OMG you're a lifesaver I was pulling my hair out LOL Thank you!!
Doesn't seem to shed any light on why one of the bookings didn't have it, but maybe that was a glitch? If so that'll just be one more thing for my VA to check up on every month...
Hey Julie! Check the cleaning fee Surcharge for that property and scroll down to the Expense section. That's where you can designate how much of it should go to you as the PM. This is customizable on each individual Surcharge that is applied to bookings.
Settings > Surcharges > This particular cleaning fee > Scroll down to Expense section
I was preparing an owner statement today and noticed one of the bookings was missing a cleaning fee expense. I went to the booking detail and found that the cleaning fee did not show up there as an expense. All the rest of the bookings for the month showed the cleaning fee, which is automatically generated on a per booking basis.
I'm trying to backtrace the settings for when the expense is set to occur to make sure it's not messed up somewhere there. And y'all, I CANNOT FIND IT.
Where on earth do I set up expense settings globally? The ONLY thing I can find is manually entering expenses in the PM tab. Yet at some point in history I was able to set up specific charges with vendor details and apply them to specific properties. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Was unable to find basically anything in the forums or the help files regarding "expenses" or "vendors" or similar. Please help. I'm now terrified I've lost thousands of dollars because the cleaning fees were not correctly billed to my owner.
OwnerRez does not actually have Trust Accounting built in at this time. However, using 3rd party tools like Quickbooks Online orClearing, should help you maintain the ledgers necessary to facilitate a trust accounting model.
I found this definition of Trust Account that explains things pretty well:
Trust accounting in property management refers to the process of managing and recording financial transactions related to rental properties on behalf of property owners or landlords. It involves the proper handling and documentation of funds received from tenants/guests, such as rent payments, security deposits, and other fees.
Trust accounting basically means having separate accounts for each property in one single banking account. Think of a trust account like a room full of safety deposit boxes. While your banking account holds all of the accounts, or ‘safety deposit boxes’, it allows you to go through and maintain them all individually. No need to worry about funds commingling with that of other property owners or even with your own operating capital and expenses.
As mentioned above, by using our integration to Quickbooks Online or Clearing, you can help ensure you have the proper reporting and documentation to keep the funds separate. Our partner Clearing has this article that discusses in more depth how to actually setup bank accounts for the purpose of Property Management Trust accounting: https://www.getclearing.co/blog-posts/open-a-trust-account-to-manage-properties
In OwnerRez each listing can have a different payment processor so that funds can be sent to different bank accounts as required.
Speaking of payment processors. In addition to the two partner software I mentioned above, another layer of protection maybe to use a different payment processor. As an example,Lynnbrook Grouphas a model where they keep the funds for each booking until the Guest Arrives. This is simply called Payment Upon Arrival instead of Payment at time of Booking. This way you never have access to the funds that should be in trust, and instead they would be paid to you when the guest arrives and thus the service has been provided. By using Lynnbrook's Pay upon arrival, there are no real funds that need to be kept in trust.
In the end no one here at OwnerRez is an accountant. So I would highly recommend speaking with an Accountant who is familiar with Property management best practices, especially if Trust accounting is a requirement by your local laws.
With Booking.com, at the moment you have to set up the cleaning fee in Booking.com itself - it doesn't get pushed in from OwnerRez the way the other APIs do:
As far as the min-nights, I do see that your API is connected, and those do get pushed, but, note that only the min-night setting of the arrival day is enforced. None of the channels enforce min-night settings on days in the middle of the stay.
Hi Ken We just got our first booking on Booking.com apparently the min night stay for Christmas season and cleaning fee is not showing up on Booking.com. I have been on the phone with them so for today 3 hours and 17 min with no one able to help. They finally suggested I contact OR to see if you can figure out what's going on? Thanks
That depends on the exact nature of the import and what data was obtained. I'd recommend writing in to the Helpdesk with specific examples so we can investigate and report back. You can also look at the Messages tab of the Booking, which will normally report which messages will, won't, or can't be sent.
Thank you Ken - I did see one fired with a new rez that came in.
Can you address my question about imported reservations? Will I have to continue to manually send those messages or is this part of the glitches you mention?
While they cover more topics than just the API, our APIs are always included, you can take live questions, and generally the "main subject" of the webinar can be adjusted based on demand from those attending.
If that doesn't do it for you, you can write in to the Helpdesk and request an account review and guidance, up to and including a scheduled live session if that's what's needed.
I want to suggest that if anyone commenting on, or reading this, go to forums>feature requests and up vote and comment on the feature requests related to reporting. (Ken, you should have recommended this as soon as ppl were making a call to action request.)
There is one regarding custom reports that is currently tagged as "planned" and would be a great opportunity to integrate our suggested change.
I will try to link this thread in the comments of each feature request referring to custom reporting.
Disabling properties is always optional - if you expect to need to regularly review their statistics on an ongoing basis, or for some period of time into the future, you can simply leave them enabled as long as you like and have full functionality for as long as needed.
Each Hosted Website, as well as each Widget, has the ability to specifically control which properties are included on it. This record remains even if a property is disabled. So, if you plan to disable a property but anticipate that you may need to re-enable it at some point in the future, you can configure your Hosted Website and/or Widgets to exclude that property (or, alternatively, to only include specific designated properties). Of course, disabled properties do not appear in any Hosted Website or Widgets, but, if they have been excluded or are otherwise not included there, even if you re-enable them they still won't appear.
