To customise… or configure?

by Kevin Grice, Director of Software Innovation & Engineering

Let’s face it, property management is a complicated business.

Any software designed to run a property business must handle those complications, as well as fitting in with your business processes.

And the devil is often in the detail. The more complex your requirements, the harder it is to find software that actually does everything you want it to.

There are three possible solutions.

One is to write a system from scratch – but let’s be honest, this is so expensive, it’s not worth even going there.

Two is to buy a base system, around which your supplier will write new code to fill in the gaps. This is the process we call customisation.

The third option is to find software that is essentially complete, and comprehensive, but that can be configured to meet your needs more precisely.

At Trace we do occasionally customise software, if asked to do so. But we’re proud of the fact that our property management software comes as a ‘package’, one that already includes all the features needed by most property enterprises.

Our package approach has many advantages.

For a start, it’s much more cost effective for our customers, because we maintain a single codebase. Developers don’t have to re-apply changes to multiple customisations to achieve a single end result for everyone.

An added benefit to this approach is that it reduces risk. If a developer re-applies each change to a slightly different code base, there is a significant chance that it will cause a problem or produce an unintended side effect. Not a good look when your business is relying on it.

With the package approach, upgrades go through more smoothly. New features or responses to legislative changes are made available to all customers as soon as they’re published. And training and support is provided by people who are already intimately familiar with how your software works.

None of this applies to a system that has been extensively customised.

Of course, whether or not a packaged system can meet your needs comes down to a single question: is it configurable enough?

And that’s a fine balance. Not enough means that the software is never going to fit. Too much, and you’ll never understand all the possible permutations.

Here, we believe, it’s the supremely configurable Mojo that gives Trace Solutions an edge. Mojo works out of the box, but has just the right amount of configurability to work the way you do.

Neat.

If you’d like to know more about Trace property management software, please call us on +44 (0)20 7825 1299, email us at hello@tracesolutions.co.uk, or use the contact form below.

We can provide demonstrations online or in person, at your convenience.