Block Managers take on a considerable amount of incoming issues / enquiries / potential lease breaches which are not strictly maintenance tasks, but are often issues that require logging with an audit trail for legal purposes. Here at Fixflo, we understand that some clients want to use the system to centralise all communication, regardless of whether it is about a maintenance issue or not. In these instances, clients want to log queries in Fixflo.

To assist with these matters, we have a feature called General Enquiries, which allows you to manage breaches/queries in Fixflo. This is a free additional feature, and requires switching on by a member of the Fixflo team - please contact our support team to request this.

Once switched on, general enquiries can be raised/created in two places:

A) By the reporting party via your unique Fixflo URL:

B) By a member of your team from within their Fixflo profile: 

When general enquiries are made, they will email the reporting party, as well as follow any assignment rules in place on your Fixflo system; the title of the enquiry will be the first few words entered by the reporting party. 

If you click into the enquiry, it will look like a regular issue, but have different workflow options on the Next steps tab:

The three options allow you to either reassign the enquiry to a colleague, close it down completely, or create a 'job' out of it, which will open up the usual workflows available. 

Some common examples in terms of use-cases of this feature include:

General Enquiry Examples:
- Request for new parking permits
- Questions around whether pets are allowed
- Code request for bin stores, bike stores etc
- Queries around window cleaning, garden maintenance etc

Lease Breach Examples:
- Air BnB - property not being used as a single private dwelling, and problems associated with this
- Car Parking - number plate and vehicle details of cars in incorrect spaces
- Anti-social Behaviour
- Potential drug use

Tracking General Enquiries

Fixflo provides the ability to track and monitor the time spent on resolving general enquiries by placing a stopwatch icon on each enquiry:

Any agent user committing time to this enquiry can click the 'Start' button on the stopwatch to log the volume of time being spent on it. If you click into other tabs on the enquiry, the stopwatch will continue counting, and you can also click off the enquiry itself and onto other tabs/windows etc. The stopwatch will only cease counting if you actively hit the 'Stop' button, or a colleague comes to the enquiry and also begins using it.

Please note: each agent can only have one timer can be running simultaneously. As such, if Agent X switches on the timer on Enquiry1 and then goes to switch it on for Enquiry2, this will stop the timer on Enquiry1.

This functionality allows you to track the volume of time spent on general enquiries, providing you with detailed information that can then be used to bill the customer if appropriate. All general enquiries will have a 'Time spent' tab, whereby you can edit and delete any time that you accidentally kept running:

To find all of the general enquiries that are open within your Fixflo system, click via Issues > Issue search and use the arrow icon to open the relevant filters:

Here, amend the filter titled 'Issue type' to 'General enquiry' and hit search to view the results. If you have the additional multiple dashboards feature (guide here), you may also want to create saved searches to view this information via dashboard panels.