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We are happy to announce that we've partnered with Rategenie to offer our OwnerRez users another dynamic pricing service!
Rategenie allows you to automatically update your rates daily with the perfect price across multiple channels. Its data-driven algorithms will help you maximize your profits by building a pricing strategy that works for your market. You can base your strategies on historical trends, your rental's occupancy, a fixed price, custom occupancy, custom feed strategy, or use their Genie Strategy to get started.
Transparent Pricing. No Hidden Fees. Check out their pricing calculator here.
Get started with Rategenie by visiting the Rategenie website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Rategenie.
I've been trying to get the strike-through discount working as you mentioned above. I'm using a last-minute 10% discount configured exactly as your example shows on the linked [ last minute ] article. While the discount does appear on Airbnb, it's not doing any strike throughs. Any thoughts on why that's not working? We're a new listing on Airbnb. Thanks!
I finally played with it enough and figured it out for at least one type of discount! In Ownerrez, the discount "Number of Nights Greater Than or Equal To ____ Days" will turn into a "Discount for other Stays" on the Airbnb control panel side. The guest will see this listed as a "Long Stay Discount" in the details under the pricing.
The catch is the discount has to be 10% or greater than what Airbnb evaluates as your average price. You can set-up multiple ones too, so 10% for 3 night stays, 15% for 4 night stays, etc. It does not stack the discounts, but rather uses the greater one, so in my example, if someone selected 5, 6 or 7 nights, they would get a 15% discount.
Can we get a character counter on the headline field? It's painful to craft the perfect headline only to then have it fail the LQA and then have to copy it into Word, use Word's character counter. It seems like a glaringly obvious thing to do (and you already have real-time character counters in a number of other fields). In fact, any that have limitations on any (popular) channels should probably have character counters--Short Description is another one I run into issues with.
YES YES YES! This is so needed in all fields with character limitations (on popular channels)!
@Steve & Kyristen K - please write in to the Helpdesk with your specific example so we can investigate.
Airbnb's sorta-new 500-character limit. Recently, Airbnb started enforcing a 500-character limit on short descriptions and a 50-character limit on headlines. To be fair, Airbnb historically advised partners like OwnerRez to limit listing summaries to 500 characters, but they weren't enforcing it, so we let users continue using longer descriptions. They just now started implementing it, so... we are now too. We also updated our support docs and Listing Quality Analyzer tool to match.
Can we get a character counter on the headline field? It's painful to craft the perfect headline only to then have it fail the LQA and then have to copy it into Word, use Word's character counter. It seems like a glaringly obvious thing to do (and you already have real-time character counters in a number of other fields). In fact, any that have limitations on any (popular) channels should probably have character counters--Short Description is another one I run into issues with.
I've been trying to get the strike-through discount working as you mentioned above. I'm using a last-minute 10% discount configured exactly as your example shows on the linked [ last minute ] article. While the discount does appear on Airbnb, it's not doing any strike throughs. Any thoughts on why that's not working? We're a new listing on Airbnb. Thanks!
On Tuesday, 9/27, join us live with the team from getawayGoGo to discuss the importance of marketing last-minute bookings.
Learn about 5 last-minute vacation rental challenges for property managers and travelers, and how automatically listing your last-minute openings on getawayGoGo’s book direct marketplace addresses many of these challenges. Also, discover more about how their unique, flat rate, no commission, no subscription, no traveler service fee model helps you become more independent and competitive.
The session is free to join, but you must use the getawayGoGo webinar link to register.
You can find all our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
We are excited to announce that we have partnered with BeHome247 to offer our OwnerRez users automation services that will allow you to connect smart devices, reduce costs and automate workflows.
BeHome247 is a unifying operations platform for property managers in the residential and hospitality industries that provides complete visibility, control, and automation over many daily tasks from a single dashboard. Automate workflows, connect smart devices, reduce costs, and drive revenue with BeHome247. From “prospect to poolside,” every step is coordinated and executed in one, seamless, purpose-built, end-to-end solution.
Founded for operators by operators, no one in the market has a better understanding of property management than BeHome247. Learn more at BeHome247.com.
Features
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Item #1 – Smart Controller
Item #2 – Smart Lock
Item #3 – Smart Thermostat
Item #4: Smart Wall Switch
Item #5 – Door / Window Sensor
Item #6 – Leak / Freeze Sensor
Item #7 – Smart Plug / Switch
Item #8 – Smart LED Light
Item #9 – MultiSensor (6)
Item #10 – MultiSensor (3)
Item #11 – EV Charger
Item #12 – NoiseAware
Get started with BeHome247 by visiting the BeHome247 website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with BeHome247.
Hey Melanie,
Yes, prices sync to all of the channels that you're connected to in OwnerRez. So if you've got VRBO activated in OwnerRez, then we'd send prices there too.
Yes, we could certainly hop on a call with you if you're an existing user. We'd love to! Just send a message to support@rankbreeze.com & we'll schedule it with you.
The Pricing Engine can be turned on for individual listings too. Which means it can be set up for 1 of your property first, before committing to all your others.
Hope that helps!
