Yeah, it sounds like a mouthful, but you get it. With 2500+ bedrooms, anything we can do to make mundane tasks faster is a life saver, so we’re always looking for ways to make our lives easier (see our Mission Statement post).
Below is a sample shot of a feature I added to our Excel Turn board where we’ve loaded the last replacement date for every carpet in the community and it will give us a bill-back amount we should charge the previous resident (if at all) when we schedule a new replacement. Just enter the new replacement date and voila!
We track our current carpet on a five year life span, but I’ve seen commercial grade products that may have a 7-8 life span. The cool part is we can change the total calculations by manipulating the price we pay for carpet up top on the page, or the life span if we switch to a stronger carpet and it will adjust all future calculations. Cool, right?
The other exciting aspect of this is we’re far more guaranteed to insure we’re properly charging back for this common loss and we can cross reference the totals for carpet bill-backs from our turn board with our budget’s actual charges to insure we didn’t miss anything.
Total build time was around three hours and another 2-3 hours of inputting the last known carpet replacement dates for each unit. Note: this was made slightly easier than usual as the entire property got new carpets during renovations in 2011, so not every single unit needed data input, we just assumed 2011 unless we’d had an invoice since then.
Robert H Myers 
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