“We have no capacity for that right now”: a sentence that renews itself every year

Almost every practice weighing up a change of software says the same thing sooner or later: that they are tied up right now, that day-to-day work leaves no room, and that there is simply no capacity to engage properly with a new system. They will come back to it once things calm down.

The sentence is meant honestly, and it is reasonable too. A full week leaves nobody two free days. Start a software migration in that state and you do both jobs at half attention, which puts both at risk. The trouble only starts with the point in time the sentence refers to.

"Once things calm down" is not a date

Walk through the management year the way it actually runs:

There is no gap in that table, and there was none in the years before either. "Once things calm down" is a hope with no date in the calendar, and it is let down at the same place every year. That has little to do with poor organisation. It is simply what the year looks like for a practice whose portfolio is growing.

Which work actually takes the capacity

Look closely at what fills the day and you mostly find small tasks that repeat:

• Keeping the same figure up to date in several places, once in the spreadsheet, once in the files and once in the letter to the advisory board.
• Digging out documents on request and emailing them one by one, often the same document to several owners in turn.
• Retyping master data when a change of owner comes in or a building is added.
• Entering invoices by hand, line by line, from paperwork that already contains the details.
• Explaining the same state of affairs several times: to an owner on the phone, to the advisory board by email, to a colleague in passing.

Each of these is quick on its own. Together they eat the diary, because they grow linearly with the portfolio and come round again in full every year. A practice that grows buys this cost in again with every new building. And the very work that leaves no time for the switch is the work a switch makes smaller.

Tell the duty apart from the habit

Before you change anything, ask yourself how much of what is filling your week you owe to anyone at all. The answer often cuts the effort noticeably.

Some of it you certainly owe: the annual settlement and the statement of assets under § 28 WEG, the resolutions register under § 24 (7) WEG, notice periods for assemblies and deadlines towards authorities and insurers. None of that is open to negotiation.

How you meet those duties is not fixed, though, and that is where the surplus collects. Typical examples:

• a list kept alongside the actual records because it has always been kept, and which therefore has to be touched a second time with every change;
• documents sent out one at a time, when a shared location the right people can access answers the same question once and for all;
• historical data reconstructed although no resolution and no owner ever asked for it;
• interim reports prepared although nobody requested them and nobody reads them.

Experience shows that a sizeable part of an overloaded week goes into tasks for which, on closer inspection, there is no recipient. That holds with any software, or with none, and it simply costs money.

What you genuinely should not do right now

A switch is not an emergency project. In the middle of a busy stretch, three things would be wrong:

• Moving the whole portfolio now. Migrating every building during a phase that is already at capacity is exactly the mistake the caution in the first paragraph rightly warns against.
• Booking onto a different system in the middle of the financial year. Half a year in two systems produces a settlement nobody can follow.
• Using the work with a deadline as the test case. Anything under time pressure is the wrong place for a first run.

Anyone advising you to switch completely in the middle of the season wants to sell you something. What a realistic roadmap looks like is set out in Going digital in condominium management: a roadmap in five steps.

What does fit into the gap

Even in a busy stretch there is room for one step that pays for itself within the same season. Three are candidates, and each takes a matter of hours.

The first is a trial import of a single building. It is neither live nor binding, just a dry run with the data you happen to have in hand. In two hours it tells you what you would otherwise learn next year: where your old data has gaps, how long one building really takes, and whether the import shows the reconciliation cleanly before anything is taken over. After that you plan with a figure and no longer have to guess.

The second is the invoices already on your desk. Invoice capture does not reach into your bookkeeping. It reads out the supplier, the invoice number, the amount and the date and puts them in front of you to check, and nothing is booked on its own. Because the pile is already there, the benefit arrives straight away, which is rare. What works and what does not is covered in Invoice capture with AI.

The third step is the one most often underrated: the documents people ask for most. Queries come in batches, and they come in precisely the weeks when you have the least room to manoeuvre. Once the declaration of division, the minutes, the insurance policies and the last settlement sit in one place where owners can look them up in their own portal, you save work in the same season in which you file them.

Make the busy stretch your measurement

One more suggestion that costs nothing: over the next few weeks, note two figures for each building, namely how many hours the work took in total and how many of those went on searching, retyping and answering the same questions again.

At the end you have a calculation in hand. If the total is small, postponing was right, and you can tell any vendor so with a number. If it is large, you know what the next season will cost you again, and the decision is no longer hard. Either way you are better off than with the sentence from the start, which can be repeated indefinitely and gets a little more expensive every year.

The plan for your own portfolio

If you would like to see the sequence applied to your own portfolio, answer four questions: how many buildings you manage, what you work with today, where the hours go and when you want to start. The plan then arrives as a PDF. It lists the steps in the order that fits your answers and names what you can skip.

Request the rollout plan

The gist, in four lines

• You can wait a long time for the quiet week, because the management year has no gap.
• The small repetitions are the expensive item, since they are manual duplicate work and grow with every building.
• What the law requires is fixed; how you produce it mostly is not, and the space between deserves a careful look.
• The first step takes two hours, not two weeks: a trial import of one building, using the data already in front of you.