General Help and Questions

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Michelle,
Do you think the first option I wrote would work well in the meantime?:
Do I create a quote and then edit it by adding a charge in negative number, reflecting total due "0"? Guest accepts and security deposit gets collected (whenever scheduled)? I'm not sure that would work since the balance would be "0", except of security deposit...
Also, What happens at that point to travel insurance quote if they wanted to buy one?"

I'm not.. I'm trying to set it up for any bookings taken via "book now" on Homeaway, or Flipkey that would come in the future. Especially Flipkey, as with Homeaway there is full control, with Flipkey one has to contact them in case of an issue in order to keep any part of security deposit.
Not really sure how to hard-code it,... do you mean first create a booking, set up charges paid, security deposit and then manually edit the email with a link taken from the booking section of that booking and paste it to the email?
Ella

Hmm, you're right! I don't see that link or the one for payments either. I'll have to note this down and get back to you. If it's just one person you're scheduling for now, you could hard-code their security deposit link into the email template since it's just going to them.

-Michelle

Yes, that makes sense. Thank you, Michelle

Hello again Michelle,
I see a field to buy travel insurance but not for security deposit.
Please let me know where I can find it... I'm missing it, or maybe it's not an available field?
Ella

Hi Michelle,
I can not find the flield code for security deposit :/

Hi Ella,

Currently, the only way to use a separate email address per property is by creating a custom field - that would certainly work. You can use that in the From field for email templates.

Keep in mind, however, that our email messages are sent with a From header that uses a OwnerRez email address for special reasons relating to spam and deliverability. The From value that you specified is used in the Reply-To header on the email address. When the guest replies to the email address, they will reply to the correct one you specify because of the Reply-To

-Michelle

Thank you Michelle!
Sounds like that should be easy enough :)
Ella

Yes, you most certainly can! Create an email template for it - the link should already be a field code - and then go into the Booking > Email and add that email template as a scheduled send. Or you could create a trigger but that would go to everyone's booking, not just the one person.

-Michelle

Hi Michelle,
The 2nd option would work better for me as I don't want to collect CC info.
I THINK I can also set up an automatic email to be send with that link? I don't remember, but I think that the booking had a fileld like that, which could be inserted to automatic/triggered email?
Ella

Hi Ella,

The best way would be to use the Schedule button on the Security Deposit page to enter one to be reserved based on your normal settings. To do that, you'd have to call the guest on the phone and get their credit card info to put into the Schedule page.

On the Security Deposit page, you'll also see a URL that you can send to the guest where they can enter their card info themselves. HOWEVER, this will reserve the security deposit the moment the guest enters their card data and submits the page. It does not schedule for the future, so only use this at the time when you want the security deposit to be reserved.

-Michelle

How would one go about collecting only the hold on security deposit for a booking that came through another site?
For example, If a booking came through Flipkey, where I would not want to collect Security Deposit, can I still create a booking OR a Quote that can be send to a guest that would be used to collect the security deposit?
I like the option of collecting it few days before check in (instead of of a time of booking) and being in full control of releasing the deposit, so this would be useful for me.
Do I create a quote and then edit it by adding a charge in negative number, reflecting total due "0"? Guest accepts and security deposit gets collected?
Also, What happens at that point to travel insurance quote if they wanted to buy one?
Thank you in advance for your help.
Ella

Hi there,
I'm wondering if there is a way to use a seperate email addy per property?
This would be helpful for automatic emails.
I assume some can be changed by adding a custom field and then changing the "From" field in email settings to that. However, I don't think this would work for all emails sent? Such as confirmation of a booking, payment etc.... It could get confusing on the guest side.
Ella

Can you send me links and/or screenshots to what you're seeing in the system? If you can show me the ones that look correct compared to the ones that look wrong, and where you're seeing the report showing $0, that would be very helpful.

I spot checked a few of your bookings for the next couple months out to June and everything looks right -- the closer ones have collected the second payment (and are showing $0 due) and the farther out ones still have future scheduled payments (and are showing an amount due).

I ran a booking summary report for your account and I see income for most properties in most months. The only one showing a noticeable gap is RH Loft.