Also, will the Rankbreeze prices push to VRBO through our integration or is this exclusively for AirBNB listings?
Is that offer open to people who already use Rankbreeze but not the pricing optimization?
Happy Friday everyone! I'm proud to announce a great new accounting feature that we've been planning for a long time and has now been released! I'm talking of course about deposits. 💰
The concept of tracking deposits has been swirling around in the back halls of OwnerRez for a couple of years now, but we never had the time to get it off the ground. Over the summer, we launched the first release of and then immediately followed it up with several more enhancements. Even in just a few months of being out, deposits has already become a core feature of the system. We anticipate that every user will want to use it in one way or another.
A "deposit" is exactly what it sounds like - a collection of payments that is grouped together and deposited into your bank account. For most homeowners and PMs, this is a nighly process where they see their credit card or Airbnb payouts in a lump sum each day. If you have a large operation or use multiple payment methods, you might see a variety of deposits each day, but the concept is the same. Depending on your relationship with the payer, the deposit is often less than the total amount of payments because it has fees deducted. Or, you might be set up with "gross deposit" which means that the fees are charged at the end of the month and each nightly payout is for the full amount of payments.
So where is this new Deposits feature? Since the first release of deposits came out a couple of months ago, you've probably already seen the Deposits menu hiding out in the top Tools menu. We added some helpful little "new" labels to lead the way. If you don't know what I mean, crack open the Tools menu and look for Deposits.
Click on Deposits to drill in, and you'll see a fairly-plain list with a record button above it. For some users, nothing will show in the Deposits list right off. This is because the first phase of deposits was manual only and unless you use Stripe or Lynnbrook Group (not "Lynnbrook Classic"), it will still be manual for the time being. That is, you need to manually record deposits by selecting from your recent payments and refunds and creating a deposit that matches what your bank records show.
Go ahead and click the "Manually Record Deposit" button, and you'll see a page showing all of your most-recent payments and refunds, inviting you to select the ones that were deposited together.
The fields at the top ("Deposited On" and "Amount") are used to record when the deposit hit your bank account and the total amount. This amount should be the exact "to the penny" number that actually was deposited into your bank account.
Below that, you should select the payments and refunds that make up the deposit. The combination of the payments and refunds you select should match the amount that was deposited.
After saving the deposit, you'll be taken back to the Deposit list where you'll see the newly recorded deposit. Clicking on the recorded deposit will drill in and show you what you recorded. If you'd like to change the deposit, you can do that, but you can only change the "Deposited On" and "Total Amount" fields. If you made a mistake selecting payments and refunds, you'll need to delete the deposit and start over by manually recording a new one.
"But wait, what about fees!!!" you ask. Credit card payments are often not fully deposited to your bank account because of fees, and we've gone to great lengths to build a process to handle the fee problem.
Fees are automatically factored out of the deposit total as you select transactions based on the fee amount on each payment and refund. For instance, let's suppose you have three credit card payments that are part of a single deposit, each of which has a credit card fee. When you select those three payments on the deposit screen, the total gross, fee and net amount will show at the bottom of the list of transactions. It would look something like this:
Of course, many users don't record credit card fees on each payment because there is no way of getting that information, so we designed a solution for that as well!
If you select payments and refunds that don't add up to the deposit amount at the top, we will automatically show you the difference at the bottom and warn you that an "adjustment" will be created on the deposit to denote the difference.
For example, let's consider the same deposit above but with payment records that have no recorded fee. When we select the payments, notice the warning box at the bottom calling out the $128.50 difference and that an "adjustment" will be created automatically with the deposit.
Wondering what an "adjustment" is? An adjustment is simply an extra amount taken from a deposit that does not align with any payment fees recorded in OwnerRez. Adjustments can happen for several reasons including:
The difference between a fee and an adjustment is that a fee is a specific fee amount linked to a single payment or refund. An adjustment is not linked to payments or refunds and can be any amount of money for any purpose. Deposits can have both fees and adjustments at the same time.
As versatile as the manual recording process is, the ideal scenario is that your deposits flow into OwnerRez automatically so that you don't have to record them at all, and that's exactly what we've done for a couple of our bigger payment partners!
If you use Stripe or Lynnbrook Group (please note: does not include "Lynnbrook Classic") to process credit cards, you'll be happy to know that OwnerRez is now automatically importing deposits for you without you lifting a finger. Every day, OwnerRez checks Stripe and Lynnbrook Group for new deposits on your behalf and automatically imports them into OwnerRez, matching up payment, refund, and fee data with your existing OwnerRez records. If you use Stripe or Lynnbrook Group, go check it out! Your deposits will already be there!
The green "Imported" status will appear on any deposit that was automatically imported into your account.
We also show statuses for pending and failed deposits, so if our system runs into a problem trying to import a deposit, you'll know about it, and we'll send you an alert pointing out the problem immediately.
Like all system alerts, you can preview or disable this alert in the Settings > System Alerts area, but we recommend that you keep it on.
