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I just download a report of bookings between given dates, remove columns that are not relevant to cleaners (such ad phone, name etc), sort by property, and email excel to them every month about the 20th. if there are last minute bookings, I just send them updated excel.

how did it go the cleaning thing is a nightmare for me every week/ day I get a booking on airbnb alone I have over 250 bookings a year let alone the other websites i manage so this would help tremendously

As my list of rentals grow I now deal with quite a few different cleaners.. does anyone use a system to help with this I dont see a place in OwnerREz to say who is cleaning for each of the rentals I have.. any tips would be appreciated

On the release page, if it fails to release, it will show you a Mark As Released button. Click that and it will force-release it in the system. If you can send us a ticket privately, we'll look into this specific instance and why the transaction may not have shown up.

Hi Paul:

I was with OpenEdge in the past and they were good. So yeah, I will start the process of transferring over to them.

Yes, I'm small potatoes and am now more like fingerling potatoes, smaller than I was when I started here a few years ago because of downsizing. I'll just have one rental this year instead of the four I used to have!

Thanks for your help. I'll let you know if I have any glitches in changing over.

Oh, also I just got a letter from WorldPay saying that they are sunsetting my existing platform on March 1. So it's time to change over.

Nancy

Ouch! That happens sometimes once a year when the big companies throw in "annual renewal" fees. Sometimes it's just a nonsense fee to purposefully push out smaller accounts they no longer want.

We have recommended Lynnbrook Group in the past and continue to recommend them on a case by case basis. They are a small processor that is committed to the VR industry. However, in the spirit of openness, some users have said that support can be slow at times.

Recently, we've been recommending OpenEdge for credit card processing. They have some great incentives like:

- Will meet or beat your existing credit card processing fees
- Will give you a $100 Amazon gift card just for signing up
- You'll get Next Day Funding (Receive 100% of your payments next day directly to your bank account...The processing fee is not collected until the first of the following month)
- Accept American Express transactions at the same rate as Visa, Mastercard and Discover

https://openedgepayments.com/ownerrez/w2l/

We're working on a better application form with them, but that will do the trick right now.

Other OR users may want to mention who they like or dislike for processing. We integrate with 22 processors and gateways now.

I was just hit with a $199 management fee for using them on top of the credit card and monthly fees they already charge. I am not happy at all about this, and wonder if there is a more reasonable alternative.

Also have been getting letters and emails about changes to their system that I don't really understand. When forwarded to OwnerRez the response has been that you were looking into it, but I haven't heard any updates.

I couldn't seem to find a search option in the forums to see if this topic has been discussed before so apologies if somehow I missed it.

Hi, I have an issue with a security deposit release and can't find a solution. I need to release a deposit (according to OwnerRez) and when I tried to do so, I was given an error message that the credit card company denied the transaction (release). The guest had used this card for his reservation deposit, but not to pay his final balance for his stay. I spoke to the guest, and he could not find any evidence that the $250 amount was held on his credit card account as was shown on my OwnerRez page (it showed that on Dec. 31 the hold was put on the card.) Furthermore he can't see any charge made to his account for the $250. So my assumption is that this hold didn't happen, or if it did, it's no longer on the record for that card. The problem is that I am getting multiple notices from OwnerRez to release this deposit, and the screen gives me no option to say that we've taken care of it and nothing more needs be done. Can you help? Thanks!

I recently added Channel Integration and looking to push rates from OwnerRez to OTA's, but am having a hard time finding information on how to do this. Do you use the Excel Export? Do you have to manually do this every time you want to change your rates. Also, is there an easier way to change your rates in OwnerRez, I am constantly updating my rates on the OTA's based on demand and comp set pricing and it does not seem easy to change rates in OwnerRez like you can on the calendars in the OTA's. Thanks for the help!

Those will all work with OwnerRez, but we can only push data supported by the version of QuickBooks. The big difference is class and department/location tracking which allow you to tag invoices with different dimensions like applicable property so you can report by property in QuickBooks. That feature requires the Plus version.

