Property managers all over the world are reeling from reports that Rachel Maddigan, a property manager in Torrance, Michigan, finished her bank reconciliations in under 1,390 hours.

“On hour 45 I said to myself, ‘if you get through this, you can open that Amazon Prime package that’s been sitting in the mailroom for five months.’”

For reference, property managers in the continental United States spend an average of 2,000 hours per month on bank reconciliations, regardless of the actual hours contained in the month – a phenomenon that has stumped physicists at MIT.

“We can’t explain it,” says Dr. Jeffrey Fransis, Michael B. Salsbee Professor of Physics and co-director of MIT’s Property Management Time Phenomenon Study.

“It’s scientifically accepted that time equals distance divided by speed. When we observe property managers doing bank reconciliations, it appears that time actually equals distance, divided by speed, times the number of poorly notated invoices, raised by a factor of 3.5 for every Appfolio freeze.”

“In short,” he adds, “we don’t understand what the [expletive] is going on, but this Rachel woman is clearly doing something right.”

To find out, we dug deeper into Rachel’s record-breaking process and the hurdles she overcame.

“I mean, I’m not perfect,” she explains modestly. “I forgot to enter the cash deposits we received from Mr. Frankles in 3B. Usually, I’m much better at remembering that kind of thing, but his parrot escaped that same day so it was a bit hectic.”

After catching and re-caging Mr. Frankle’s parrot herself, Rachel went to download the bank statements, which she also did in record time.

“It was pretty incredible,” she exclaimed. “It only took about four Appfolio freezes, two hours on the phone with the bank, then another hour on the phone with the bank after we got disconnected the first time.”

It was at this point Rachel reportedly took a break to go to her friend’s surprise birthday party at 8pm.

“Yeah we couldn’t believe she actually showed,” said friend and former tenant, Steve Kaufman. “She hasn’t been able to make it to a social event in three years, so I was honestly more surprised to see Rachel than I was about the birthday party.”

After the party, Rachel got right back into it, comparing the bank statement with the line items on Appfolio. Yet again, she was thrown another curveball.

“There was a company called Pest Control,” she explains, “the deposit was categorized as maintenance but really, Pest Control is the name of the owner’s nephew’s band who they hired to play our community Christmas Party.”

Line item mishaps aside, Dr. Jeffrey Fransis and his team at MIT’s Property Management Time Phenomenon Study are hopeful for the future.

“We’ve received reports that there’s a startup out of San Francisco that has developed machine learning technology that cuts the time it takes to do bank reconciliation by about 97%.”

“But if that’s true,” he added, “then they’ve managed to disprove MIT’s Reconciliation Time Vortex Theory and possibly all realities within the time-space continuum. Ms. Maddigan should give them a call, and I should just [expletive] retire.”

Have you or someone you know spent less than 1,390 hours on property management bank reconciliations? Our team wants to know about it! Please send all tips to info@proper.ai  

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Disclaimer: This is a satirical article; any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental. The only things that are true in this article are as follows: 1) you’re probably spending too much time and money on your property bookkeeping and accounting, and 2) there IS a company out of San Francisco that can save you hours of your time and up to 30% on your property accounting costs. Learn more about our services here.

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