Depending on your configuration with Lynnbrook Group, you might have "gross deposit" set up where fees are taken out at the end of the month. Our automatic import system handles this perfectly fine. Each daily deposit will show $0 in fees, and then once per month you'll see a large fee-only deposit show up with a large negative amount like this:
This should match the large debit that Lynnbrook Group makes to your bank account for their monthly fees. So we handle both situations - net deposit (fees per day) and gross deposit (fees per month).
Also, one important note - you cannot manually record deposits for payments or refunds that were processed via Stripe or Lynnbrook Group. If you go to the manual screen and check the payment method filter you'll notice a message there telling you that:
This is because our automatic import process needs to control which transactions are matched up with which deposits. We tried to design a system that would let you do both, but we found it was too difficult to correct bad or duplicate deposits if users were manually recording deposits and the system was automatically importing deposits at the same time.
So If you're wondering where your Stripe or Lynnbrook Group payments are on the record deposit screen, they won't show there because OwnerRez is automatically depositing them in the background.
It's important to know what happens to payments and refunds after they are scooped up in a deposit. Over the past couple of months, you may have noticed that payments and refunds have started showing a little "Deposited" field inside the booking.
These fields have been added to show you whether a payment or refund has been deposited to your bank account or not. After all, just because you've been paid by the guest doesn't mean you've actually gotten the money yet. In some cases, like Airbnb bookings, it may be several months before a payment is actually deposited.
When a payment or refund is scooped up in a deposit, the "Deposited" field will show the date of the deposit with a link you can use to click over to the deposit record.
In this example, the American Express payment was deposited on September 27th, and if we drill into that link, it will open the entire deposit record showing the other transactions, fees, and adjustments that were part of the same deposit.
This should give you a fast indicator of whether the payment or refund has actually hit your bank account versus still waiting for the bank or channel.
Wondering how to search for deposited or undeposited payments across the system? You can do that too. Check out the section below about finding and filtering deposits which includes information about filtering bookings and using reports.
Let's circle back to the screen where you manually record deposits.
When you first start recording deposits, one of the first things you'll realize is that there are zillions of payment and refund transactions that you have to deal with from the past. Where do you draw the line? Where do you begin recording deposits, and if you're not recording all the historical stuff, how do you get rid of it all so that it doesn't show up on the deposits screen?
Over the summer, we pondered this problem internally and came up with some solutions to help everyone get started.
The first thing we created is a batch update that finds old payments and refunds and lets you "mark them deposited" in bulk. Marking them as deposited will set a flag on the payment or refund so that they don't show up in the future. To get started, go to the Deposits overview page and click the Batch Update button on the top right. You'll see our standard batch layout form with some criteria options you can use to target the transactions you want to work on.
In the above screenshot, I am selecting all payments and refunds before the current fiscal year (ie. everyone on or before Dec 31, 2021). My reasoning is that the previous fiscal year (2021) and all previous years are already closed out and reconciled, so I don't need to be concerned about ancient history. I'm going to mark all that history "as deposited" so that it no longer clutters my deposit screens.
Click the "Show Transactions" button, and the page will load all of the payments and refunds that match the timeline and criteria you select. After it finishes loading, you'll see a list of the payments and refunds that will be marked as deposited.
If the list is longer than 50 items, it will show a count at the top and a footer saying "....and [x] other payments and refunds" so that the page doesn't spin and spin for hours on end. We did this to help our larger PMs who have hundreds of thousands of payments going back 5 or 10 years.
If the results look correct, scroll to the bottom of the list and click the "Mark Deposited" button. The system will now run through all of those transactions and mark them as deposited so that they no longer appear for you to include. This could take a good deal of time, so give it a few minutes to finish if you are updating thousands of historical records.
Once you've cleared out the old stuff, you can go back to the Record Deposit page, you'll see a lot fewer transactions since you just cleared all of the old ones.
Make a mistake? You can use this same batch update to find transactions and mark them as undeposited to make them appear again.
After releasing the Batch Update tool, we realized that we needed to take an additional step in helping users with historical transactions. Some of our large PMs have hundreds of thousands of payments going back years and the Batch Update is kind of a given. No one is actually going to manually record deposits, one by one, for years of payments and refunds, so why not auto-hide all of the old stuff?
After talking with some users and looking at data, we decided to automatically set all transactions prior to July 2022 as deposited. This is exactly the same thing as if you had gone into the Batch Update tool, filtered for everything before July 2022, and set "mark as deposited". We just did this behind the scenes for everyone.
If you'd like to record deposits for transactions before July 2022, let not your heart be troubled! You can still do that. Simply use the Batch Update tool to find the months that you want to record, find the transactions, and select "mark as undeposited". That will flip them back so that you can see them again on the deposit screen.
You can also reverse a single payment or refund directly. Go to any payment that was marked as deposited, and you'll see a button that can reverse it.
If you click that, the payment will revert to its original Not Deposited status.
Even with all the old transactions cleared out, there is still the problem of sifting through hundreds of current transactions when recording a deposit. If you're a PM with 30 properties, you likely get at least a dozen payments every day. Over the course of a week, you'll have 75 - 100 transactions to match up when manually recording deposits. If you have 100 active properties, you may have 5 times this much (500+ transactions) to reconcile. This problem bothered us, so we tweaked the Record Deposit page to deal with thousands of transactions in a fast intuitive way.
