Digitizing Building Management — From an Excel Spreadsheet to a Transparent Platform

Most buildings in Israel are managed today with three tools: an Excel spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, and the memory of one busy person. A tenant sends a message about a stuck elevator, the building manager marks "handled" in his head, and if the message gets swallowed among twenty others — it simply disappears. There is no history, no tracking, no organized proof that a statutory inspection was carried out on time, and no way for the apartment owners to know what is happening with their money and their property. This is not a problem of bad people; it is a problem of analog tools that break the moment the building grows. Digitizing building management is precisely the move from this "from memory" work to a system that remembers, schedules and shows — instead of a manager trying to hold it all in his head.

The pain of analog management — why Excel and WhatsApp break

To understand what digitization solves, it is worth first describing honestly what building management without a system looks like today. The picture repeats itself almost everywhere:

• Service calls that get lost: requests arrive by WhatsApp, by phone, on a note and by email — with no single place that centralizes them. A request that goes unanswered within a day simply sinks down in the chat and is forgotten.
• No history: when an air conditioner breaks down for the third time, no one remembers what was fixed the previous two times, which supplier came and what he said. Every fault starts from scratch.
• Inspections that get forgotten: elevator approval, fire inspection, water-reservoir disinfection — all with an expiration date. In a manual Excel, the expiration is discovered only when an inspector arrives or when something fails.
• Zero transparency to owners: an apartment owner who pays management fees does not see where the money goes, what work was carried out and what the maintenance status is. This lack of transparency is the number-one source of distrust between tenants and the management company.
• Management by firefighting: without advance scheduling, the entire day passes reacting to faults. There is no time for preventive planning, so the building stays forever in a reactive state.

What all of these have in common is that the information lives in the head of one person or is scattered across tools that don't talk to each other. The moment that person is on vacation, sick or leaves — the knowledge disappears with them. That is why the first and most important shift in digitization is not technological but conceptual: taking management out of personal memory and into a shared system.

What digitization really delivers — the six core capabilities

"Digitization" is a big and vague word, so let's break it down into six tangible capabilities that any serious building management platform should provide. Each of them solves a specific pain we described above.

1. Tenant portal — a single entry door for every request

The heart of digitization from the tenant's point of view is the portal: a single place where a tenant reports a fault, attaches a photo, and sees in real time what is happening with their request — received, assigned to a supplier, in progress, closed. Instead of a WhatsApp message that disappears, a documented service call is created with a number, a status and a history.

The most important effect of the portal is psychological no less than operational: when a tenant sees that their request is "in progress" and was not swallowed into the void, the level of frustration and repeat inquiries drops. The transparency itself — the very ability to track — creates trust, even before the fault has actually been resolved. The portal also separates the different inquiry channels and unifies them into a single track, so that no request falls between the cracks.

2. The service-call life cycle — from an organized place to a controlled closure

A digital service call is not just a "record"; it is a full life cycle. The request is opened, classified (electrical, plumbing, elevator), given a priority, assigned to a supplier or an employee, and accompanied until closure. Along the way documentation is kept: who handled it, when, what was done, and at what cost.

• SLA tracking: for each type of call you can define an expected response time and treatment time, and immediately see which calls are in breach. This is the difference between "I think we handled it quickly" and "we know the average response time dropped."
• Controlled closure: a call is closed only when the work is completed and documented — not because someone "remembers" they handled it. This prevents calls that were closed on paper but stayed open in reality.
• Accumulating history: every call joins the property and system history, so that the next fault starts with the context of all the previous ones.

Organized SLA tracking is also the basis for managing the suppliers themselves. If you work with a management company or subcontractors, these metrics are what allow you to evaluate them objectively — we expanded on this in the SLA checklist for a management company.

3. Automatic PPM scheduling — don't miss a single statutory inspection

Here digitization presents its clearest value. Preventive maintenance (PPM) is a series of recurring inspections, each with its own frequency: elevator inspection every six months, annual fire approval, water-reservoir disinfection, thermographic inspection of electrical panels. In a manual system, each of them is a date that can be forgotten. In a digital system, every inspection is a scheduled task that pops up by itself at the right time, is assigned to the qualified party, and is closed with the certificate attached.

The practical meaning is a shift from "breakdown maintenance" — handling a fault after it has occurred — to "preventive maintenance" that catches defects while they are still cheap and safe to repair. This difference is measured in safety, in cost and in legal exposure, and we detailed it in depth in preventive maintenance versus breakdown maintenance. Automating the scheduling is what turns this good intention into a plan that actually runs — because it no longer depends on memory.

You can see what such a spread of inspections over a year looks like with the help of the PPM schedule planning tool, which illustrates the pace for each system.

4. Asset registry and maintenance history — the building's memory

A building is a collection of physical assets: elevators, air conditioners, electrical panels, pumps, a fire detection system. A digital asset registry manages a card for each of them — model, age, manufacturer, warranty, and the entire treatment history. When a compressor breaks down, you can see immediately when it was installed, how many times it was repaired, and whether the time has come to replace rather than repair it again.

