Aug22Written by:TOPS Software
Monday, August 22, 2011 
Welcome back to our TOPS question and answer blog series, Q&A. I am Andrea Drennen, your hostess and your personal TOPS researcher. You ask me the questions and I do my best to find you the answers you seek.
There are two ways you can contact me with your questions. You can leave it in a comment on this post, or you can email it to me directly at andread@topssoft.com. However, please try to keep your questions limited to topics related to TOPS Software, I can't do much to help you plan your summer's end pool party. (Feel free to invite me though!)
So lets move on to the questions and answers!
- Can TOPS Help me go Paperless?
- If you are thinking of going paperless, you have definitely come to the right place! Over the course of the past few years, TOPS has turned much of our efforts and energy toward providing a software environment that supports green, socially responsible, cost-conscious management companies.
As a part of those efforts, we have made it so that every report and every letter created for an owner gets saved as a PDF and attached to the proper record in TOPS. Those reports and letters can then be emailed to owners, vendors or board members, or uploaded to your community websites to avoid the fiscal and social costs of printing.
The key feature that supports this format is called TOPS iMail. This application allows owners to “Subscribe” or “Opt-In” to receive emails from you. Owners who still prefer more traditional “snail mail” methods of communication need not do anything at all.
Learn how much labor, time and money you can save with TOPS’ green solutions on our interactive Resource Saving Calculator.
- How do I transfer community files to another management company?
- Nobody wants to lose a community to a competitor. However, things happen, and you may find yourself in the position of needing to transfer one of the communities in your portfolio to another management company.
I've known some management companies to take this change a little sour and give over only printed reports to the new company, forcing them to manually type in the data. But in my opinion, it's always better to catch a fly with honey instead of vinegar. There is always a chance that the community will decide to come back to your management company sometime in the future, or you will find yourself in a reciprocal relationship with this competitor. So what's the best way to do this?
The good news is it's really simple. All of your community's pertinent information is located in the community folder. So to transfer a community, all you need to do is zip up the community folder and load that onto a thumb drive (or even send it in an email if its a small enough community). You'll find the folder in the "TOPS" directory on your server if you are running TOPS Pro, or "TOPS2000" directory if you are running an older version of TOPS (321 or 2000). The community folder will be identified by the Community ID.
- What are the hardware / system requirements of TOPS Professional?
- We've got a handy PDF printable guide to both hardware and software technical specifications, as well as a guide on networking specifications on our Support page: http://www.topssoft.com/Services/Support
- Does TOPS integrate with Community Websites?
- TOPS offers an amazing website product that integrates with your accounting data to give the board and owners in the communities you manage exactly the data they need, including such features as 12-month Owner Balance History, Online Dues Payments, Online AP Invoice Approval (for Boards), Live owner contact info change updates and so much more! You can learn more about TOPS Websites at http://www.topswebsites.com
- Does Phone Messenger create a message in the homeowner's record?
- The Phone Messenger is intended to be a communication between users of the system, so it was not designed to create a note in an owner record. However, you can embed an owner's information into a phone message for the intended user. We also recognize that there is a lot of value in allowing the phone message to display in the owner's record, and I have been informed that this feature is already slated to be included in a future communications update in both TOPS Professional and OnPoint.
- What does TOPS stand for?
- This story is legend around the TOPS office, but I went to the source to get you the original tale from TOPS President and founder, Jeff Hardy. He shared a vignette that occurred between himself and his original partner, Kerry Wilson:
"The original name of the company was Property Management Systems, Inc. We called the app 'PMS Software' for the first several years after we released in it 1985. OK, so Kerry and I had to fly to Houston to install TOPS on a new customer’s computer. Just before we left I answered a customer’s call. It was a woman with a support question. When I was done helping her she said “You know, you really need to change PMS Software to some other name because PMS has such a bad connotation to women.” So Kerry and I took the flight to Houston and on the flight I tell him what the customer had said. We agreed we had to change the name. So I start throwing out names, one of which was TOPS. Kerry and I both liked it. But I said that TOPS had to stand for something. So Kerry thought for a minute and came up with 'TOPS - The Optimal Property System'."
So that's it for today's questions. Thanks for taking the time to read. Please feel free to leave your questions in the comments and I'll do my best to get you answers in the next installment. Until next time!
1 comment(s) so far...
Re: Q&A: Your Questions Answered
We are looking for security software that is compatible with TOPS. Norton & McAfee don't work well, Microsoft security essentials works well but it has it's drawbacks in the security dept. as it doesn't catch some nasty things. What is recommended form other users that is compatible with TOPS?
By Pamela Passon on
Thursday, April 05, 2012
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