For starters, when you get to the Record Deposit page, we only load the 50 most-recent payments and refunds in your account. Typically, when reconciling your deposits, you'll start with the latest deposits and work your way back. So we figured that the latest transactions should appear at the top. If you need to find more transactions though, just scroll down and click the "Load older transactions" button and the page will instantly fill with more payments and refunds.
But we also noticed that deposits typically occur within a few properties and single payment processor, not across multiple processors.
So we added some filters to the top that let you quickly narrow down your transactions to specific properties and payment methods (eg. Stripe, Lynnbrook Group) so that you can work smartly in recording the deposits. The payment method options combine all manual payments - cash, check, offline, into one category called "Manual recorded". The credit card payment methods are broken up into individual processors so that you can prepare deposits for each one and filter out the transactions that match that processor.
Use these filters to quickly narrow down the transactions that match the deposit you are working on, then select the transactions, save and continue working on additional deposits.
Hopefully, these enhancements will allow you to deal with historical transactions and large sets of current transactions in an orderly way, so that can start using Deposits without a lot of aggravation.
As your list of deposits builds, it's important that you know how to field and filter them to deal with your accounting.
To aid with that, the main deposits list now includes a number of great filters so that you can search against nearly every aspect of the deposit - items that are included, amounts, dates, statuses, etc.
But we wanted to drive the adoption of deposits throughout the system, so we added filters and reporting in many other places as well!
You can search for bookings based on deposited status. Wondering which bookings have payments that haven't been deposited yet? You can do that. Go to the main Bookings list view and click the Filters button. You'll see a new Deposit Status option with four statuses to choose from.
Those statuses are:
These four statuses are mutually exclusive, meaning that a booking can only be in one of these statuses at a time. If a booking has no payments or refunds, it would not come up under the Fully Deposited status. Its status would be "No Transactions". Likewise, the "No Recorded" status only applies if there are actual transactions on the booking but no deposits.
You can also search for payments directly based on their deposited status by using the Payment Detail report. There is a new Deposited filter in the top list of filters.
This filter will return payments that are part of a specific deposit or merely "marked as deposited".
There is also a new Deposits Summary report in the reports area. Pick a period and grouping level, and it will show you your aggregate totals for that group level (eg. month).
You might be wondering why tracking deposits really matters. After all, your payments and refunds are already there in OwnerRez, with the correct date, so isn't that good enough to see in revenue reports? Short answer: no! There are many many advantages to tracking deposits. Here are a few to think about, some of which are theoretical and apply to future updates:
If you have thoughts, questions, or concerns about deposits, please let us know!
Hey Victoria, I think we were just chatting on support!
The price is dependent on the number of properties you have, so if you have fewer properties then you'd want to likely start on our Starter plan - which is a great choice at $29/mo
Hope that helps and let us know if you need anything else.
This sounds like a good program and I am interested. Note that the monthly price is actually $67 with a 15% discount for quarterly payments.
Happy Friday, everyone! Here's another belated product update that covers the July 12th release with 20 updates. Give it a quick read before you cruise on into your weekend!
We'd like to welcome one of our newest first-class channel partners getawayGoGo! A big shout-out to Brad, Jason, and the team at getawayGoGo for the hard work they put in to make this integration possible. We already announced the getawayGoGo partnership a couple of months ago, but let's run through it again from a product update standpoint.
getawayGoGo is all about last-minute bookings. That's all they do. In fact, you can't book a vacation rental on getawayGoGo that is more than 14 days in the future. This is super cool because it allows you to offload your last-minute inventory to a channel that is solely focused on that with deals and promotions that are targeted at travelers that are looking to capitalize on last-minute pricing. As getawayGoGo works to build its following among travelers and guests, your inventory can become part of the deals and promotions it sells, while you still charge full price for your normal bookings that are made 30 or 60 days out. Don't want to offer a deal or promotion for last-minute stays? No problem! You can still push your inventory to getawayGoGo with a push of a button and charge the same price.
Their fee structure is also pretty cool. Instead of paying a percentage of the booking amount, you simply pay a flat $10 fee for any booking or $7 for any inquiry where the guest came through getawayGoGo first. If they inquire and also book, the total amount is never more than $10.
To get started with getawayGoGo, simply go to Settings > Channels > API Integrations in OwnerRez and look for the getawayGoGo tile.
Click the Connect button, fill out your preferences and save. From there, follow the instructions tab to reach out to getawayGoGo support to finish the account on their side.
The integration is complete and includes all content, rates, rules, and availability. Bookings come into OwnerRez automatically along with the guest's credit card, so the process is similar to Vrbo. For deals and promotions, simply discount your rates in OwnerRez for last-minute stays and getawayGoGo will notice the price difference and automatically advertise that as a deal. It checks your pricing against a 60-90 day average to determine if the last-minute pricing is cheaper. You can discount last-minute stays in OwnerRez in a variety of ways like adding a rules-based discount for the "number of days from now" or simply adjusting your spot rates on the rate calendar.
