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Sorry for the long delay in blogging, folks. The blog may have been quiet but development hasn't.
In fact, we've been busier than ever, figuring out the 2011 roadmap and which items to prioritize over others. We've also been gathering feedback from new users.
We released an unannounced update in December that allows users to create new merchants directly in OwnerRez (switching away from Authorize.Net or PayPal). This allowed us to work with a few users directly and gather feedback before telling everyone about it. We're going back to work on it, actually, to deal with areas that need to be improved and streamlined.
Just this morning, we released a huge update to the rate engine. I'll be discussing the new features and fixes in a set of blog posts this week.
Time To Get Official
As we burn through 2011, it's time to remove the 'beta' rubric and make this thing official.
We've come up with a set of great prices - even a free option - that we'll be discussing in a few weeks. Here's a quick teaser on that free option: if you use an OwnerRez-created merchant account, you won't pay any monthly fee no matter how many properties you have.
Here's the top items on the roadmap:
Those items are somewhat in the correct order, but things are constantly shifting as we experience new feedback and continue to evaluate our longterm goals.
We're also working on several partnerships which, depending on the urgency, may pop up and suddendly steal focus for a few weeks as we work to meet the partners' needs. For instance, we've been in talks with both HomeAway and FlipKey/TripAdvisor to integrate both calendar data and reviews. We know the importance of eliminating double-entry for users. As vacation rental owners ourselves, it bothers us too.
Continue sending us emails or posting on the forum. It's very important that you tell us what you like or dislike about the system. We know that the booking model is slightly different for each owner, so what fits our booking model may not fit yours.
We love talking to OwnerRez users so keep those requests coming!
You may have noticed that links in our emails sometimes take awhile to load. Sometimes they don't load at all. You get a nasty "Service Unavailable" blurb.
Only a few customers have noticed this, but it has definitely occured from time to time.
This isn't caused by OwnerRez but by a link redirection feature we turned in with our email vendor. Basically, when emails are sent to you by us, our email vendor transcodes all the links in the email so that you temporarily access their website before being redirected to us. This allows them to record who has clicked which links in which emails and, in turn, provides us with some flashy reports.
While the reports are nice to see, they're certainly not worth having a sometimes-slow, sometimes-unavailable click for you.
So we've turned it off.
From now on, all the links you see in OwnerRez email will go directly to our site and not through a third-party redirect. We apologize for any slow clicks you've had in the past.
Booking cancellations are a rarity for most owners, but it's important to treat them professionally so that your guest and third parties have all the information they need. You can now decide when (or if) you want to send emails for cancelled bookings.
Previously, when a booking was canceled, the system simply sent out standard emails straight away. In some cases, the guest was never notified of the booking to begin with so there's no reason to nofity them, or any third parties, that it was canceled.
Under the Email page for the booking, you'll see three new types of email to send. You'll only see these email types if the booking is canceled.
Just like the other email types on the page, if the canceled emails were already sent, it will show the last time each one was sent. You can send these email types again and again. You can also use the Preview option to see the email exactly as the receipient will see it.
The cancellation page has a new section called Email Options that is similar to the ones on the Change Dates and New Booking pages. As with those pages, you may select which emails you want sent at the time of cancellation.
If you are deleting the booking - as opposed to canceling it - the emails can only be sent at the time of deletion. This is because the deletion process completely removes the booking from the system, including all related email information.
Good email options are vital to a booking system because it's the communication pipeline between you and your guests. Our goal is to expose every email point in the system and let you configure it, choose if you want to send it and provide options to send it later. Adding email options to cancellations brings us one step closer to that goal.
It's easy to change the dates for a booking, but up until now, nothing has automatically alerted the guest that the change successfully occured. You had to send a manual email to the guest after the fact. You also had to manually email your third parties - the housekeeper, manager, etc - so that they were kept up to date. Making a simple date change meant having to remember who you needed to notify and having to write out manual emails to keep everyone on the same page.
Now, OwnerRez does all that for you.
Open a booking, navigate to the Dates page and click the Change button. Right away, you should notice the new Email Options section that shows under the calendar strip.
By default, all three email options are selected since most of the time you will want to notify everyone. If you don't want an email going to the guest telling them that their dates changed - perhaps you told them already - simply deselect that option. Likewise with the third party or owner notifications.
The format and layout of the automatic emails are the same as the others you're used to seeing in the system. The guest gets a clean message that reminds them what the dates originally were and confirms that the change has been made.
Third parties get a message that not only tells them the old and new dates, but also summarizes what they are supposed to do.