If you don't need class tracking, you can use either of the other ones.

Paul,

I'm only using custom templates, not any of the one's that OR has built in.

Take a look at "Thanks for Booking !!" I already removed the table structure which is an improvement, but I'm sure there is html cleanup that can improve it since many of the rows still don't wrap naturally.

Is there a way for me to do it myself? Would be nice to have a predictable way to test for the content to be mobile friendly.

Are these emails all custom templates (ie. that you created from scratch) or emails that are sent from the system as a hard-coded notification? If they are custom templates, then it should be easy to figure out and clean up the problem. Give me the names and I'll take a look at the raw HTML of those 3 emails. There might be some crud in there that can be cleaned up.

Thanks for the advice on iPhone, Rich! Helpful!

Hi Rich, the webhooks we have are limited to specific partners only as they are really tailored to specific use cases. We've love to open that up for wider access but it would take a lot of time for cleanup and testing that we haven't been able to allocate. You can find information about the API under the Account button > API Access option.

have you looked at standard set of OR reports? I think 2 of the 3 things you asking for already exist

Hi folks,

I'm eager to figure out a solution to generate periodic (weekly?) reports which would capture information about a variety of topics.

Example use cases:
- report for cleaner listing departure dates
- report for owners showing availability gaps
- report for owners showing the value of bookings this season

I understand this can't be automated currently in OR, but I've read that y'all have webhooks and a full API... Can you send me information on the webhooks? I use a crm platform (Podio + globiflow + procfu) which has a workflow engine that makes this kind of reporting possible, I just need a way to get access to the raw data.

iCal Setup (for OR admin/owner)
- in Owner Reservation, go to Properties, then pick a property and click on Calendar Export
- click 'Add Custom iCal Link' and check these two fields
[ ] Show the property name and location on each event
[ ] Show the booking summary on each event
- click 'Create iCal Link'

Here's the email I sent to the cleaner

Hi Cleaning Person,

You'll need these two iCal links for the units you clean for us:
[OwnerRez iCal link for Property A]
[OwnerRez iCal link for Property B]

Instructions for an iPhone
- copy one of the links
- go to Settings, Passwords & Accounts, Add Account, Other, Add Subscribed Calendar, then paste the link into the Server field
- Once you do this you should be able to go to your apple calendar, hit the Calendars button at the bottom center and you should see the link in the SUBSCRIBED section (will say something like OwnerRez Unit A)
- repeat for the 2nd link

These links will work in a google calendar or other calendars since iCal is a standard way for these things to work.

WARNING - when I tried the steps above on my wife's iphone the pasting didn't work. So I had to send the email with the links to my own cell phone, copy them from my email and text them to her. But that shouldn't happen to you, it was probably due to security settings on her phone due to her company security settings.

USING the Calendar - I think you'll find it mostly self-explanatory, but here's some things to note
- you can adjust the color of the entries. On my wife's iphone they defaulted to blue and purple
- when looking at a full month all you see are grey dots (not very interesting)
- but you can hit the list icon (upper right) to show less calendar but details about the daily events
- when looking at a list of events for a given day, you'll notice
- arrivals: checkin times start in the afternoon, usually 4pm unless I adjust it (like I did for a recent guest)
- departures: checkout times are typically 10am unless I adjust it
- in between days are listed as "all-day" events

At first I found it a little confusing, but it got easier when I was able to add in the unit name and when I realized that the checkin/checkout times help you recognize arrival/departures.

I have 3 automated emails that are sent, one at create and the other two are day before/day of arrival.

Two of the emails wrap and are therefore easily read on my phone, but the third doesn't. Each row just extends wide across the screen and in order to read the email I have to zoom in and slide the screen back and forth on each line. I suspect the issue is a table I had copy/pasted into the email. It's handy to have it, but it's kind of wide.

Before I start experimenting, I was wondering if there is an way to preview how an email will render on a cell phone. Or some rules like don't use tables or wide images.