For questions about the getawayGoGo fee structure or where your listings will appear, please reach out to getawayGoGo directly for answers.
In the July 20th change log, you'll notice that we mention something about "deposits". Deposits is a big deal with a lot of implications and things to think about, and, while you can already use deposits in the app, we're actively working on some important fixes that are not quite out. We're going to write a separate product update all about deposits in a few days, so keep your eyes peeled for more on that soon!
When guests search your website for available properties or dates, how do you know what they are searching for? How do you know if they search for dates but don't come up with any properties? Maybe that's happening a lot for a particular set of dates in your area.
Well, now you can know! We added search events to Google Analytics to track and record every time someone executes a search on your Availability & Property Search widget. If it's the first page, Google Analytics will see a "search" event. If the visitor scrolls to a different page of results in the widget, it will show as a "search page" event.
This works on both Hosted Websites and widgets you embed in other websites, and it will also work if you use our search short-codes in your WordPress website.
The event in Google Analytics also records the arrival date, departure date, result count, and page number of the search as well so that you can do additional research.
Juneteenth (June 19th) is now a federal holiday in the United States, and most of our American users already know that because it's been official for more than a year. But it wasn't in OwnerRez!
We have updated the official list of United States holidays to include it, and it will continue to appear every year moving forward.
Wondering what you need to do for it to appear in your OwnerRez account? Well, if you subscribe to the "USA Official Holidays" list, then nothing - it's already there!
If you don't subscribe to the USA Official Holidays list, you can always add it as a manual holiday. We were a little late getting this one out, but now it's there for next year!
Our WordPress Plugin is graduating. That's right! We've been testing the plugin long enough that we no longer consider it a "beta" feature. If you've been waiting to try it out, go ahead and spin it up.
This doesn't mean we won't make changes or add more features to it down the road, just that we consider it mature enough to recommend it to all of our WordPress users.
Did you know that OwnerRez has a great YouTube channel and a LinkedIn page? No? Yes? Well, now you definitely do, and we just updated our website header to show this. Click through, follow and subscribe!
Update OR logo on Setup Interview. Apparently, we still had that ancient palm tree appearing at the end of the interview! It's been removed. Is this a bug? I don't think so, but hey it was on the list of stuff that was fixed, so now you know. 😉
Clarify channel bridge import failures. When running a Channel Bridge import, you might have seen this error message "Cancellation status of booking (false) doesn't match cancellation status of import (true)". Hmm, what does that mean? Well, it basically means that you're trying to import a booking where the booking is already in OwnerRez, and, when merging the two, we noticed that they each show two different cancellation statuses. We're not sure which cancellation status is correct, so we throw up our hands and show you an error message. We added some text to clarify all of this. Mutual blocking and cancellation status problems should now be easier to understand.
Booking list view preferences now look nicer. Just a little polish to the preferences page. (If you really must know, the "Cleaning Date" option was misaligned.)
Display a notice that TripAdvisor is not accepting new connections. We've been told by TripAdvisor support that they are not allowing any new connections at this time. So we added a banner to the TripAdvisor API integration setup, warning you of that fact.
Don't say a pending booking will be canceled if it won't! OwnerRez is all about customizability for your business. To that end, you have the option to decide what to do with pending bookings that don't get paid in a reasonable time. You can automatically cancel them or you can just send a notification and keep it pending longer until you deal with it manually... You probably already knew that, but our "Pending" banner on the booking stated that the booking was going to be canceled, even if you had configured it otherwise! 😲 Well now the statement on the banner matches your configuration choices.
Typo on the hosted site page edit form. I'll bet you didn't find it, but our eagle-eyed QA team brought it to our attention.
Clarify SMS Brand status has been approved. Previously, after submitting your SMS Brand details, if everything was accepted by the regulators, it would just disappear into a black hole and you could not see what happened. Well, we added a quick little green checkmark to the SMS Numbers list so you can tell your brand is hunky-dory.
Payment Summary report filters for arrival and departure dates. For some time, the Payment Summary report has only supported filtering by the actual payment date. But there's no reason for that to be the case, so we opened it up to allow you more flexibility.
Template field codes are now case-insensitive. Are you one of those awesome power users who tried putting field codes in the `style` attributes of your templates? Previously this didn't work because the attributes are automatically converted to lowercase, but our merge field replacements only matched uppercase fields. Well, we've got your back! Now, both lowercase and uppercase field codes will be accepted, so go ahead and make those styles dynamic!
Send triggers when clearing the pending status without payment. Some hosts want to mark a booking as no longer pending (i.e. accepted) but not collect immediate payment. In that scenario, we will now send the "Booking Created" triggers you have configured.
Congratulations to each of you for this well deserved recognition! You are appreciated!
May be worth mentioning that airbnb has also realized hosts do these last minute negative reviews and offers the guest some extra time if it’s at the last minute. I’m not sure how much extra, but maybe an hour or so? Have had guests submit a review (and it was posted) past the designated time when I did a last minute review.
We're not aware of this change by Airbnb. Can you contact the helpdesk with the booking # and we'll look into it?