As it says in the title of the Email Options section, these automatic emails can only be sent at the time the change is made. In other words, if you deselect one or more of the email options and click Save, you cannot send the automatic emails at a later time.
Scheduled payments are now smarter than ever! In Thursday's update, we released some changes that will increase the versatility of what scheduled payments can do.
If you schedule a new payment, or open an existing one, you'll notice some changes at the top.
The changes should be fairly self-explanatory, but let's take a minute to run through them anyway.
When it comes to picking the collection date for the scheduled payment, you can now select a number of days before the arrival date instead of a specific date. This is useful because it means that the collection date will automatically change if the arrival date changes. Before, if you changed the dates of the booking, you'd have to manually update your scheduled payments too or risk having the payment collected on the wrong date. Now, you only need to set "1 day before the arrival" (or whatever) and it will occur on the correct day even if the arrival date changes in the future.
The amount area was similarly updated. Previously, you could select "the remaining balance" but that only stored the total owed as it existed at the moment you saved the scheduled payment. If, sometime later on, the remaining balance changed, the scheduled payment would still try to collect the original amount. Now, when you select "whatever the remaining balance is (currently $x)" it tells the scheduled payment to collect the total owed at the point of collection.
We've also added a calendar button to the right of the date field. The date field always opened a calendar in the past but it wasn't obvious until you set focus to the field.
By default, bookings that are created via the guest form use the new options - Days Before Arrival and Remaining Balance. The Days Before Arrival value is based on your settings for the associated quote or property.
This update removes an additional step of work in your booking process. No longer do you have to adjust the collection date or amount on a scheduled payment just because the dates or charges changed on the booking.
It's been almost two months since our last update, but we haven't been sitting on our hands. We've been working on a variety of issues relating to payments, security deposits, scheduled payments, scheduled security deposits, cancellations and email.
From fixing minor bugs, like a "saving" spinner not showing, to adding major enhancements, like being able to view canceled bookings and send cancellation emails after the fact, we've completed over 60 issues on our roadmap.
We released the update a few minutes ago. Over the next few days, we'll be discussing each part of the update in more detail. If anything bothers you in the meantime, please tell us about it.
We've just released a new support area and filled it with a new list of support articles. At the moment, we're still working on writing all the articles, but we wanted to release the layout so that we could get your feedback as early as possible.
Are some of these articles more important than others? Are there articles not listed that you would like to see included? Special topics that should be broken down into more detail?
At the top you'll notice a search bar that will help you find articles that are relevant to your problem. At the moment, the results of the search aren't terribly useful because the support articles aren't finished being written. Once the articles are finished, the results will become much more relevant. Our search engine is only as smart as the content it's given.
In addition to support articles and blog posts, our search engine will return relevant results from forum discussions so if you'd like to contribute some useful information of your own, create a discussion in the forums.
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.
Rate categories and overrides are here! We've added significant functionality to the rate engine, based mostly on your feedback.
You can now specify a rate for weekends, specify the number of nights that a week or weekend has and define the day types (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc) that are valid for a category.
You can also choose not to split up adults and children - charging only for a total number of guests.
Let's See It
To see the changes, navigate to your property and click the Rate link. You'll notice a new page layout that shows the default rate at the top and the override rates at the bottom.
The "default rate" is the rate that is used most of the time. Think of it this way - if no override rate has been specified for the dates in question - the dates of the booking or quote - the default rate will be used.
We'll get into the overrides in a later post. For now, click the Change button to drill into the default rate. You'll see a completely new page layout with six rate categories that can be filled out.
The only category that is required is Any Night because there must be some basic 'per night' charge that is used if no other category is met for a given date. As you will see, all other categories are unused until you specifically mark them as used by selecting the Use This Rate option. Once selected, the rate will open so that can fill in the rest of the details for that category.
As you'll notice, every category has the same basic options with a few additions.
First, each category asks what the rate amount should be for that category. You should enter the entire amount that should be charged for the entire category. For example, if the category is week, enter an amount that encompasses all 6 or 7 days for that week, not just 1 night.
The other thing that every category has is the Guests breakdown.
The Guests breakdown allows you to specify what kind guests are included for the specified rate and how much more is charged for extra guests. If you charge only for total guests (instead of a adult/child breakdown), select the "Do not differentiate between adults and children" option which will change the display. If you do not specify a value for one of the Included text boxes, that is interpreted as allowing an unlimited number when calculating the total rate. If you charge extra for all guests, you would need to put "0" in the Included text box.
All categories, except the Any Night category, include a Valid Days field which allows you to select which days of the week participate in the category.
