Maintenance requests and work orders
Tenants submit requests in their portal; your team triages, assigns vendors, and tracks to completion. Costs feed the Maintenance & Expenses report and vendor 1099 totals.
Maintenance is where structured beats scattered: requests arrive with details instead of as voicemails, and every job leaves a cost trail your reports can use.
How requests arrive
- Tenants submit in their portal — issue, description, and their unit is attached automatically. They track status and can cancel their own requests.
- Your team creates them directly — from the Maintenance page, a property's Maintenance tab, or a tenant's page (e.g. after a phone call, on their behalf).
New requests notify whoever's routed for maintenance, and the sidebar badge shows open count.
Working a request
Triage from the Maintenance page or in context on the property/tenant tabs: set status as it progresses, assign a vendor, and record the actual cost when the work completes. The tenant sees status changes in their portal — fewer "any update?" messages.
Vendors
Vendors live in their own list with contact info and tax details (TIN, address, W-9 on file). Completed work orders' costs roll up per vendor — which is exactly what the vendor 1099-NEC worksheet reads at year-end, so recording costs as you go makes January free.
Where the money shows
Completed work-order costs feed the Maintenance & Expenses report (reports overview) — per property, per period. Deciding whether a door is worth keeping usually starts with this number.
Habits that pay off
Record the cost when the job closes (not "later"); attach the vendor rather than leaving jobs unassigned; and encourage tenants to use the portal — a photo and a written description beat a voicemail every time.
Related guides
The resident portal: what your tenants see
Tenants get a branded portal: balance and payments, their lease, maintenance requests, documents, and live chat with your team. Accounts are created automatically through the apply flow.
Reports: what's available and how to run them
Cash-basis reports for operating and tax questions: Operator Income, Owner Income Statements, Revenue by Property, Tenant Ledger, Maintenance & Expenses, and 1099 worksheets — all exportable to CSV and branded PDF.
Tax season: 1099 worksheets for owners and vendors
Year-end worksheets compute owner 1099-MISC Box 1 (gross rents by actual ownership share) and vendor 1099-NEC totals, flag who crosses $600 and what info is missing, and export to CSV, PDF, and a per-owner email.