The non-negotiables

If a platform cannot do these, it cannot run a building.

Tenant and company records connected to space

A contact belongs to a company; the company occupies offices; the offices sit on floors. Everything else attaches to that spine. If tenant records are a flat address book, every operational question becomes manual.

Maintenance ticketing with a location

Not just a request queue — a ticket that knows the tenant, the floor and the room. Ask whether a contractor can tell where to go from the ticket alone.

Response and resolution targets

Per category, not one global number. A blocked drain and a flickering light do not deserve the same clock, and your tenancy agreements probably say so.

Contractor assignment and cost capture

Costs recorded against the job that caused them. Without this you have a maintenance budget you cannot explain and no evidence at contract renewal.

Room booking with two prices

Tenant rate and external rate, live availability, and a way for non-tenants to find and pay. A room you cannot sell to the public is inventory you are not using.

Tenancy records with end dates and reminders

The notice deadline usually matters more than the end date. Reminders need to fire before it, to more than one person.

A finance bridge, not a finance replacement

You already have an accounting system. What you need is invoices reaching it with the right contact, the right account and the right VAT rate.

Mobile that works in the building

Maintenance and cleaning do not happen at a desk. If the mobile experience is a cut-down view of the desktop, the people doing the physical work will not use it.

The ones people underestimate

These rarely make a shortlist and are missed within a month.

A key register with an audit trail

Every key, fob and card against a named holder, with a history that cannot be edited. It matters at move-out, and it matters enormously after an incident when the question is who could have got into a room.

Compliance certificates with warnings

Gas, EICR, PAT, fire risk assessment, alarm and emergency lighting, legionella, lift, insurance. Expiry dates somewhere the whole team can see, with a warning early enough to book the inspection.

The step most systems miss is turning an expiry warning into assigned work. A warning tells you something is expiring; a task makes it somebody's job.

Housekeeping you can evidence

Schedules per floor and per shift, and the option to require a completion photo. "Was it cleaned?" should be a lookup, not an argument.

Email that becomes tickets

Most tenant requests arrive as email. If they do not become tickets automatically they live in one person's inbox, which is fine until that person is away.

Per-person access control

Not just roles — the ability to give one trusted person finance without making them an administrator.

The ones sold hard and used rarely

Not useless, but rarely worth choosing a platform for:

  • Community feeds and member social features. Genuinely valuable in community-led coworking. In a serviced office they are usually built, launched and abandoned.
  • Elaborate floor-plan visualisations. Impressive in a demo. Most operators check occupancy from a list.
  • Deep native accounting. You have an accountant and they have a system. A bridge beats a rebuild.
  • Automated dynamic pricing for meeting rooms. Interesting at scale, noise at one building.

Ask what is not built

Any honest vendor has a list. Ours: visitor management and telephony are placeholders in the product, both on the public roadmap where operators vote on what comes next.

What you are testing is not whether the list is empty — it never is — but whether they will tell you before you sign.

Use this as a scorecard

Take the non-negotiables, score each platform out of eight, and only then look at price. A cheaper tool missing two of them is not cheaper; the gap becomes somebody's manual job.

When you are ready to compare, start with the page that matches your building: business centres, coworking, flexible workspace or multi-site.