This allows you to specify when, during the week, the category is active. For instance, the Weekend Package category is usually only used on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. If a guest requests 3 nights during the middle of the week, you may not want to give them a weekend-specific rate just because the number of nights is the same. The Valid Days field is interpreted by the rate engine inclusively, as opposed to exclusively. This means that if any one of the selected days of the week is in the requested dates, the category is valid. If you want any day of the week to be valid, select all of them.
The Week and Weekend Package categories also include a Nights field which allows you to specify the number of nights that are part of that category. For example, some owners prefer using a 6 night week; others prefer a 7 night week.
Next time, we'll discuss the overrides and how to use the above options for a specific season or set of dates.
Custom renter agreements are here!
We've just released an update that lets you create your own custom agreement, directly within the system. You can copy in any text you want, including from any MS Word document, Outlook email or web page.
Let's get started. Navigate to your property, select the Legal link and click the Use Custom Agreement button. You'll notice a new page that opens with a large editor area for entering text.
If you don't know where to begin, you may want to start with the text that the auto-generated agreement uses. At the bottom of the editor, on the left side, there's a link labeled "Prefill with auto-generated agreement".
Starting with the auto-generated agreement will give you some valuable text from which you can add your own bullet points or move things around. It is certainly not necessary to use the prefill option, but it may be helpful.
As you'll discover, the editor is very strict in terms of what kind of formatting it allows and what kind it does not. We have purposefully restricted some formatting options like colors and font styles. The reason we did this is because we believe that those formatting options tend to make agreements look less professional to guests. When copying from MS Word documents, for instance, bits of color and font will persist after the text is pasted into the editor. Our editor cleans out those custom colors and styles so that the text you edit, from that point forward, is clean and valid for the web.
The editor does support several formatting options that will make your agreement look professional. It supports bold, italic and underlined font as well as multiple title/subtitle text sizes. You can change the horizontal alignment of your text and create bullet or numbered lists. You can also create hyperlinks around text if you need to link to a different location.
The editor also supports custom fields or "mail merge" fields. You'll notice a drop-down list in the menu called Insert Field. This drop-down list contains a set of fields that you can insert into the editor - wherever the cursor is currently located - that are automatically converted to a real value when the agreement is displayed.
For instance, say you need to create a custom agreement that two properties will use. If you need to reference the property name in the agreement, you'll need to use a custom field. Otherwise, it would not be possible to write a sentence (such as "this agreement is for Acme Cabin") that serves two different properties. You can easily do that by setting the cursor to the position in the agreement where you want the property name and then selecting the "Property Name" field from the drop-down list. You'll see a yellow box, with the field name in red, drop into place.
Saving the custom agreement requires that you enter a name. The name is not used anywhere in the interface, nor is it shown to guests. It is only displayed for your conveniece so that if you create multiple agreements, you can quickly tell them apart.
You can create as many custom agreements as you want. If you do have multiple agreements and you click the Use Custom Agreement button, a grid of all your agreements will be displayed so that you can select from them before adding a new one. The grid will show you which agreements are in use and allow you to edit or delete them.
Wasn't it possible to upload a custom agreement before? What's the difference?
Previously, we allowed users to have custom agreements by uploading their own file. You could upload your own MS Word or PDF file, and it would be displayed when the user viewed the Terms and Conditions. The problem with this approach is that is lacked uniformity. Since users could upload any file format they wanted, it was hard to guarantee what the file would look like. Also, it wasn't possible to sign the file with a digital signature at the time of booking so no uploaded files ever got signed. The new process keeps all the text inside the system in a clean, uniform way that permits us to render and sign all agreements, whether they are custom or not.
This is the first version of our custom renter agreements so there will be things you like and things you don't like. If there are options you would like see, please let us know. Use the forum or send us an email.
Last Saturday's update added several new features like being able to disable security deposits at the property and quote level. Another new feature in that update has to do with booking confirmation email.
We heard from users that it was annoying to have confirmation emails sent - to the owner, guest or a third party - every time a booking was created or time was blocked off.
Sometimes, you just want to block off time or create a quick booking without telling the whole world. You might just be doing testing. You might be creating a reservation that you've gotten through a partner but you don't want the guest or anyone else being alerted. You can now do all these things.
We've also added an area that shows you what emails were sent for a booking, when they were sent and a preview of what the email will look like for recipient.
The new time you're creating a booking in the system manually (or blocking off time), you'll notice a new set of email options.
The options do exactly what they say - whichever email option you check will be sent and the ones that aren't checked will not be sent. By default, only the owner notification email is selected. This is because the majority of the time, if you are creating a booking yourself, manually, you probably don't want the guest or a third party getting email until you've had time to make sure the charges and billing details are correct.