Hey everyone, we're back with another belated product update. This update covers our July 1st release with 17 juicy updates, including a couple of new features and enhancements. Give this a quick read before you head off to your weekend! ☕️
Our PM module has a powerful Expenses feature that lets you record all the expenses that you need to charge your owners for. Whether they are small booking-level expenses, like credit card fees or host fees, or larger property-level expenses, like monthly lawnmowing, our expenses feature allows you to enter and record them all and then include them on statements so that your owners pay you back from their earnings.
One thing we noticed, a while back, was that there was no Customer or Vendor name on expenses. There is a description field, so you can enter something like "Paper products from Walmart," but no way to record "Walmart" as the Vendor, which is then searchable and sortable in the expenses list. So if you want to find all Walmart expenses, you have to search the description field and hope that it's included (and spelled the same) everywhere. Also, as we look to the future, we know that accounting systems like QuickBooks require vendor information, so if our expenses synced to QuickBooks, we would need to support that down the road.
We have added a new "Vendor Name" field to expenses. Head on over to the main Expenses list (under the PM area) and you'll see a new "Vendor" column.
Right off, you'll notice that some of your expenses already have a vendor name in place - ones like Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Stripe, and so on. This happens when our system sees an automatic expense from a known vendor name. We automatically put that name in place for you. However, the other expenses that you've entered manually will show "none" under the vendor name because nothing was ever entered. It's time to get those updated!
You can update the empty ones in bulk, so let's go ahead and do that! Use the filter to search for some common vendors by using the Description filter. When the results appear, select the ones you want to update, click Batch, and then click the Set Vendor button. In this example, I am searching for "Walmart" expenses.
This will open a small window where you can type in "Walmart" and put that in place on the selected expenses.
While you're there, you may want to set the expense "Category" as well. You can do that from the same batch operation, using the "Categorize" button. For these Walmart ones, I would probably select "Supplies" as the category.
Now that we've cleaned up the old ones, let's look at the Record Expense page where you go to record a new expense. As you might expect, there is now a new Vendor field on that screen.
The same thing appears when changing an existing expense. Vendor is not required, so if you don't want to use it, leave it empty.
Once your vendor names are set, you can search for expenses with that name using the list filters because "Vendor" is now a new filter option. Perhaps you want to search for a description or amount but also by the vendor name to narrow down the list. You can now do that.
You can also run reports that show the Vendor in both detail as a grouping level. For instance, here's the Expense Summary report with "Group By" set to "Vendor." Notice the results at the bottom.
Any expenses not in a group (i.e. without a vendor name) are shown in the top "None" row so that you can see those amounts as well.
Vendor Name should help you manage your expense records, and, over time, will be expanded into other parts of the PM system like custom statement views and year-end reporting.
If you use our API, you'll be excited to know that we've added Tags and Fields to our API. To be clear, that's the OwnerRez API that we host for our many partners who build integrations and apps for OwnerRez, not the channel APIs we connect to for our channel management feature.
If you're a developer and haven't seen our API in a while, head on over and take a look. You'll notice the new API documentation area, and you'll see that we have the 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 APIs broken out clearly, along with their status. The 2.0 API is where we are focusing most of our effort on new improvements and enhancements, though the 1.0 and 1.1 versions will stay up for a long time as we transition things over.
In the 2.0 docs, you'll notice the new Tags, TagDefinitions, Fields, and FieldDefinitions sections. If you're a developer, you can drill in and figure out how those work on your own.
The cool thing I wanted to point out is how tags and fields are mixed into bookings directly. Check out the booking endpoints, and you'll see what I mean. Now, when you return booking data, you might see tags and fields directly on the booking like so:
{
"id": 12345
"firstName": "Joe",
"firstName": "Blow",
"tags":
[
"name-one"
"name-two",
"name-three"
...
],
"fields":
[
{ "code": "BXCLEANER", "value": "Sam" },
{ "code": "BXGENDER", "value": "him" }
...
]
}
You instantly see the tags and custom fields without needing to make an additional call. Pretty sweet, right!
One of the high-level goals of the 2.0 API is to reduce chatter and provide a more-functional interface for developers. In other words, we want you to do more stuff with fewer calls. This approach of mixing in tags and fields achieves that because, as a partner, you can request booking data and see the tags and fields for that booking at the same time without making additional calls against the Tags and Fields endpoints. Over time, as the 2.0 API expands, this pattern will include guests, quotes, properties, and other entities, and we'll allow you to set tags and fields using the same structure.
A while back, some users pointed out that there is no way to show owners the status of their booking when the owner is looking at their statement. If the arrival and departure dates are on there, it should be obvious whether the booking has arrived, is mid-stay, or has departed, but some owners gloss over when they see the dates. Also, what about cancellations? Some owners wonder why bookings show up with small amounts or refunds and don't realize that the booking is a cancellation that still had revenue remitted through to them.
So we added a "Status" column to owner statements. It isn't on the default views, but you can go into your custom statement views and add or change the columns list to include it.
