General Help and Questions

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I signed up for the "property management module" which grants access to my cleaners and maintenance. However, the calendar view they have is hard to view when on your phone. I Is there a way to for the cleaners to see who is checking in and who is checking out?

i found my own answer.
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/setup-checklist

is there a way to save a report and have it emailed daily? This would save time based on other softwares that I use in my business. Example: I would like to have a daily report of what properties are checking in/checking out.

Besides Vacation Rentals, I also plan to offer some tours. I will be using tour booking software for that. It allows Travel agents to earn commission if they send me tour customers. There is a Travel Agent sign-in that will be a link on my Tour website(to track their commissions)

The question. On an OR hosted website, can I put a link elsewhere that has nothing to do with OwnerRez? It doesn't need to hook to OR functionality, just be there to let them log in and go elsewhere. Then they can also request to book my Vacation rentals.

I am new to OR. Is there any type of checklist to make sure I am doing all the necessary items. I am afraid I’m going to miss something and not getting full usage of the website or miss something that may be needed and not realize it.

Ross,
Since you clearly took the time to search my other posts, you should have seen where I offered to pay Chris or ANYONE ELSE for consulting assistance more than one time. Not that it's any of your business. And pardon me for thinking wrongly that this was a forum where users assisted users. My bad.

And you're right -- I AM a business owner. In fact, I own TWO businesses, which is why after spending MANY MANY hours in the beginning trying to get everything set up properly, I still find myself frustrated now and again when a function just doesn't seem to exist.

But hey, thank you for your response, Ross. I'm so glad you took the time out of your busy day to craft it and I hope it makes you feel good to have put me in my place.

Yes, we have ever so cleverly hidden it from you :-P

Just kidding... here's where to find it.

- Go to the Quotes menu up top
- Click on the quote you want in the list
- Click on the Email tab of the quote
- Check the email to make sure it's all good, then hit "Send Email Now" to send it

There are times it pays to pay someone to help you with the problem areas. I would say every property management system can be bewildering if it offers a lot of functionality.

I am not sure expecting someone to walk you through each step is a fair request, We are business owners; you are responsible to review all available help materials, ask some questions, and perhaps pay for in depth functionality that you are trying to use or customize to your own use.

Did you read through all their introductory materials? From your past questions, I get the feeling of someone who may not be aggressively learning the functions they plan to use, but rather, being either overwhelmed or hoping others will fix your problem.

Maybe the owners will let you pay them a consulting fee to do some in depth set up. Not sure how they work on that.

I've manually created a quote twice now, before sending it, I edited the charges to reflect what I actually want to charge the guest, and there is NO WAY to send the quote if you do that. Or if there is, it's cleverly hidden.

I've gone to the quotes tab and I can see both the quotes there, but there's no way to send the quote from there. I've clicked on it a hundred times, thinking maybe I've missed something, and I can see NO way to email it, as far as I can tell. I really need to start using the functionality on this site because I've been paying for it for a while now and not using it because it's confusing. So can someone please explain to me how to do this??

Thanks

If you have "send create triggers" enabled, it will send any ones where the create triggers have never been sent before for that booking OR there was never an email address in the system for that booking.

"send create triggers" sends create triggers and those by arrival that are due in the next 36 hours. Any others like the 1 day prior or day of arrival would not be sent.

What I'd recommend to do here is do disable your create trigger, then run the channel bridge on that file with "send create triggers" enabled. Then re-enable the create trigger. That way channel bridge will know that it tried to send create triggers at the time for those bookings and won't try again next time. Then manually send the create trigger on the new one. In future, as new bookings come across, the send create triggers would work for the additional ones.

Interesting thought on that. It would be good to show a bit of status there, but it's a little complex because it could be completely new or have come in via iCal and be getting populated with charges for the first time, or being updated with new charges, or not changed at all because it hasn't changed since last time.

Yep, we've bounced around the idea of having an email template area where folks can share their templates and anyone can click a button to import the template into OwnerRez. Similarly ideas on web design etc. And we do plan to add images and links... but that's harder than you'd think to do in a way that's not a spam magnet :-/

You're right though... lets just get started! I created a new forum here: https://www.ownerrez.com/forums/templateshare

There isn't a detection or trigger for that right now. You can run off a Date Range type Stay Report -- that'll includes the custom fields alongside the booking so you can see which ones are populated or not.

Right now we don't error on missing fields because there are a lot of cases where you might want an empty field value -- maybe it's a property trash instructions field that is applicable to one property but not another etc.

Great!

FYI you can also populate the values for all properties at once in the detail section of the property field.

You can't do that exactly but you can get close.

The system will check the second payment days on booking and if it's past the deadline it'll require everything up front. In other words, if you put second payment days at 60 days, and the guests books on day 59, they'll be charged everything up front. If they book at 100 days, it'll take 50% up front and 50% on day 60.

What you can't do right now is to vary up the days so the second payment is due at 14 days if over 60 days from arrival but due at 60 days if less than 60 days from arrival.

Okay - So I have just set up my email triggers for these
a) at create
b) 1-day prior
c) day of arrival

When use the channel bridge I'm grabbing about 30 past bookings along with one new one. Is it safe to leave the 'send create triggers' enabled? I hesitated this time since of course I don't want all those past bookings to get the initial 'at create' email, just the most recent one. The rest I had emailed outside of OR. The description implies they would be sent if they haven't been sent already (which they haven't). But maybe OR actually just would send for completely new bookings?

Unrelated to this, when I import bookings that were previously imported the message next to each booking is 'Imported' whereas it would be nice to see which bookings OR thinks are completely new versus updated bookings.

