Property Management

Cohiva

Background

Housing cooperatives often manage their properties with a patchwork of spreadsheets, emails and standalone tools. After building and occupying their first property — around 60 apartments in Bern — the Warmbächli cooperative faced exactly this challenge: administration, communication and self-governance all needed a coherent digital solution.

Marco Steinacher, now a member of the Tegonal team, built the Cohiva software landscape on top of existing open-source tools. It supports the office, administration and all cooperative members in their day-to-day work.

Modular architecture

Cohiva is modular and uses interfaces to integrate with existing systems. An existing management solution can be selectively extended with features like room booking or automated QR billing. The components are tightly linked so that users only need a single login to access all relevant functions.

Under the hood, Cohiva runs Django (Python) on the backend and a progressive web app built with the Quasar framework (Vue.js) on the frontend. The application is containerised with Docker.

Features

Cohiva covers the core areas of property management and self-governance:

• Master data: members, tenants, contracts
• Defect and repair reporting with personalised notifications
• Accounts receivable and payable: shares, loans, recurring charges
• Utility billing including solar energy communities and shared internet
• Financial accounting: full integration with GnuCash (other systems supported)
• Community chat, room booking and billing for self-managed services
• Mobile app for tenants

Open source

Cohiva is built on proven open-source components, cleverly combined and extensible for additional data structures and workflows. The full source code is freely available on GitHub — every user benefits from ongoing development.

«The digital tools Marco has developed over recent years were instrumental in building the Warmbächli cooperative, and they're now central to our daily operations and community life.» — Bernadette Dancet, President of Wohnbaugenossenschaft Warmbächli