The new "Status" column is special to owner statements and will display one of four values depending on the booking:
These statuses should be self-explanatory as they depend on the dates of the booking and are all mutually exclusive. As with any other column, you can move around the order of the column and change the header title to call it whatever you want. Hopefully, this helps your owners clearly see what they're looking at as their eyes skim over the statement.
Underscores showing in WordPress amenities. Our WordPress Plugin creates a dynamic bridge between your WordPress website and OwnerRez. Any time your OwnerRez data changes (property headlines, photos, amenities, rates) your WordPress site will update in real-time to match. However, we noticed that some of the amenities were being transformed to include underscore ("_") characters in place of some special characters, which was caused by the underlying API between WordPress and OwnerRez. This has been fixed!
Multiple values not working in API operations. If you use our API (the same one I talked about with the new Tags and Field stuff above) you may have noticed that you could not assign multiple values to things like "day of the week". For instance, if you assigned a Monday and Tuesday value at the same time, via a bitwise operation, the API request would fail. This is because our API was parsing values based on straight numbers and not considering bitwise combinations. This is now fixed. (And I'm super psyched that I got to say "bitwise" twice in a product update post).
Percentage labels on portal area owner charts. Our portal area shows a Dashboard with revenue and occupancy charts for any owners that have been granted access to the portal area. However, the Occupancy chart was using a 0 - 1% range instead of a 0 - 100% range as you might expect. This has now been fixed. While we were there, we noticed that some decimal amounts were producing long unreadable numbers, so we chopped all decimals to 2 digits.
Location edit messaging. When you change a property address in OwnerRez, we ask if you'd like the system to automatically change the latitude and longitude as well. However, the system was over-asking about this. If you only change the lat and long, there's no reason to ask again. And if you change the lat and long manually, even if the address is changed, there's no reason to ask then either. So we updated our messaging to detect those things and stop bugging the user.
Check field code send-ability in messages. If an email template has a field code for one of the email headers (e.g. the "TO" or "FROM" address), we assume that there's an email address in it. It doesn't cause an error during sending because our email sending engine will skip the message if the email headers don't have valid email addresses. This makes it tough to understand why an email message wasn't sent. To fix this, we changed our message pages to check for field codes that have bad or missing email addresses, and we show that before letting you save the template. We also show this in trigger statuses so that you can see if the trigger message won't be sent for that reason.
Honor required gap rules for quote holds. Because we implement quote hold as blocked-off time, quote holds weren't factored into "required gap" rules. The rule would be checked when creating the quote, but until the quote was accepted and turned into a booking, somebody else could book right next to the held quote. This has now been fixed. We now treat a quote hold the same as a booking when it comes to required gaps.
Honor user weekend setting when checking min nights by arrival for weekend min less than default min
Testing on payment methods. Recently, we accidentally broke the payment method "test" process for card-based tests. This is the test that the system runs when you add a payment method and then click the Test button to see if the credentials work. The test is conducted by actually trying to authorize a test credit card and seeing what error message is returned. This is now fixed.
Owner Statement Expense Remittance includes too many expenses. Recently, we noticed that the Owner Statement Expense Remittance report (wow, that's a lot of words!) included owner-level expenses even when individual properties were selected in the report filter area. Fixed!
QuickBooks trial subscription ending. No longer using QuickBooks? No problem, it happens! We now detect that your QuickBooks subscription has ended and turn off your QuickBooks sync settings in OwnerRez automatically. Before, our system would send you error messages about your bookings not being able to sync, but we've made it smarter!
Changing a quote that's been booked. When we implemented the change/move screen for quotes, we lost the block that keeps you from changing quotes after they've been booked, so it has been possible to change or move a quote even after it is booked. No longer! We put that validation back in place. Like the good ole days, you can no longer change or move a quote after it has been booked.
Add blank item to header editor action menu. Our Hosted Website has a flexible editor for changing how your menu, contact inks, and other parts of your header appear. However, in the "action" list of the header editor, we didn't have an empty item, so it was easy to add a link to the wrong page if you were not paying attention. We fixed this. We now show a top "[select page]" option so that you understand that one of your web pages needs to be selected for that link to work.
Disabled security deposit messaging. Have you disabled security deposits for your property, or maybe disabled them just for a single quote or booking? No problem, that's normal. But you may have noticed that the security deposit stuff still worked.... sort of. The guest form, request form, preview windows, etc. would all appear like normal even though you had security deposits disabled. This was confusing. When actually using them, the system would throw error messages because it would see that security deposits were disabled when actually trying to process them if the guest entered their credit card. To head this off, we now show messaging earlier in the process that reminds you (and the guest) that the security deposit is disabled. The guest sees a friendly "A security deposit is not required" message, and you see something similar on the app side.
May be worth mentioning that airbnb has also realized hosts do these last minute negative reviews and offers the guest some extra time if it’s at the last minute. I’m not sure how much extra, but maybe an hour or so? Have had guests submit a review (and it was posted) past the designated time when I did a last minute review.
Custom Payment Methods
Can you please let us edit the wording of the instructions manually? With the fixed wording the grammar is not great.
How To PayWe accept Master Card and Visa. We also accept Bank Transfer which we will provide detailed instructions for during this process.
