The OwnerRez Blog

Have you ever wished you could see your bookings overlayed on a calendar instead of a plain grid?  So have we.  While the grid is useful for scanning some of the details, 90% of the time you want a calendar view to show you where the bookings occur and which days are still open.  And you want to see it right away when you login.

Welcome to the new Bookings Calendar View.

You can use this new view to quickly scroll from one month to the next and see which dates are still open and for which properties.  To drill into a booking, just click on it.  If the booking is too small to see all the details, hover over it with your mouse to see the rest of the text.

On the left side of the calendar, you'll notice a few other new features.

The Property Filter is exactly what it looks like.  If you uncheck a property, all bookings for that property will disappear from the calendar.

The buttons above it give you quick access to the things you do the most - create a quote or bookings for your guests.  These options still exist in the tab drop-down menus if you'd rather access them there.

We're working hard on making the calendar do other things.  For instance, we'd like to be able to click on an open day and create a booking (or quote) in place without navigating away to a different page.  Please share your thoughts on what you like or dislike and other features we should add.

For your custom renter agreements, two new fields are now available in the 'Insert Fields' drop-down list: booking arrival date and booking departure date.

These options are exactly what they sound like - the arrival and departure dates for whatever booking the agreement is generated for.

How is this useful?

Suppose you want your renter agreement to specify a certain condition for only the period of time when the guests will be at the property.  You can use these two fields to do that - "Guest may do blah between [ArrivalDate] and [DepartureDate]".

What other fields are you dying to have?

On Monday, we commented about adding new page numbers to the renter agreement PDFs.  In the same update, we also released a significant set of improvements for security deposits.  You can now schedule security deposits for future collection or reset security deposits that have already been collected.

After navigating to one of your bookings, click on the Security Deposit link and you'll see where the changes begin.

That 'Schedule It' button at the top right is the new guy on the block.  If a security deposit has already been scheduled, the button will be called 'Change Scheduled One' instead, which will allow you to edit the scheduling details.  If a security deposit has already been reserved, no schedule button will be displayed.  Bookings can only have one security deposit so if one is already reserved, any scheduled ones disappear.

Click on the Schedule It button or Change Scheduled One button and you'll see a new page layout with scheduling options.

The options are very straightforward.  You can either have your security deposit collected on a specific date, or you can schedule it for a certain number of days before the arrival date.  In either case, the collection date must be in the future.  Most of the time, you will want to use the 'days before' option so that if the booking changes dates, the security deposit will move right along with it.  When a booking is created by the guest and a security deposit is automatically scheduled by the system, the 'days before' option is always used.

The bottom portion of the page, which allows you to pick or enter a credit card for the guest, is exactly the same as the billing sections you've seen elsewhere in the system such as for collecting or scheduling payments.

The system will not allow you to schedule a security deposit if one has already been reserved.  Occasionally, if the security deposit was already reserved and you need to schedule one for the future - perhaps the current one was collected prematurely - you need to release the current one and do a reset.  We added the 'reset' option in the latest update which allows you to start over, essentially.  The Reset button will only appear after a security deposit has been reserved and released.

On Reset, any existing security deposit or scheduled security deposit will be removed from the booking.

With these new scheduling and reset options, you should now be able to control security deposits much more completely.  We already have a lot of ideas about how to enhance these options, but please give us your feedback so we know what you like or dislike about what we've done here.

About a month ago, one of our users brought up a great point.  The user pointed out that when a renter agreement is turned into a PDF, at the time of booking, the PDF has no page numbers.

At first, this seemed like a relatively minor thing.  But as we continued to think about it, the more it bothered us.  Technically, legal documents are supposed to have page numbers so that no additional pages can be inserted into the middle or appended onto the end of the document after the document has been signed.

Not wanting our users to have legal issues with their renter agreements, we made this a priority.  Today's update includes a fix for this.  When renter agreements are turned into PDFs by the system, they now contain page numbers at the bottom of each page.

We also changed the digital signature block so that the guest's full name is used instead of just their initials.  We believe that the full name is more clear and accurate for everyone involved.

We recently discussed the new rate categories that were added to OwnerRez.  In the same update, we also added overrides.

The steps for working with rate categories, discussed in the last post, can also be set up for different time periods throughout the year.  For example, many owners have different rates between the on and off season.  Many OwnerRez users in Florida have higher rates during the last three weeks in December.

On the Rates overview page for your property, you'll notice a lower section called Rate Overrides.  Click the Add New Override button and you'll see a rate layout that is similar to the Default Rate page.

At the top, you'll notice an Override Type field that allows you to specify either Seasonal or Specific Dates.

A seasonal override is an override that only has months and days, not years.  Seasonal overrides repeat every year.  This is the type of override that you would use for off-season/on-season rates.

A specific date override is an override that only occurs once - you specify a hard start and end date.  The guest's dates have to fall within those dates.  You can manually enter a date or select from the calendar that appears next to the text box.

Overrides should be the exception to the rule.  If you have an on-season and off-season, make your Default Rates the on-season and create an override for the off-season.