Hi there and Happy Hump Day! 🐪 We're back with another makeup product update that covers a release (15 updates) from a couple of weeks ago. While small, this release introduced a couple of new enhancements that you're sure to want to see, so give it a read!
Enhancements & Tweaks
Show Integrations, Websites, and Insurance On Property Info
The "General Info" tab of each property shows quite a bit of great overview info about the property - the name, location, high-level rules, occupancy, and rates. Recently, we realized we should add some additional information here including what was connected to the property in terms of integrations and connections so that you and your team can get a quick idea of how the property is configured. So we did that!
As to shows above, you can now see all of the following aspects of a property in one glance:
- Channel - the direct channel connections active and running for the property
- Payment Methods - credit card, checks, etc that the property accepts
- Door Locks - any lock integrations currently in place, generating codes (or manual generation)
- Websites - the hosted websites or WordPress plugins that currently show the property
- QuickBooks - if OwnerRez is syncing booking data to QuickBooks for this property
We also added Damage Protection and Travel Insurance to the top section so that you can quickly see if those settings are turned on for the current property.
You'll notice that each of these areas includes links that you can use to quickly navigate to those connections or settings for fast access.
Candy Striping for Blocks on Month Calendar
We felt like it was a little confusing how the booking month view showed blocks and bookings the same - both were the same color. On the ribbon view, blocks are always different (they are candy-striped) but the month view shows no such difference. This seemed inconsistent to us, so we decided to add some candy striping to blocks on the month calendar side.
However, in the weeks since this update was released, some users pointed out that they actually wanted their month calendar to show blocks and bookings the same, and both in solid colors. Others liked the change.
So we added a setting to the Account > Display Preferences so that each user can select what they want.
Hopefully, this will create a good balance between consistency and individual preference.
CC Processing History and Card Status for Quotes
Our Credit Card Processing History report shows you a full list of your processing history with a lot of detailed information, but it doesn't include one tiny aspect of processing history - payment attempts on quotes.
The report will show you failed attempts, verifications, voids, and many other things, but only if the credit card transactions occurred on a booking. What if an attempt was made on a quote and then failed? Where do you see that transaction? How do you search for activity using a quote ID to see if anything happened? So we got to work on upgrading the report.
First, we changed the "OwnerRez Booking" column to "OwnerRez Entity" and switched the old Entity column to "Transaction". We then switched the values that show in each row to be dynamic to the entity that was charged against. If there wasn't a booking, we look for a quote and show that instead. We added help bubbles so that you can see what they show.
At the same time, we realized that the quote itself (the overview page, etc) could show information about the credit card attempts, so we upgraded that page as well. There is now a new "Card Status" field that shows in the Quote > Overview > General Info section and here is what it shows:
- Card on file - if the quote is booked and the booking has a card status, it shows the booking's card status
- Property has no credit card payment methods - if the quote isn't booked, and there are no card payment methods
- None - if no credit card transactions have been attempted (ie. default status for new quotes)
- Failed - credit card transactions have been attempted but no successful booking has happened (ie. the guest has tried to pay for the quote but run into problems or stopped)
This should provide additional clarity on the state of credit card transactions that have happened on a quote. We plan to add triggers for quotes soon, but this should help your research in the meantime.
More Columns on Tax Reports
Our Tax Reports have two modes - Accrual and Cash - that allow you to pick how you want to view and report taxes. For a while now, the accrual view has had more columns than the cash view, and we've wanted to fix that, and we also wanted to add some additional columns on both reports.
To start, we upgraded the Tax Detail report Cash view to have four additional column groups for Item, Booking, Transaction, and Pro-Rated columns. For bookings columns, we added Total/Period Nights and Dates. For payment columns, we added Amount and Fee. For Pro-Rated columns, we added Taxable, Non-Taxable, and Individual Taxes.
Then, based on the above, we added totals at the bottom of all amount columns including the pro-rated ones.
We added some hover text showing the difference between "Total Nights" and "Period Nights".
Finally, we added a "Transaction Fees" column on both the Tax Summary and Tax Detail reports and in both Accrual and Cash views.
For Cash view, we only show fees for that particular payment if it exists.