Once the booking is created, click on the new Email link. You'll notice several email types enumerated along with their status, a preview option and a Send button.
The preview link will open a new window (or tab, depending on the browser) that shows you the exact email the recipient will get. It's useful to check the preview after you've updated charges so you can see exactly what the guest will see.
To send the email, click the Send button. If you've already done so - or if the email was sent at the time the booking was created - the email type will show the date and time of the transmission and the Send button will change to a Send Again button.
You can send each email type over and over again, as often as you want. So if the guest tells you that they never received the booking confirmation email, just send it again. The date and time will only show the most recent transmission.
In the future, we'll be adding more email types to this area including types for payments and security deposits.
Saturday's update gave us several new features. Among them, you can now disable the security deposit for your property or a specific quote.
To disable the security deposit, navigate to your property, select the Billing Details link and click the Change button. You'll notice a new set of options in the Security Deposit section.
Select the 'Never reserve a security deposit' option and click Save. Future quotes and bookings will no longer create security deposits or tell the guest about them. The public quote form, where the guest accepts and finalizes their reservation, will tell the guest that no security deposit is required.
To disable the security deposit for a specific quote, navigate to the quotes, select the Billing Details link and click the Change button. This area is similar to the billing details on the property only whatever you set here only applies to the specific quote in question.
Why would you want to disable it for a specific quote?
Say you have a friend that is renting your property, and you trust them and don't want to impose a security deposit on them. Instead of turning it off at the property level, thereby turning it off for all quotes and bookings for all guests, you can just disable it for your friend's quote. Your friend will never see it when they're accepting and finalizing the quote online and no security deposit is ever scheduled or reserved.
Thanks for posting that information.
On Friday, we released an update that finalizes our integration with Perfect Places. You can now create a calendar sync for Perfect Places and we'll automatically make sure your bookings show up there.
There is a slight delay in the integration so new bookings and blocked-off times may take a few hours to show up in Perfect Places. It shouldn't take more than 24 hours.
Since our support area is still being built, here is some info to get you started.
To add a sync for Perfect Places, navigate to your property and select the Calendar Sync link. On the Calendar Sync page, you'll notice that a new sync appears for Perfect Places.
Click the Set Up Now button and you'll see a new calendar sync page that asks for a Reference Number and has a set of Save/Cancel buttons.
In order to save the new sync, you must supply a reference number which is the number that shows on your Perfect Places listing. Log into the Perfect Places control panel and look at your listings. The reference number is shown in the left-most column.
After you've copied the reference number over, click the Add Sync button and we'll take care of the rest. After you add the sync the first time, a representative from Perfect Places may contact you by email to verify the integration.
You'll never need to manually update your Perfect Places calendar again!
For awhile now, we've disliked putting the technical details of our updates in blog posts and wanted to provide an update history area that contained specific technical information.
If you're wondering what I mean, take a look at our last five posts and you'll see several titles that start with something like "New Update (x.x.x) Released".
To scratch this itch, we just released a minor update. Click that link and you'll see the technical details of the release contained in (wait for it) the new update history area.
The blog will continue to comment on updates, as they occur, but without all the technical flair that goes along with it - version numbers, release date, affected components, etc. If you care about such things, they'll be waiting for you in the update history area.
I considered going back and re-titling previous blog posts and changing the content to address the now-separate update history, but I was told by my co-workers that such a move violated the nature of the Internet. I was told that blog posts should be persistent and reflect the time in which they were written, even if they now seem obsolete. So, as much as it pains me, I'll leave the old stuff alone.
We've also added comment capability to the update history so you can let us know what you think when stuff happens. As with the blog, the comment capability is available via the forums under the newly-added Update History Comments forum.
In the last release, we updated the application login pages to use a newer design which would allow us unify all the user accounts between the website and application. This release finalizes the other half of that.
If you're logged into the application and you navigate back to the website - say to post something on the forums or ask a question - you'll notice that you'll still be logged in with the same name and email address that are associated to your account. To change your name or email address, use the Update Profile area in the application.
There is no longer any "community" login or user pages. For community-only users, which are users that have not yet used our core service but have created a community account for using the forum, your community account has been merged into the application so you can continue using the same login information. If you need to change your forum display name, you can use the Update Profile area of the application to do that. Even though this means that community-only users now have a full owner account, they are under no obligation to use or pay for the system. Future payments will be tied to the number of properties a user has created.
