Have you ever signed up for a new software product and found it couldn’t do what you thought it would? It seems almost everyone has had this experience at least once.

It starts when you are looking for a software solution that will make your job easier and ideally create a more efficient way of doing things. Only to find that a couple of days in, you are being forced into a whole bunch of time consuming “work arounds”.

With software, the devil is usually in the detail and often what looked great in the “demo” - is just not fit for purpose.

A great example of this is where commercial property managers try and use software built for the residential housing market. Or worse still, residential software that has been dressed up to look like a commercial solution.

You find almost immediately that the product just doesn’t contemplate the multitude of different ways commercial leasing deals can be structured.

When you then factor in fussy landlords, who want you to manage the property a certain way, the job becomes much harder again.

Whether the property is a retail shop, an industrial warehouse or a full floor in a high-rise office building, the ability to properly reflect the agreed terms and conditions of the lease is paramount.

Ideally, good software provides different ways of doing things, and will offer a multitude of configurable reports. And most importantly, it will provide “flexibility” everywhere you need it.

In our business, people will often say they want something “really easy to use”, but “very powerful and flexible”. The reality is however, to get power and flexibility, you need sophisticated processing occurring in the background - which is difficult to design and build.

At Cirrus8, we looked at the workflows property companies were trying to streamline and then designed the system architecture to suit. Efficiency, productivity and flexibility were always at the forefront of our software engineers’ minds - with a view to automating processes where ever possible.

Good software is something that gets better the more you dig and the more you learn. It is not always the sexiest in the slick one-hour demo.

Rather than making do with software that “just isn’t up to the job”, more and more commercial property companies are discovering modern cloud-based solutions like Cirrus8 are less expensive than they thought - and quick and easy to implement.