Asset Managers - How Do You Track Your Unit Renovation Costs? (multifam)
I am relatively new to my company and noticed that there are several processes which appear to be in dire need of standardization, one area being how we track our costs per unit on renovations. For most of our jobs, we don't use a GC and instead sub out the work ourselves or do it internally (usually a combination of both). One of the downsides of not using a GC is that we have to do all of the cost tracking ourselves. What is even more surprising is that we have our property managers taking the invoices and using them to manually fill out a spreadsheet that breaks out cost per unit for each renovation item (units in a column on the left, renovation items across the top row, with a total at the end showing the total cost per unit). Sometimes they enter things incorrectly, or don't update at all. And I can't blame them, the process is so manual. The result is unreliable data.
If we don't know/can't trust our cost tracking, we don't know our ROI on the program. If we don't know our ROI, we don't know whether to continue/suspend the renovation program. I'm not quite sure if sr management knows quite how bad the problem is. How are all of you tracking your renovation program costs? There has to be a better way.