The question that decides whether a remote seat feels safe is not who they are. It is exactly what they can see and touch inside Yardi, AppFolio or Buildium from day one.
Start from least privilege, then add
The default access grant for a new coordinator should be the minimum needed to do the first task list: work order creation and dispatch, the leasing calendar, and tenant ledger view. General ledger posting, bank connections and owner payout settings are excluded until a specific, written reason exists.
What does a remote assistant need access to?
In Yardi, that typically means the Maintenance and Resident Services modules with a role restricted from GL posting. In AppFolio, task and maintenance dashboards plus messaging, without bank feed access. In Buildium, the tenant and work order dashboards with reporting view-only.
| System | Grant | Exclude |
|---|---|---|
| Yardi | Maintenance, Resident Services, calendars | GL posting, bank connections |
| AppFolio | Task boards, maintenance, messaging | Owner payout settings |
| Buildium | Tenant and work order dashboards | Bank reconciliation |
Access by system for a first coordinator seat
Provisioning before day one, not during week one
Access requests routed through your IT team should be submitted as soon as a candidate is selected, so credentials exist before onboarding starts. Late provisioning is the single most common cause of a coordinator falling back on a parallel spreadsheet, which then has to be reconciled by hand.
Reviewing access as the role grows
As a coordinator takes on owner reporting or AR follow-up, access should expand in a documented step, reviewed with your Bota Lead, not granted informally over email. A quarterly access review is a reasonable minimum cadence.
- Day 0 Least-privilege access provisioned ahead of the start date.
- Month 1 Access confirmed matches the actual task list in use.
- Quarter 1 Formal access review with your Bota Lead.
How much oversight does this actually require?
Very little in practice. A quarterly fifteen-minute review of the audit log against the written role scope is enough to confirm nothing has drifted, because the remote seat's login behaves exactly like an in-house employee's inside your own instance.
What goes wrong, and how to avoid it
The most common failure is granting broad admin access for convenience during a busy onboarding week, then never revisiting it. Writing the exact permission set into the role scope, before onboarding, removes the need to fix it later.
Want this applied to your own operation?
Start with a free workflow audit. We will help you identify the work, define the role and determine whether Bota is actually the right fit.
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