Demo is tomorrow, we'll let you know how it and the trial period goes. And yes, your cleaners would benefit from being on the app assuming that their other customers are on it or there are other property owners in your area also using the app.

We are looking to purchase the right version of QuickBooks online to integrate with OwnerRez. There appear to be three versions available: Simple Start at $20/mo,, Essentials at $35/mo and Plus at $60/mo. What is the minimum capability version that OwnerRez integrates with?

Randy

I stayed with a new Airbnb owner in Newark last week, we went to a travel conference. I was going to recommend he use other OTAs, but then remembered that HomeAway and VRBO are only for entire homes. And he rents out about 22 rooms in several buildings.

I mean seriously, is there any point in excluding a broad category of rentals?

I have two adjacent 5 bedroom townhomes that are off the charts historically. but since there is one laundry room for the pair, I can't say there is a laundry room on HA/VRBO because that is shared! Argh.

Yep! We just pushed out an update this morning that added some of that status tracking in addition to a bunch of other improvements in error handling, pulling in Air future payments, automatically recording VRBO refunds, and allowing new listings to be mapped during the process vs. causing an error.

Right, yeah. We may add Firefox support for channel bridge at some point (FF does allow extensions on mobile) -- that wouldn't help iOS but it would help having a maybe more trusted browser on Android.

Names and dates should come over automatically on the VRBO iCal import. Looks like you don't have this set up yet, but go to the Calendar Import tab of each property and you can add iCal feeds from sites like VRBO and Airbnb.

So iCal will keep the calendar up to date automatically, and then channel bridge will merge with the booking and add the other info like guest email, party size, financials etc. Alls you really need to copy over is the email address so you can email them, and channel bridge will add the rest later.

Today I noticed that my 37 bookings showed a collection of different statuses after I did an import. Some showed unchanged, some updated and there was a 3rd label (new?).

It looks slick, and reassuring to see old/untouched items not being changed.

I bet I could run Yandex on an old android phone connected via wifi only.

I'm a little leery of putting a russian based closed-source browser on my primary phone these days, and buying a tablet seems silly for a single operation once in awhile.

Question - if I want to manually create a booking using my Ipad and OR through safari browser, what's the minimum information I'd want to copy over from the VRBO website? Is it enough to capture first/last name, email and arrive/depart dates? Maybe I also need the VRBO booking ID so in the future (some days later probably) I could use chrome with channel bridge and it would merge/overwrite and life would be good?

Same request - for a fee like $1 per cleaning it's a no brainer for us to use this, but our cleaning person cleans 20 units and we are just 2 of them.

But if it's handy to the cleaner I be she'll get other owners on board with the app as well. Keep us informed please !!

No, Channel Bridge is currently developed as a Chrome extension, so there's no way to run it without Chrome. Since Apple blocks all non Safari browsers from running on iOS, and since Safari doesn't support rich extensions compatible with other browsers, there's nothing we can do about that, unfortunately. I'm always hoping they'll loosen up the restrictions on apps, but it's been 10 years and nothing yet.

Do you happen to have an alternate Android device? We've got some folks with Androids using the Yandex Browser: https://browser.yandex.com/ and running Channel Bridge that way.

For sure. The only one that doesn't appear to completely hate owners is Booking.com, but then Booking.com's engineer team is kind of all over the map with their settings and features. In general, they tend to lean in the favor of owners and develop tools that owners need, but they have QA problems in keeping all that consistent.

VRBO, Air and TA appear to completely hate owners. Makes me wonder what would happen if owners had a "boycott the channels" and disabled their listings for like a week. If most of the inventory disappeared and VRBO and Air lost 90% of their revenue for a week, I would wonder if they would change their attitude towards owners.

Please share your thoughts. I only do 20-30 rentals a year so for $20-30 it may be worth it to me just to be able to coordinate my cleaners more efficiently/automatically.

I emailed them for more info...

Tim

We're warming up to the Resort Cleaning app as we learn more about what it does for the price. I think we'll see where we are after the demo and 30 day trial.

Randy