If you're logged into your account (you can tell by the wording that is displayed under the 800 number at the top), a "logout" link will appear in the bottom footer links, in the Privacy & Security area, on every page of the site. By clicking this link, you will be logged out. Again, since the application and website now share a unified login system, this will log you out of both sides.
Other Tweaks
We also included a number of small fixes and enhancements with this release. Here are some of those:
This release, in its entirety, was the result of feedback from our beta users. Please continue to tell us what you like, dislike or don't care about. We really listen to you.
In the past few weeks, we've established an integration partnership with Perfect Places.
Our integration partnership will allow you to keep your Perfect Places calendar seamlessly up-to-date without lifting a finger!
As you create bookings or block-off time, our system will communicate with Perfect Places, sending them the information they need to change the availability that shows on your Perfect Places listing.
At the moment, we're finishing all the necessary pieces to make this work. Our release estimate for this feature is about 4 weeks.
(In the meantime, if you don't have a Perfect Places listing, run over there and get one. They've got great prices.)
Last night, we released an update that changed the login, register and reset-password pages; and fixed several minor bugs.
Changes to the Login, Register, Reset Stuff
Besides tweaking the design on the login pages to match previous updates, the login pages now uses a uniform login process that combines the application and website.
To simplify, after the next release (0.7.3) users will have one login that controls both their owner account and community account. They will no longer be separate entities. For example, if you've already signed in to the forum to leave a comment, you will be able to move right into your owner area without having to go through a second login area.
The previous Forgot Password page has been replaced by a new Reset Password page that emails you a reset link. This is a safer and easier way to reset your password because it means that if someone else triggers a reset on your password, on purpose or by accident, you don't have to go through the bother of having to correct it.
Links Fixed
The Terms of Service, shown on the new user registration page, had some links pointing off to Never Never Land. Those have been fixed.
"Waiting" Image Fixed for Chrome and Safari
When you click to save something in OwnerRez, you may have noticed a blue and white image that displays while the application is processing. Or maybe you didn't notice because you were using Chrome or Safari. There was a bug preventing Chrome and Safari users from seeing the image that has now been fixed.
Happy New Years to all our beta users! (And anyone else passing by.)
Excitement is in the air. Over the past few months, we've been getting OwnerRez into a position where we can work on and release several of the new features that our beta users have asked for. Up until now, we've been working on nuances in the core quote and booking engine, tightening up the workflow and doing loads of testing. Those items have been fully hammered down, and now we're on to the new stuff.
Our list of new features and enhancements is quite large, over 150, and our beta users have provided a few more on top of that.
As the new year emerges, we're working hard on the list. Here are some of the top features in the queue right now:
New features for a new year!
This morning, we released an update that fixed minor bugs and made enhancements to the user interface. None of the updates were critical. Among them were the following:
Spelling Errors
Several pages in the properties area contained misspelled words. For instance, in the email settings tab, the booking confirmation page had a title with the word "Confirmaton" that was corrected to "Confirmation".
Custom Paragraphs Not Showing Up On Email
For some users, the custom paragraphs for the booking confirmation email were not showing up on the actual email sent to the guest. The paragraphs would display properly in the user interface and in the preview mode but not in the actual email that was delivered to the guest.
Failed Payments and Security Deposits Attempted Multiple Times
Scheduled payments and security deposits are only supposed to be collected one time, whether they succeed or fail. Previously, if the collection succeeded, which is what happens most of the time, the collection never tries again. However, if the collection fails, certain internal errors were causing the scheduled payment or security deposit to be attempted again the following day - which, of course, would simply fail again. These errors were found and corrected. Now, if the scheduled payment or security deposit fails to be collected, it will not try again.
Occasional Errors On Date And Charges Tabs
In the bookings area, some users would occasionally see errors if they clicked on the Date or Charges tab for a booking.
All of these errors, and others, have been fully fixed and tested. The version number for this update is 0.7.1.
The OwnerRez Blog is live!
We've just released the new website. With it comes a new blog and forums area so our customers can get more visibility into the features we're working on. Please click around and let us know what you think.
Those of you that have had questions, comments and feedback on the application - it's time to let loose. Register for a forum account, and let us have it. We value every bit of feedback you have. We've already gotten loads of feedback by email so we'll enter that into the forums so others can review it.
The support/docs area is still not finished. We're integrating that directly into the application so it needs a little more work. We want to make sure that that's solid before pushing out a first release.
Use the RSS buttons over on the right (or on the bottom of every page) to stay up on our feeds. And make sure to sign up for newsletters. Those will be going out twice per month.
More soon to come. Thanks again to all our early testers!