Sure they will, in fact one of the key features of the Vrbo API is that we integrate into the Vrbo internal messaging system, so you can use OwnerRez triggers to send automatic messages to your guests that way.
As with all things, of course, there can be glitches, and we've seen some recently which are being investigated. But generally, yes, OwnerRez triggers and templates work fine with Vrbo.
I appreciate honesty but find Ken's response unhelpful.
As a property manager with frequent property changes, reports for historical data are crucial.
The suggested workaround is simplistic. It requires a manual record check of which properties were active for a given year since there is no report for this data either, property reactivation, calendar blocking to prevent future bookings, report generation, and deactivation. Estimated time for just 5 properties within a particular year would take about 7 hours away from a day of work- a significant time investment.
This process of re-enabling, blocking calendars, and disabling properties just to see historical reports is cumbersome, ridiculous, inefficient, and unreasonable.
Data shouldn't be hidden. The data belongs to the user and should be readily available, not "held hostage."
100% agree. I just got off an hour-long phone call with one of my clients who was looking to buy another property in town. I had to go into my old properties and re-enable two of them so I could run comparable reports for him for other properties I managed in the two developments he was looking at. Doable, but very cumbersome, and also annoying that for the duration of my hour-long phone call, those properties showed as listed on my hosted website.
And I had to run reports on both properties for several different years to try to figure out which years I had managed them (turns out one was in 2021, the other was in 2022).
Definitely did not make me look very professional to my client and did not present a good look to anyone browsing my website at the time. OR can and should do better here.
Chris, I had about 20 properties that I had to reenable. I decided to deactive my hosted website while the properties were being reenabled so they wouldn't get booked. This turned out to be easier than blocking the calendar for each one. It was still unprofessional and I got about 3 phone calls during that time about the site being down :(
I appreciate honesty but find Ken's response unhelpful.
As a property manager with frequent property changes, reports for historical data are crucial.
The suggested workaround is simplistic. It requires a manual record check of which properties were active for a given year since there is no report for this data either, property reactivation, calendar blocking to prevent future bookings, report generation, and deactivation. Estimated time for just 5 properties within a particular year would take about 7 hours away from a day of work- a significant time investment.
This process of re-enabling, blocking calendars, and disabling properties just to see historical reports is cumbersome, ridiculous, inefficient, and unreasonable.
Data shouldn't be hidden. The data belongs to the user and should be readily available, not "held hostage."
100% agree. I just got off an hour-long phone call with one of my clients who was looking to buy another property in town. I had to go into my old properties and re-enable two of them so I could run comparable reports for him for other properties I managed in the two developments he was looking at. Doable, but very cumbersome, and also annoying that for the duration of my hour-long phone call, those properties showed as listed on my hosted website.
And I had to run reports on both properties for several different years to try to figure out which years I had managed them (turns out one was in 2021, the other was in 2022).
Definitely did not make me look very professional to my client and did not present a good look to anyone browsing my website at the time. OR can and should do better here.
Hi Spencer - more details to come as we fully plan this out. I did want to answer your question about international restrictions on SMS. Before doing the Dialer work, we plan first to open up SMS to work internationally. Then when Dialer becomes available, it will work for the same countries that SMS supports. So you'll see the details on SMS come out first.
This is why I haven't integrated the API. It seems like I will lose some personalizing capabilities. Right now I import their contact information manually and then push out my rental agreement contact form which then puts them in my system for future email triggers. It is a bit clunky but since I only have 3 properties I can still manage it this way.
I have imported VRBO bookings (and AirBNB) that won't fire the automated triggers b/c the system says there's no message thread. Now that my API is integrated, I tried to "create" a thread by sending a VRBO msg via ORez, that didn't work.
Will this be fixed with NEW reservations created via VRBO and I just have to manually send the imported bookings?
This could be the Airbnb API screwing around with their launch.
This morning I spotted the warning
Attention needed! There is a problem with your Airbnb channel account. The connection is no longer authorized. Please reauthorize your Airbnb channel account.
So i check and it is one of my customers accounts. I click reauthorise and OR says your listing is verified. But it takes me to my airbnb settings page.
Go back to the customers. repeat and the same happens.
Click on fix it and it takes me to my airbnb account (on airbnb) with my details. I confirm an it says done.
Come back to OR and nothing has changed.
nb the whole layout on AIRBNB has changed. The snooze option is hiding so i've switched it to request to book.
This might just be me but its probably not a coincidence that it happens today.
More detailed information is in the above posts in this thread - it is not necessary to pre-approve anything. The guest should simply proceed to book via Vrbo, your manual participation in advance is not required.
Since I'm using OwnerRez, I'm using their "trust accounting model" for my property management clients.
Unless I'm missing a trick, while the accounting makes sense, the banking doesn't. It would seem, in order to keep everything straight, that I will need to open a new "trust" account for each client. Also, since I'm listing on Vrbo and have a private site as well, that I'll also need to open an account for each client on Stripe.
Banks don't like this. To them, multiple accounts means something fishy is going on. I'm being met with disbelief and obstacles.
How do other people manage this? Do you have one "trust account" for multiple clients? Is there a bank that understands this and you like?
I'm a little stuck. I need to onboard clients and I've been delaying until I found a solution.
I'm thoroughly confused on how to handle VRBO inquiries. I've responded, but I'm unable to pre-approve via VRBO's portal and the guest info wasn't imported to send a quote via OR.
What are the proper steps when an inquiry is received?