This history is an asset in itself. It enables data-based decisions instead of gut feelings, it turns the building "independent" of the person who managed it until now, and it is the basis for any modernization move. The richer the information on the systems, the easier it is to later incorporate smart sensors and continuous measurement as well — a subject we expanded on in IoT sensors in buildings.

5. Supplier management — who, when, and how well

Most of the work in a building is actually carried out by external suppliers: an elevator company, an air conditioning technician, a cleaning company, an electrical contractor. Digital supplier management centralizes the contact details, contracts, insurance and certificates in one place — and links every service call to the supplier who carried it out. This creates a real picture of each supplier's performance: response times, the recurrence rate of the same fault, and meeting commitments.

Without a system, supplier evaluation rests on a general impression — "they're fine" or "they're disappointing." With a system, the evaluation rests on what actually happened. This changes the balance of power at contract renewal and makes it possible to demand improvement on a factual basis.

6. Transparent reporting to owners and tenants — the end of distrust

Perhaps the capability that most changes the relationship is reporting. Instead of an apartment owner calling to ask "what was done this month?", they receive an organized report: which calls were handled, which inspections were carried out, what the maintenance status is, and where the resources went. This transparency is the direct remedy for the chronic distrust between tenants and management companies.

A good monthly report is not just a list of actions — it is a story of the property's condition in language an apartment owner understands. We built a whole guide to what should go into such a report and how to build it in a monthly maintenance report for owners. When the report is generated automatically from the data that already exists in the system, it stops being a heavy chore and becomes a natural by-product of organized work.

What to look for in a building management platform

Not every system that declares itself "digital" really solves the problem. A few criteria worth examining before choosing:

1. Simplicity for the tenant: the portal must be so simple that an elderly tenant can report a fault without instruction. If a user guide is needed — it has already failed.
2. Real transparency: make sure the system gives owners and tenants visibility into the status and history, not just an internal tool for the management company.
3. Built-in statutory scheduling: the system needs to know how to "think" about recurring inspections and alert before expiration — not just store documents.
4. Real Hebrew and RTL: an interface built for the Israeli market, not a partial translation of a foreign product.
5. Data retention and continuity: the history you accumulate is an asset — make sure you can export it and that it is not locked in the system.
6. Integration between the systems: calls, PPM, assets, suppliers and reporting need to sit in the same system and feed each other. Five separate tools are just scattered Excel in new clothing.

Such deep integration essentially approaches building control systems, and it is worth understanding the continuum between operational management and technical control — we expanded on this in the guide to building management systems (BMS) and in the Knowledge Hub on building systems.

The human side — change management and implementation

The most common failure in digitization projects is not technological — it is human. You can install the best system in the world, and if the team keeps working on WhatsApp and the tenants don't log into the portal, nothing has changed. The implementation matters no less than the choice.

• Start with one channel: make the portal the only way to open a call. As long as WhatsApp remains an "additional outlet," no one will switch.
• Quick wins for the team: show the employees how the system saves them effort — fewer phone calls, less "I forgot," fewer arguments about what was done. Adoption comes when the tool makes things easier, not when it is imposed.
• Win the tenants over through transparency: a tenant who sees that their request is moving will return to the portal. Transparency is the strongest adoption engine.
• Migrate gradually: there is no need to make everything digital in a single day. Start with service calls, add PPM, and then the asset registry and reporting.

Good change management recognizes that the existing culture — "I know my building by heart" — is a strength to be respected, not fought. The system is supposed to empower this knowledge and preserve it, not replace the person.

The return — what you gain in the end

After all the capabilities, it is worth sharpening what you actually get. Without promising numbers we cannot back up, we can describe the direction clearly:

• Fewer surprising failures: preventive scheduling catches defects before they turn into faults and into expensive emergency incidents.
• Auditable compliance: when an inspector, an authority or an insurance company arrives, all the certificates and inspections are documented in one place with dates — not a ninety-second scramble.
• Trust: consistent transparency builds trust among the tenants, the owners and the management company — the hardest asset to build and to restore in the industry.
• Continuity: the knowledge lives in the system, not in one person's head. The building stops being fragile.
• Time to focus on what matters: when ongoing operations are documented and scheduled automatically, the building manager is freed from firefighting and can plan ahead.

It is also worth examining your team's level of maintenance knowledge — we prepared a building maintenance knowledge test that maps gaps and shows where digitization and organized processes would improve the management.

Where to start

Digitizing building management is not a plunge into the deep end — it is a series of steps. The first step is to stop managing from memory: to move the calls into a single organized place, and from there gradually add preventive scheduling, an asset registry and transparent reporting. Each layer builds on the previous one, and each on its own already improves the management.

A platform like Domera was built precisely around this continuum — a tenant portal, a call life cycle with SLA tracking, automatic PPM scheduling, an asset registry and transparent reporting — in order to give the building manager a single system that remembers, schedules and shows on his behalf. The goal is not to replace the building manager, but to give him the tools that will turn the management from fragile and reactive into transparent, planned and trustworthy.

Want to go deeper? Read about a monthly maintenance report for owners, try the PPM schedule planning tool, or talk to us about moving to digital management in your building.