Buildium Training - Ep. 2 Setting Up Buildium Account

Hey everyone, and welcome back to APM Help Academy. In this video, we’re going to walk through setting up your Buildium account — from your company profile and billing details to application settings, team members, and user permissions.

Account & Billing
To get started, head to Settings > Account & Billing. You’ll likely spend a fair amount of time here, because it’s where all of your Buildium invoices live — you can review your monthly invoices at any time. It also shows the subscription plan you’re on, your monthly cost, and the payment method you have on file.

Account Information
When you first get Buildium, you’ll want to edit your account information, because several fields default to placeholder values. For example, the company name defaults to your account’s URL, so change it to your actual company name. From here you can also set your company address, default phone number, and default email, and choose your tax identity type (in most cases an EIN).

A few other fields on this page are worth noting:

• Account owner:the user you want set as the account owner (managed under Settings > Users, covered below).
• Company default bank account: most important if you track your company books in Buildium; otherwise most people just choose their operating trust account or an association bank account.
• Company signature and account URL: you can change your account’s URL here, but be careful — if you’ve already given residents a URL and later change it, everyone will need to update their bookmark.

Once you save, your company name updates here and in the branding area (Settings > Application Settings > Application Branding). That branding mainly drives what residents see in the resident portal — your company name appears at the top of their screen when they sign in. You can even make the branding name different from your account information, for instance if you want a legal name on the account page but your DBA name in the resident portal.

Application Settings: System Preferences
Under Settings > Application Settings you’ll find several defaults worth reviewing:

• Property types: if you don’t manage associations you can uncheck that type (and vice versa); keep both checked if you do both.
• Region: set your time zone, date format, and currency.
• Reports: controls how your company information (name and address) appears on reports such as rent and income statements sent to owners.
• Printer alignment: for printing checks or deposit slips.
• Text messaging: enable or disable texting.
• Beta features: opt in or out of features Buildium is testing.

Application Settings: Business Rules
These are the most important settings to get right before you start entering transactions. They include your default accounting basis, trust-account warning messages, and whether entering a transaction defaults to selecting a unit or simply to the property or association level. You can also turn on locked periods and configure your management fee settings.

The Resident settings are worth a close look too — for example whether to enable prepayments (recommended, to keep reporting clean), reminders and statements, and how payments are allocated when tenants pay. You can apply payments to the largest outstanding balance first, or set a custom order (rent first, then late fees, and so on).

Team Members & User Permissions
Go to Settings > Users to add any staff member and give them access to Buildium. Adding a staff member takes basic information — name, phone number, and an email (required to log in) — plus a role, which determines how much access they have. The Administrator role is the master role that grants access to everything.

You can edit users at any time to change their email, phone number, name, or role, and you can inactivate a staff member to remove their access and stop their email notifications. Rental owner users and vendors can also be set up from this page — creating a website account gives landlords access, and vendors can be granted their (more limited) access the same way.

User Roles
Under Settings > User Roles you can edit Buildium’s default roles or create your own. The Administrator role can’t be edited, but for a custom role you simply name it, describe it, and check off exactly what it can access. Be especially careful editing the Rental Owner role — Buildium limits owner access by design, and adding permissions can expose information about other rental owners that you may not want them to see.

Management Fees
In your management fee settings you can charge a flat fee, a percentage, a mix, or whichever is greater. The management company defaults to a vendor named “My Management Company” — rename it under Maintenance > Vendors to your actual company name. The default general-ledger expense account defaults to Management Fees, which is standard and usually left as-is.

Two income settings here are especially important:

• Management income: pass-through income that belongs entirely to the management company, such as application fees, convenience fees, and often NSF (non-sufficient funds) fees.
• Non-commissionable income: income you don’t take a management fee on, such as forfeited security deposits, tenant charges for cleaning and maintenance, or utility reimbursements — this belongs entirely to the rental owner or association.

Getting these right from the start keeps your accounting clean. (GST settings, mainly relevant for Canadian accounts, can also be configured here.)

Rental Applications & Leasing Settings
Buildium’s rental application defaults are solid and give you a good head start, but you can edit your applications, application fee settings, and tenant screening criteria — including whether screenings charge your Buildium account or the applicant (note that Buildium’s enhanced screening doesn’t charge applicants). A few more settings to review here:

• Default lease renewal offers: set your defaults if you use renewal offers in Buildium.
• Late fees: set these up carefully from the start — automatic late fees can be tricky, and misconfigured fees confuse both you and your tenants. This is your global policy; you can still create custom late-fee policies for individual properties, leases, or association owners.
• Return payment automation: automatically charge a tenant when a payment reverses.

Rent Owner Statements
Here you’ll set your statement period end (typically your default accounting cycle) and decide whether to display tenant liabilities. Showing liabilities adds a lot of detail — security deposits, prepayments, last month’s rent — which can confuse owners who aren’t comfortable with accounting, so many managers keep statements simple with income, expenses, and equity. You can also choose how transaction details display (for example, additions and subtractions by date).

Other Settings
A few remaining options round things out:

• Vendor insurance: toggle warning messages on work order pages.
• Event history: set up custom events that appear in Buildium’s event-history reports, alongside built-in events like move-ins and lease endings.
• Bill approvals: configure approval policies if your company tracks bill approvals.
• Locked periods: lock your books so transactions can’t be changed for a given period; reconciled transactions are already protected (you can’t delete them or change the amount).
• Markup settings: turn on and configure markups if you use them.

That covers setting up your company profile, working through Buildium’s default settings, and adding team members with the right user permissions. Thanks for watching APM Help Academy, brought to you by APM Help. For questions, visit apmhelp.com or reach us at info@apmhelp.com — and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more tutorials.

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