I think the OR community would benefit if there were a forum dedicated to sharing email templates and website design ideas. We're rarely competing (if ever) against each other, and I bet there are folks here who have way more experience who would enjoy sharing the content they've developed over time... I imagine this would work better with having the ability to add images, links and other rich text content, however even as the forum is set up today we could make meaningful contributions .... Chris/Paul what do you think ?

If my automated emails are expecting a custom field to be supplied for the booking (eg: Lock Codes) is there any way that I can detect the absence of the field being filled out for a given booking?

Perhaps this would be a new feature to trigger on an empty custom field with an email back to myself.

I don't see a custom field report, but that would be another way. Meaning a booking report that lists the contents of custom fields.

Without some kind of check like this I run the risk of assuming I added key codes to a particular booking when in fact I didn't.

Another idea would be to have OR implement a check when automated emails go out containing a custom field with a null value. I think it would be best to halt the sending of the email but alert the account owner about the failure to send due to missing information. But this would be a safety net and I'd prefer some method prior to the arrival date where I'd be reminded to supply missing custom booking field info.

Okay - In hindsight it's obvious how this needs to work, and it works perfectly for both Booking and Property codes.

I just got confused when creating the custom field and not realizing that their values of course need to be entered from the property tab.

This is the point where the time savings is becoming really obvious, thanks for building the custom codes in a robust way !!

If you want to go per booking, like a lock code that is unique per booking, then use a Booking type field definition. The per property field definition would be for a manual programmed lock where it's always the same.

Parking instructions that are different per property would be where you also want to use a Property type field definition.

So in this case, you would create one Booking type field definition called KABACODE or some such, populate that per booking, and then reference that in your arrival day instructions email.

Then create one Property type field definition called PARKINGINSTRUCTIONS, populate that per property, and then reference that in your arrival day instructions as well.

When the email template is sent, it'll look at the booking and property and substitute in the correct values for each.

Here's an article with step by step: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/pre-arrival-email-templates-triggers-custom-fields

Chris - I also don't see how custom fields can work on a per-property basis either.

I just wanted to make different parking instructions per property. So that I can have a single Arrival Day Instructions where the custom field is replaced with the parking instructions appropriate for the guest's booking.

It doesn't seem like this is possible on a per-property basis either. Hopefully I'm missing something but even though there are different types of custom fields for booking or property it seems they all act like account level custom fields.

Chris - I don't see how this can work ...

It looks like there can only be one value of the lock codes at any point in time per property. For this to be automated properly the field needs to be associated with the booking, so that I can create a value for keycodes for Property A on January 1st for a visit in March, and then created another value for Property A on January 10th for a visit in February, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something?

I personally am using Kaba and would like to have this integrated but that's not available yet, right?

So for now, I'd like to create key codes at the same time that I use channel bridge to import from VRBO and create the booking. That will of course happen in whatever sequence the bookings are imported. Then I'll use a trigger on the day before arrival to send the email. In case it's not clear, my keycodes get varied for each guest so that everyone knows that no one else can have codes that allow entry during their booked stay.

Just a quick THANK YOU for this feature. I've used other (more expensive) software that required me to create a new template for each property and for each communication that required property-specific info.

The custom field is life-changing and really sets OR apart.

Kudos.

Hi all! I can't seem to find this functionality and am hoping it exists.

We typically collect all monies in full up front for any booking that begins within the next 59 days. However, for bookings that begin 60+ days out, we only collect 50% of the total, and then we automatically charge the balance two weeks before they arrive.

I can't find in the RULES section how to set up these parameters. My only option appears to be to charge ALL UP FRONT or to do two payments, across the board, for every single booking.

Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks!!
Monica

There's a link on each booking (and quotes) where you can find all email sent for that booking. It's a shortcut over to the email list that filters just to that booking or quote. You can find it in two places - under the booking > email tab and in the top yellow bar:

Not sure how to determine "did I already send this guest the welcome email"?

I'm only sending emails manually at the moment until I get comfortable with the channel bridge importing and turn on some automation.

I'd expect that clicking on a booking would show the email history under Activity (near the bottom) but emails don't seem to show there.

I'd expect that clicking on the email menu link from the Overview under a booking would show email history, but the only emails I see are canned emails, not manually sent emails

The only place I can see an email history is from the email module, but that requires remembering a persons name and typing it into the filter which is harder to do.

Hopefully I'm missing something, otherwise this should surely be a feature request to have some easy way to see a full list of all email communications by booking and by guest. Especially for repeat guests it is helpful to see past discussions about children, experience with the area, etc.

Thanks - I added an entry to feature request since I think having automated reports would be very desirable.

Hi Tim,

To be clear, you still want the line items split apart internally, but you want the guest to SEE it as the same thing. If that's the case, we don't have out yet. That's the "condensed view" thing we've talked about before. No ETA on that yet. Doing the "show as rent" check will simply make the line item type be rent, but there would still be multiple line items when the guest sees it.

We've discussed internally and we may end up moving those damage protection settings to the channel only. It makes more sense to have that there then on the iCal. You either want it on a channel's bookings or you don't - no matter whether it was imported from iCal or channel bridge. No ETA on that yet though. If you need it removed, let us know and we can remove it from a booking. Send in a ticket for that.

Hi Rich,

You can create an email template and trigger to email the cleaner with a nicely formatted message but only for one booking (using the booking field codes). There isn't a way to do a single email for a list of bookings.

You can grant full admin access to other accounts if you use the PM > Portal Access feature. If you're looking for limited access (calendar, guest info only) you can do that in the same place.

I'd like to stop having my cleaning fee as a separate line item on quotes. I know I can manually edit quotes I create, though obviously if it was done automatically that would be great. I am particularly looking at the booking/quote widgets though. I thought this was possible to set it so that surcharges and rent are all combined into one line item? I could swear that the check box for "Categorize this as a 'rent' line item" was supposed to do this, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Am I missing something?

-Tim