The contract is signed, your Yardi account is provisioned, and the implementation clock has started. What happens now?
For many organizations, the period immediately after purchasing Yardi is the most disorienting phase of the entire project. You have made a significant investment, you have a go-live target date on a calendar somewhere, and the path from here to a fully operational system is not always obvious from the outside.
This guide gives you a clear picture of what the first 90 days after purchasing Yardi should look like, broken into three monthly phases. The focus is on what your organization needs to do, not just what your consultant or the Yardi team will do. Implementations that succeed are ones where the client is actively driving decisions, not waiting for things to happen to them.
Month 1: Foundations
Week 1 and 2: Get Organized
The first two weeks are about establishing the organizational foundation before any technical work begins. This is the phase most organizations rush through, and it is the one that determines whether the rest of the project runs smoothly or in fits and starts.
Confirm your internal project owner. This is the person who has decision-making authority on configuration questions, protected time for the project, and a direct line to your implementation consultant. If this role is not confirmed before week two, the project will have a leadership gap that costs you time every single week until it is filled.
Document your current processes. Before you can configure Yardi, you need to be explicit about how your operation currently works. How is rent collected and recorded? How are maintenance requests submitted and tracked? How are leases renewed? How are owner disbursements calculated and paid? Write these down. The consultant will use this documentation to configure workflows that match how your team actually operates.
Identify your data sources. Take stock of where your current data lives: what platform or spreadsheet holds your tenant records, where your lease documents are stored, how your historical transaction data is organized. The earlier you understand the state of your data, the earlier you can begin the preparation work that determines migration quality.
Weeks 3 and 4: Chart of Accounts Design
The chart of accounts is the financial backbone of your Yardi installation. The structure you design in weeks three and four will determine the shape of every financial report, every owner statement, and every tax preparation export you produce for the life of the platform.
This work requires collaboration between whoever is responsible for your financial reporting, your accounting staff, and your implementation consultant. The goal is a chart of accounts that is structured to produce the reports your stakeholders actually need, not just a copy of whatever structure your previous system used.
Common categories include: rental income by property type, late fees, application fees, other income, maintenance and repairs, insurance, property taxes, mortgage interest, management fees, and capital improvements. The exact structure depends on your portfolio composition and reporting obligations.
End of month 1 checkpoint: Project team confirmed, current processes documented, data sources inventoried, chart of accounts designed and approved.
Month 2: Build and Migration
Weeks 5 and 6: System Configuration
With the design work from month one completed, your consultant builds the actual Yardi configuration. Lease templates are created in the system. The chart of accounts is entered. Maintenance categories and workflow rules are set up. User roles and access permissions are established. Screening criteria are configured.
Your role during this phase is to review configuration outputs and confirm they match the design decisions you made in month one. Every time your consultant completes a section, review it against the documented design. Catching discrepancies here is far cheaper than catching them during testing.
Weeks 6 to 8: Data Preparation and Migration
While system configuration is underway, data preparation should begin in parallel. Pull your tenant records, lease data, and transaction history from your current system. Work through the cleaning process: resolve naming inconsistencies, fill missing required fields, reconcile balances against your source records.
The first import into a test environment should happen around week seven. This is not the final migration. It is a trial run that reveals mapping problems and validation issues before they affect the production system. Expect to find problems on the first test import. That is normal and expected. Resolving those problems in test is the entire point of the exercise.
End of month 2 checkpoint: System configuration completed in test environment, test data import run and issues documented, major data quality problems identified and being resolved.
Month 3: Testing, Training, and Go-Live
Weeks 9 and 10: User Acceptance Testing
Testing is the phase where your actual users work through their real workflows in the Yardi test environment to confirm everything works as expected. This is not a passive review. It requires your accounting team to process test rent payments, run reports, and check that numbers reconcile. It requires your leasing team to work through an application and lease signing workflow. It requires your maintenance coordinator to submit, assign, and close test work orders.
Document every issue found during testing. Your consultant resolves configuration issues. Your internal project owner tracks the issue log and confirms resolution before sign-off. Do not agree to go-live while there are unresolved issues on the log unless you have made an explicit, documented decision that those specific issues are acceptable to carry into production.
Weeks 11 and 12: Training and Go-Live
Training should happen no more than two weeks before go-live. Role-specific sessions work better than general platform overviews. Your accounting team needs to go through rent posting, bank reconciliation, owner disbursements, and report generation. Your leasing team needs application intake, screening, and lease execution. Your maintenance coordinator needs work order submission, assignment, and completion.
The go-live cutover is a defined moment: you stop entering new data in your old system and start entering it in Yardi. All transactions from the cutover date forward are in Yardi. Your old system stays accessible in read-only mode for historical reference but no new records are created in it.
The two weeks after go-live are the most important support window in the entire project. Your consultant should be available during this period to address issues as they surface. Problems discovered in the first two weeks after go-live are addressed against a system that is relatively fresh and easy to correct. Problems that linger for months become embedded in your records and are much harder to resolve.
End of month 3 checkpoint: User acceptance testing completed with all significant issues resolved, all staff trained in their role-specific workflows, go-live executed, post-live support engaged.
What to Watch in the First 30 Days After Go-Live
- First rent cycle: The first full rent collection cycle after go-live is the highest-risk event in the post-live period. Monitor every payment as it comes in, confirm that each one posts correctly to the tenant account and the property ledger, and compare collection totals against your previous system’s records for the same period.
- First owner disbursements: The first time you run owner distributions through Yardi, review each one against what you would have calculated manually. Discrepancies here indicate either a configuration error in the management fee setup or an opening balance issue carried forward from migration.
- Maintenance workflow: In the first two weeks, watch whether work orders are being used as designed or whether staff are falling back to texting and calling contractors directly. If staff are bypassing the workflow, find out why. It usually indicates a training gap rather than a workflow problem.
- Open questions log: Keep a running list of questions and issues that surface in the first 30 days. Your consultant should be triaging this list with you regularly. Separating urgent issues that need immediate resolution from enhancements that can wait for a post-live optimization pass helps keep the team focused.
NEED SUPPORT THROUGH YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS?
The difference between a Yardi implementation that your team is confident in after 90 days and one that is still causing daily frustration is almost always traceable to how well the first three months were managed. As a certified Yardi consultant, I work through the full first 90 days with clients, from design through go-live and into the post-live stabilization period. Get in touch to discuss your timeline.
