Navigating reports has never been among an apartment professional’s favorite things to do. And when those reports are flawed, their aversion to them grows.

To be fair, many common complaints surrounding reports are difficult to argue. Among the most common we hear: They are incomplete, not thorough enough, too convoluted, take too long to generate, contain too much information, present data that’s hard to quantify, and—if we want to border on nerdy—aren’t granular enough.

Thankfully, the myriad of grievances hasn’t gone unnoticed by the industry. As abstract as they may seem, reports are an integral facet of an apartment community’s decision-making process. It’s a matter of making them more user-friendly and more inspiring for community teams.

That effort is well underway, as Entrata is committed to extending enhanced reporting capabilities to its partners. Here are some of the advancements Entrata is working on and the potential benefits to the user experience:

Pandemic-related metrics

With regular processes thrown into turmoil the past few months, apartment communities are in uncharted territory in many ways. How deftly they navigate through the newfound challenges will be directly proportionate to how quickly they’ll recover. Accurate and detailed reports to help users track delinquency and collection trends throughout the pandemic are an invaluable resource in that pursuit.

To address that challenge, Entrata has developed reports to help users leverage existing reporting features within the platform and provide increased insights into key performance indicators. The reports provide the ability to track delinquency over the course of a month and compare the results to prior-year data, as well as compare delinquency across custom historical periods to identify aberrations in data. That will create a clear picture as to what extent of current eviction and collection activity can be attributed to the pandemic.

More properties at once

Multifamily reports are often pigeonholed to a particular property. A platform is being developed that will enable the generation of reports for an entire portfolio across multiple consumers. While this won’t affect communities that rely on property-only reports, it could provide a major impact for reports run for an entire region or even the entire enterprise. These reports would display individual properties on separate tabs or pages, enabling users to peruse portfolio-wide reports with the ability to drill down to a single community.

Instant Downloads

Through customer research, Entrata’s reporting team has found that many users like to generate a report in their web browser to validate it before downloading it to a PDF or spreadsheet. Because of this, our team is working on a features that will save the results of the query used to generate the report and will simply “render” the data into the new form (PDF or spreadsheet) when it is downloaded. This will significantly reduce the time it takes to download a report after it has been generated in a web browser.

Navigating reports won’t ever become a preferred primary activity for property teams, but enhanced reports delivered in user-friendly fashion certainly can ease some of the trepidation. And while software companies like Entrata are working hard to provide these solutions to the industry, consider implementing other best practices for ensuring high-quality reports and analytics in your business.