Hi, everyone! This is Part 4 of our Midsummer Update series, and it covers 15 updates from the week of July 26th. 🌞
While there are no major new features in this update, we did add a number of cool little tweaks that will help you work with existing features faster!
Enhancements & Tweaks
Over time, we notice little things where a subtle change will speed up the user's workflow. We call these click-reducers. The idea is that you can do the same work without clicking on as many buttons or pages. We gather those click-reducers together and then hit them all at once. This update had a few of those click-reducers in it...
Have you ever wanted to select a bunch of properties when changing your settings, and you were annoyed because you had to individually click each property in the list? If you're a PM that manages a lot of properties, you know exactly what I mean. Now you can use Shift+click to select a range of properties all at once when updating your settings. Whether you're selecting 5 properties or 50, you can make those changes faster and get back on with life!
This was put in place across the settings area - from season to payment methods - but if we missed a spot, or you see a different field that should work the same way, let us know.
Do you have different taxes set up for different channels based on which channel collects/remits taxes for you? If so, you're not alone. And before, it was confusing to know which of your taxes was the one to click on because you might have the same "5% sales tax" in the list multiple times. Once you click in, you then see that it applies to all, or just Airbnb or only effective at a certain date. To help with this, we added a Listing Site column to the Taxes list so that you can see right off which tax is for which channel. This should reduce a couple of clicks on your part.
When editing Check-In, Check-Out and Time Zone settings, you now see the account culture (ie. language and currency) and click to edit that from the Time Zone settings page. New users often wonder where the language and currency settings are when they end up on this page, so we now display it along with a quick link.
A few months ago, we started auto-creating listing sites based on where bookings come from. If you use our Hosted Websites or widgets, we'll automatically detect the listing site that the site or widget came from and auto-match it to your listing sites or auto-create and match a new one on the fly. This is a really cool feature and we wanted to expand it to other areas of the system, so we now auto-create custom listing sites for the Business URLs you enter in your account themes. All you have to do is update the "Business URL" field in the account theme, or in a secondary theme, and we'll automatically detect that and make sure you have a custom listing site for the same URL.
For those of you that are PMs, did you know you can import lists of owners from Excel, or if you already have owners update them from the same Excel spreadsheet? To make this easier, we updated our owner export spreadsheet to mirror the import version. This makes it easier for you to export a list of owners, make your changes (directly in the same Excel sheet), then import it right back into OwnerRez.
Wondering which of your properties use which themes? You can now see the associated properties right on the Themes list without clicking in. For most of you, that will only be the one main account theme, so it will just show "All" under properties.
In keeping with our patterns elsewhere in the interface, we've added an "Export" button on the Seasonal Rates tab of the Rates settings. This will take you to the corresponding Seasonal Rate Export to Excel function.
That's it's for click-reducers. Let's wrap it up with a couple of enhancements that went out in this update...
Sometimes when you're going fast, it's easy to fat-finger or copy/paste the wrong information. We noticed some strange lat and long coordinates on property addresses, and when digging in, it looked like the user simply made a copy/paste error. We now validate the lat and long coordinates for all property locations to fall within the logical range.
It's pretty common to refer to the minimum age of the renter in renter agreements and emails. Since that's a setting in our property rules, we figured we could automate that for you, so we've added a field code called {PMINAGE} which will render the minimum age of the renter. If you don't know what field codes are, check out our Field Codes support article or Field Codes video walk-through. Now, if you go change the minimum age in your rules, your renter agreements and emails will automatically follow suit without you having to manually adjust those. That's assuming, of course, that you use this new field code. 😉
Bug Fixes
Just remove those expenses... If you unmanage a booking that has charge linked expenses, then try to adjust the charges, you'd hit an error. All better now!
Show booking tooltip below booking for properties at the top of the ribbon. If you had only a few properties, the ribbon tooltip appeared above the booking instead of below. This would make tall tooltips overlap off the screen. Fixed now.
Support import for Vrbo listings with no rates. Some Vrbo listings have no rates. You'd see an error if you tried to import those listings before, but no more. We now safely detect this case and continue with the import (informing you at the end, of course).
Treat Airbrb "pre-approval" as special offers for charge calculation. We noticed that pre-approvals were being handled as special offers by Airbnb under the covers, so Airbnb won't send us standard fees for those. We added some logic that will back out the configured fees even though they're not sent by Airbnb. This is similar to how our Channel Bridge logic will make your surcharges appear in OwnerRez even if the guest didn't see them because they were baked into the rent rate.
Airbrb inquiries are sometimes booked. We noticed that when Airbnb inquiries were booked, our system was actually voiding the inquiry part and marking them as voided. That has now been fixed and booked inquiries from Airbnb now properly show that in the interface.
Changeover days on booking widget calendars. Was it always liked this or was there a regression? We're not sure, but it looked weird so we changed it. Specifically, we changed the way changeover days look on the date calendars that show on Book Now widgets. There was a weird highlight effect happening, and we removed it.