Thanks
Richard
Great to hear! Thank you so much, Shawn!
Couple questions on the changes to cancellation fees and how they display in the cancellation policies...
- In my jurisdiction, only the Sales & Use tax would still need to be applied to cancellation fees collected (same with any portion of the rent still collected from a cancelled booking). The other taxes do not apply. Is there any way to set that or will all taxes be automatically applied to the cancellation fee?
- The written-out cancellation policies no longer state the amount of the cancellation fee, just that there is one. That's going to generate a lot of questions from guests that I'd like to avoid! Can we still have the cancellation policy include the amount of the cancellation fee?
Hello again, Alece!
All taxes on the canceled booking will apply to the cancellation fee (and rent kept). Such needed granularity will come in a future release. No timetable has been determined for this work.
The cancellation policy preview in your screenshot is a little truncated. We're updating that preview soon to reflect the full policy better as the guest sees it. If you look at the Cancellation Policy page grid, it should show the cancellation fee amount in question. Also, check a recent booking by going to the rules tab; it should reflect it.
We appreciate you bringing these things to us! Have a great weekend!
-Shawn
What an amazing list of enhancements and updates! THANK YOU!
Couple questions on the changes to cancellation fees and how they display in the cancellation policies...
Thank you again!!
OwnerRez is honored to announce our recognition as a Top Vacation Rental Software by Software Advice in its 2022 Frontrunners report. Software Advice is a leading company that helps businesses navigate their software-buying journey.
Software Advice is the leading online service for businesses of all sizes navigating the software selection process, providing free, personalized software recommendations that meet their business needs. Software Advice features objective research by industry experts and reviews from validated users, saving buyers time and resources. Software Advice is a Gartner company.
This report evaluates verified end-user reviews, positioning the top scoring products based on their usability and customer satisfaction ratings for small businesses. (Know more about the methodology here)
Check out a video one of our users posted on Software Advice about how OwnerRez has helped their business.
You can find all our Software Advice reviews here. If you'd like to leave your own review, click here! If you're curious to see what other awards OwnerRez has received, check out our Awards page here.
On Wednesday, 8/31, join us live with the team from GuestSmiles to discuss how they offer a unique way of bringing more eyeballs and reservations to your properties.
GuestSmiles has taken a unique marketing approach to promote your properties. Their process is to reach unique markets and provide, as close as possible, direct bookings between you and your guests. Their white-label booking engine provides a straightforward process of adding your real-time bookable (or owner confirmation) vacation rentals to any website. They call these connections Vertical Partners. These vertical partners range from international companies down to local mom and pops. This allows them to utilize existing traffic from existing websites instead of building a brand.
The session is free to join, but you must use the GuestSmiles - Vertical Partners webinar link to register.
You can find all our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Rankbreeze to offer our OwnerRez users another dynamic pricing service!
With Rankbreeze, you'll never have to worry about what it takes to rank highly on Airbnb again. Combing through hundreds of competing properties is a thing of the past - improve your Airbnb rankings and optimize your prices with personalized, data-driven recommendations & automation. Get higher rankings, maximize your prices & scale your business today. Visit Rankbreeze.com to try risk-free today.
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Pricing starts at $34/month, with discounts for quarterly plans.
Get started with Rankbreeze by visiting the Rankbreeze website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Rankbreeze.
Rankbreeze is offering an onboarding call, Airbnb SEO training, plus Pricing Engine setup for the first 100 OwnerRez users who start a trial.
On Tuesday 8/23, we'll sit down with the team at Airbnb to discuss discounts and trends!
Join us live to learn about our new discounts feature and Airbnb trends! We will give a tutorial on how to utilize Airbnb discounts in OwnerRez and help answer your pre-submitted questions.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for Airbnb - Discounts & Trends webinar link to register.
You can find all our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
Recently, our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt, sat down with Heather Bayer to discuss his thoughts on what makes a good software solution, what you should look for, and how a people-first approach drives the company culture and has contributed to its success.
With many years of experience owning and managing multiple vacation rental properties, Heather brings her knowledge and views on every aspect of the business. Heather has appeared as a guest on CTV Canada, CBC Radio, Rogers TV, and Chex TV and is frequently interviewed on real estate and travel topics by magazines and daily newspapers. In other words, she's a big deal in the vacation rental industry. Check out the Vacation Rental Formula website to find Heather's interviews, articles, and marketing tips.
Over four years ago, the OwnerRez co-founder's Paul Waldschmidt and Chris Hynes joined Heather Bayer to discuss what they had created. (You can listen to that podcast here.) Now Paul has returned to talk about how OwnerRez has quietly worked at making the software one of the most awarded in the industry. The business has grown from a small start-up into an Elite channel manager with 25 employees and growing.
Some of the topics discussed in this podcast include:
The conversation can be listened to, in full, by using the following Apple podcast player:
If that doesn't load for you, go directly to the Paul Waldschmidt episode on Apple or visit the Vacation Rental Formula website.
Thanks for that tip, Ken!
If you want to add a $10 fee, you could just create a surcharge that only applies to GGG bookings - that should do the trick?