Hopefully, these changes bring additional clarity to your taxes and the amounts due, both at the booking and overall level.
Bug Fixes
Insurance Detail report row order. Recently, some users were experiencing unsorted output from the Insurance Detail report. The report was relying on some default internal order base on our reporting engine, and it would vary depending on the size of the results. We fixed this to use the same sort order all the time, and we made it dynamic to the date field (eg. booked, arrival, etc) that is selected. While we were there, we also added the Booked Date as a column to the report so that users can cross-reference the report against their invoices.
Added missing address components LQA. Do you use our Listing Quality Analyzer tool? If not, you should. It can show you where your listings have holes or where channel rules have changed. A while back, we noticed that Vrbo chokes on addresses where certain parts of the address are missing and the country is USA or Canada. So we updated our LQA tool to point that out. Now, if you have a Canadian address, we check for missing City and Postal Code fields, and if you have a Vrbo API integration, we check for missing Postal Codes on all addresses, no matter the country.
Rate table with discounts less than zero. We noticed an edge case where the rate table widget can end up with a rate that is less than zero if you have (1) a 100% "percent of subtotal" discount with no criteria and (2) a 20% weekly "percent of rent" discount. Since those two amounts are calculated separately, the rate table ends up showing some rates that are less than zero. Not cool, right?! We fixed this so that length-of-stay discounts that result in a less-than-zero amount are ignored.
Show full cancellation policy on website. A little while back, we updated our hosted websites to automatically show the cancellation policy of the property on each property page. We added a "Cancellation Policy" section between the rate table and guest reviews towards the bottom. However, we noticed that we were using the abbreviated version of the policy, not the "full legal" version which is the fully-spelled out policy as a paragraph. The full legal version is the version we put in renter agreements and most other places. We noticed some confusion around this as guests transitioned from the website into the booking process. We updated the hosted website to clearly show the full legal version so that there is no confusion as to what the real policy is. The same full legal version now shows on the hosted website, on the booking/quote acceptance forms, and in the electronically-signed renter agreement.
Rounding off cents when setting rates. Have you ever set cents on the rate calendar (ie. not a whole number) and then gotten frustrated when we rounded off the cents to a whole number? For instance, you might have entered "150.75" as the nightly rate but then we changed it to "150" when you saved. We fixed this. If you set cents, you now get cents.
Deleted fees in owner statement snapshot. Previously, owner statement snapshots were showing duplicate host fees, which was happening because we were storing a snapshot of deleted host fees in addition to active ones. We fixed this so that deleted fees are no longer showing up in the snapshot.
Email history links. Have you ever looked at your Communication History and then, when reading an old email you sent, click a link in the body? If so, you might have noticed that the link opened inside the body window which is not what you probably intended. We fixed this so that all body links open in a new browser tab.
Different aspect ratios in photo carousel slider. In our hosted websites and WordPress-integrated sites, we have a photo carousel slider that will automatically show your property photos in order, with the correct captions, and allow the guest to click or open them for better viewing. However, depending on the size of your property photos, some of the images would show with padding around them or force the captions below the thumbnails where they were not readable. We spent some time tweaking this so that oversized and undersized images would display correctly with no padding around them and the captions in the correct place.
Hosted URL on widgets when hosted isn't live. If you use one of our widgets and you also have an active hosted website, we detect this and make sure to the use URL of the property from the hosted website on the widget. However, we recently noticed a confusing situation where the hosted website wasn't live (ie. not set to active) and so the property URL was going nowhere. We now detect this and only use the hosted website URL if the website is set to active.
Duplicate custom field values. We noticed some places where duplicate custom fields were being created because we weren't doing a strict check on certain parts of the custom field creation process. We tightened this up and made sure to never allow the same field value to be entered more than once for the same field for the same entity (booking, quote, property, etc).
What type of template is this? How do you know whether a given email template is Booking type, Payment, or something else? You don't! There is always some confusion around this issue as our message templates only work for a certain type of entity in the system which is required because of how custom fields work. For instance, you can't use a booking message template to send out owner statements. To add some clarity around this, we added this to the information bar above the message editor.