It Was the Best Thing I Ever Did. One Manager on Life After the Switch.
Most property managers and volunteer treasurers who are buried in accounting work do not think of it as a problem that can be solved. They think of it as the job. Annie Stefanelli thought the same thing for 17 years, until the accounting firm she had worked with since the beginning retired and she was forced to find another way.
Annie has been managing condominium communities in Massachusetts for 25 years. She ran her company for 17 of those years the same way: paper invoices, manual coding, drives to the accounting office, and a constant stream of follow-up emails that did not stop when the workday ended. “Paper and staples,” she says. “That was the name of our company.”
The Part Nobody Talks About
What Annie describes about her life before the switch is something a lot of property managers and volunteer treasurers will recognize immediately. The work did not stay at work. Evenings and weekends were spent sending follow-up emails to an accounting firm that operated on business hours, living in a low-grade state of paranoia that something would not come through in time for a board meeting or a vendor call.
“I was hitting the emails and asking for things for follow up and the paranoia that it wasn’t ever going to come in was taking time out of family time nights and weekends,” she says. She describes sending her 19th request email for the same item. Walking into meetings hoping the information she needed had finally arrived. “For 17 years I sent countless emails just stating, please, I’m walking into a meeting, please can you get me this information.”
The Fear That Almost Kept Her Stuck
Annie will tell you plainly that she was terrified to make the switch. She is not tech-savvy by her own description. She had been with the same accounting firm for 17 years and had no idea what a fully automated online system would look like for someone like her. “I was crying in my Cheerios terrified,” she says. “I can’t believe I lost sleep. I was stressed thinking I’m not going to be able to do this, my boards aren’t going to be able to do this.”
She almost did not make the call. But she did, and what she found on the other side was not what she expected.
How It Actually Works
What surprised Annie most after making the switch was not the technology itself. It was how the people behind it were organized. “If I need X, I go to Tanya. If I need Y, I go to Jennifer. If I need A, I go to Marta. If I need B, I go to Ethel,” she says. “It is so systematic and the time delay of getting responses back because of how it is set up is so minimal. I ask, it’s on my desktop because that party is just exclusively curtailed to do these things. It’s flawless.“
The portal had the same effect. Instead of calling someone to check on a payment or emailing to request a document, everything was already there. “If a vendor calls me and says, hey, can you check on this payment, I can log into the system and see with the blink of an eye if that payment has been issued.” For her boards and homeowners, the same access applied. “Condo docs, rules and regs, budgets, insurance, master insurance policies, minutes of meetings, all of that uploaded so that owners can go right there. We’re not emailing piecemeal to an owner that wants this or that. It’s phenomenal.”
Pricing was the last thing she had been worried about. She assumed the switch would cost her more. It did not. “The fee structure was right in line with what I was accustomed to,” she says. “What changed was the quality of work.” And the transition she had dreaded turned out to be far easier than she expected. “Even me, somebody who is not techy, who can’t navigate around, I can navigate every single system.”
What Actually Changed
With the system in place, the results came quickly. Annie recovered 15 to 20 hours a week, not from accounting work itself but from everything built up around it: the drives to the accounting office, the follow-up emails, the chasing that never fully resolved. “I’ve never once had to ask for something twice,” she says. “Those days are done and they’re laughable now.”
The evenings came back. The weekends came back. The paranoia about whether something would arrive in time went away entirely.
Her boards changed too. They went from skeptical to thrilled once they realized they could access financial information themselves without waiting for anyone to send it. “They didn’t believe it,” Annie says. “They were like, no, that’s not how it works. They’re thrilled. It’s taken a lot of questions out of board meetings.”
And for the first time in years, Annie started thinking about growth. Three years ago she could not have imagined taking on new clients. The system she was operating under had no room. “Now I absolutely could, with comfort and the knowledge that there wouldn’t be any limitations on the quality of work.”
What We Hear Most Often
Annie’s story is not unusual. It is one of the most common things we hear from people after they make a change they spent a long time being afraid to make. In her own words: “Make the change. It was the best thing I ever did. It changed the way I run my company. It changed my stress level, changed my family life. The fears are not rational.”
The accounting was always supposed to work quietly in the background. When it does not, it does not stay in the background. It follows you home.
If that sounds familiar, it is worth having a conversation about what a different setup could look like.
Schedule a call at CommunityFinancials.com or call 833-CONDO-HOA.