I was running reports this morning and noticed a suspicious absence of income on two of our highest income producing properties. Generally we take a deposit to hold a reservation, then charge the balance 60 days prior to the stay. Looking forward on the calendar, all of the bookings 60 days out say they've been paid in full and owe $0.00. I am concerned about whether this glitch is in the display only, or if the system will fail to charge the balance on the correct date. Could you please verify and/or give me a call to reassure me that funds will be charged as expected? Per the reports generated on the system, the income for 4 of our 5 properties is zero... and way off from 2014 and 2013.

Thank you,
Laurie Elliott
509-885-6077

Yep, that was exactly the problem. Thanks for the bug report!

I added a 1024 character limit with a friendly error message to the guest that they need to shorten up the comments.

That hotfix is now deployed, so this shouldn't happen again.

Customer complained of the inquiry widget crashing out on him this morning. Looks like if there's too much text (he wrote a book!) in the "Message to owner" field it craps out.

Hi Michelle :)
Great! Thank you.

I might be back with more questions when the time comes.
I appreciate your answers and help.

Ella

Good morning Michelle
That sounds great, thank you! :)
Ella

Hi again Ella!

You can definitely add multiple payment methods into your account (see Settings > Payment Methods).

That is a great way of managing someone else's property while ensuring that the money goes to them directly. Just add a new payment method and set the "Use On Properties" field to the correct properties for the other person, and you'll be set.

-Michelle

Good morning Ella,

You can always create a booking and then delete it and you won't be charged. The bookings you are charged for, in your invoice on your billing day of the month, are calculated by looking at the created bookings since the previous invoice. If a booking was deleted during that time period, it won't be included in the count.

To see how the Third Party Alert emails look, add your email address to the Third Party Alerts and then do some test bookings. At the moment, Third Party Alerts are not template driven. They are hard-coded with a system design. However, that is something we plan on changing so that they use email templates.

-Michelle

@Michelle "You can, however, have multiple payment methods (merchant accounts) configured in your account with different properties having credit card deposits sent to different ones. That would allow you to share a single account but have different merchants for the various properties."

Does that mean that I can add a merchant account for another person under my account? (This way they get paid, while I don't have to create another user name/log in)

I'm asking because it looks like I might be helping more than one person soon, if it works well for me :)

Ella

Hi there, if I wanted to create a test booking (Im interested to see what Third Party emails contain), I'm curious if it is still free to create a test booking?
Is there another way to see what information Third Party gets?
For example if an email is sent to a cleaning crew, booking rate/total probably should not display. Are we in any control (probably not) of what the emails contain?
Thank you in advance,
Ella

Either way. If you want to post it to ours, send me the body and title and I'll stick it up. If you post it to yours, send the URL and we'll copy it over. ~Sam

Awesome. I'll run the analytics and share with you. Basically I want to understand my booking rate as a function of price to see if I have my price optimized.

I'll work on the blog post this week. Should I post to my own blog and u pick it up or shall I post directly to yours?

I was able to work around the issues Sam mentioned and add a total to the Quote export. It basically sums up all of the charges on the quote as its going through the export. I just hotfixed that up to prod.

I'm curious... what sort of analytics are you doing here? Is it something that would be useful to add as a report in the reports section?

Also, have you given any more thought to the guest blog post we were discussing a couple of months ago? If I remember right, you were thinking to write about setting up processes and analytics to increase conversions, automated surveys, automated review requests, etc.

@Ella: At the moment, that's not possible. Sounds like you're looking for PM->owner management where you can set up a name for who owns a particularly property (which you manage) and then send ACH payments to them. We've been asked for that by a number of the larger users. ~Sam

I can see the need for that, but not possible right now. Under the covers, we don't store the TotalAmount field in the database actually. It's calc'd on the fly by running through the charges. Booking stores Total but not quote. We could still spit it out in the export probably. ~Sam

We are trying to optimize our price and I want to do some analytics to determine booking rate based on the price we offer.

Would it be possible to add the "Total $" field to the Quote data export? I need this information to do my analytics.

This may be a little far fetched, but is there a way to split payments for a booking between two bank accounts? Say I would be helping for a commission, would it be possible for a partial payment to be sent to me while the rest is sent to the owner of the rental?
If not, I wonder if that could be a good feature to include if at all possible.
Ella