Setting up property management in Zoho Books

Setting up property management in Zoho Books

Hi,

I run a property management business that manages property complexes. There are multiple owners, some owning more than one property on the same complex.

My role is to manage the fees they pay for maintenance of common areas, such as the swimming pool and gardens, and paying for services such as cleaning.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to set this up in Zoho Books. 

For each complex, I will need to run reports showing income and expenditure, and eventually, I'll want to compare actual figures to the budget. I've set up a custom field for this, and that part works okay.

What I need help with is how to set up the owners on the system. At present, each property and owner is an individual customer. This causes some issues;
1. Customer portal access is a problem as an email can only be associated with one customer/portal access
2. For customers with multiple properties, I have to run multiple reports as the properties are not linked to one owner
3. Indexing is a little awkward, and I currently have each customer setup as the property number followed by the customer name; Eg: Apt102 - Joe Bloggs
4. The indexing then makes the email templates a little impersonal, as it is addressed to Dear Apt102 - Joe Bloggs. Although I guess I can adjust this by using different placeholders in the template.

So my question is, has anyone else set this up for their business, and what is the easiest/simplest method?

I thought of using Projects for each property against a customer's name, but that doesn't seem to fit very well either. Or maybe I'm missing something in projects?

Any help/advice gratefully received.

Thanks
Martin

    Nederlandse Hulpbronnen