Feature Requests

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We have multiple properties, and occasionally it happens that two guests will get quotes for the same or overlapping periods of time. When Guest A finalizes the booking, Guest B's quote is pre-empted and OR won't let them double book. This is good, but usually we simply offer Guest B one of our other properties instead. Right now to do this we have to manually copy over all the quote information and create a new quote from scratch. It would be better to add a "Clone/Change Quote to Different Property" that would let us switch them over easily.

Hi
This is a very nice new feature (property and booking custom fields). I thought that I'd be able to use this to help us with a problem that has recently come up, but not sure if it will.

When a customer requests a quote, they specify the number of adults, kids and pets. That is what we agree on when we create a booking & quote. Our contract stipulates a "generic" max number of guests at our property - 7. We want the Legal contract that the renter signs to indicate the specific number of guests that were specified in the quote, but cannot find a way to do this.

I thought that perhaps we could create a custom field for the booking, and then add this to the legal document, however it does not seem like custom fields we add are available in the legal contract. Is that the case or am I missing something?

Thanks

Hi Elizabeth,

Because our system relies so much on credit card payments, we haven't exposed an address or phone field on the booking itself. Both the address and phone are on the PAYMENT for a booking. In other words, if you were to open a booking that had payments, you could click Payments and then view a payment and you'd see the address/phone that they submitted with the credit card payment.

However, it is very true that for check-paying guests, this is awkward since you need an address but there isn't one exposed.

We've had a to-do to add (and require) address and phone during the quote acceptance process - right up front before they sign the renter agreement page - but we never scheduled it for development. I will ask the dev team to make that a higher priority.

I know the Notes feature is coming very soon. That went into active development already.

Hope this helps,

-Michelle

Thank you very much Chris,

I followed your instructions and created a Custom Field to store this information for a particular booking. One thing I need to add to this new Custom Field is the Guest Mailing Address.

How can we require the Guest Mailing Address as part of the quote/booking process? We must ask for the Guest Address up front for our rentals, for deposit return situations and for legal protection for us as vacation rental owners.

Thanks for your help.

Elizabeth

You can approximate this now by creating a custom field for Booking called Notes (https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/custom-fields-expanded-to-work-with-bookings). If you follow the directions there and add a rich text field, you'll see an editable field under the Custom Fields tab for each booking.

Our more full featured notes feature that manages flowing notes through from inquiry -> quote -> booking should be released in the next month or so.

Can I ask since it is now a year later, what is the status on this "Notes" feature so that we can add Notes to our guests' bookings? (Honeymoon stay, cell phone, etc.). We need a place to enter this information for each booking.

Thanks,
Elizabeth

Sounds like lots of great stuff!

Hi Damon,

It would be fairly easy to add account (or user) level custom fields. I'll see if that can be slotted into future development. And I do see the immediate benefit of that, given the framework already in place.

As far as guest level, that would be much harder. We do have some designs on the back burner for centralizing guest records so that you can have an actual CRM system and do reports on your repeat guests and up-selling and such. Obviously custom fields for that would have to wait until CRM stuff was actually out. I can tell you that it will probably a good deal of time before that happens.

There is a lot of focus right now on things like:

- Auto responders for inquiries
- Rules (which go along with auto responders)
- Notes
- Reporting (lots and lots of reporting)
- Accounting integration (QuickBooks, Xero, Wave, etc)

This is the high level focus. Obviously, there are plenty of other things that will be mixed into that. For instance, we just released the ability to move bookings between properties (not blogged yet) which was something we wanted to push out quickly even though it wasn't a high level focus.

-Michelle

I was listening to one of my favorite books last night (The eMyth Revisited), I'd recommend it to all vacation rental owners.

It prompted some thoughts. You have created "booking level" and "property level" custom fields. Could you also create "Account Level" and potentially "customer level" fields?

Example: An account level field might be "Website" or "Property Manager Contact Information"

A customer level field might be "Newspaper preference" or "Favorite Wine" or "Family Information". You can imagine the possibilities for CRM (which your system is getting very close to being able to do.

None of the requests are urgent, just wanted to plant some seeds.

Damon

Hi Martin,

It should be able to print in color. You might have to check out your printer default settings. You can call me if this does not fix the problem, or if you have any more questions.

Thanks,

Devin

The colored "bars" on your calendars to not show up on a printed copy. Are my setting wrong or this 'just doesn't happen"?

We've just pushed an update that adds this. Sorry it took a little longer than expected -- it ended up getting wrapped into a bigger update.

If you go to the email section, the Feedback filter is now a checkbox list. Uncheck "Opened" and "Bounced" and leave "Unknown" selected and you'll get the filtered list of email with unknown statuses.

You guys rock...a software development machine!

Thanks for the suggestion. We've added this to our current release, due out this weekend!

Also keep in mind that just because an email doesn't show up as "read" doesn't necessarily mean it has not been read. Not all email clients pass back the email read beacon we use to flag things as read, so its possible for a user to read an email, but the "read" flag not show up.

Thanks again!

-Devin

When managing email within OR I would like to filter to only those emails from me that haven't been opened. The feedback filter doesn't include "unopened". If it did I could determine who I needed to follow up with very easily ??

Please add to your product backlog.

Glenn, we missed the two week mark that Sam mentioned, but we're wrapping up to release some of the new design shortly.

As for emails, it's funny you mention those events that Bookerville offers. I didn't know about those, but that's exactly what we're upgrading our templates to have. Basically scheduled templates based on two different things:

- An event (booking is paid in full, security deposit was released, etc)
- Date (x days after booked, x days before arrival, x days after departure)

Not everything will be out right away, but we're definitely in the same thought process you are.

Have you guys checked out your competition at bookerville,com? Fantastic customer management tools + very flexible emailing system where you can create templates and also define events for when emails go out (ie. when full balance is paid, 3 days before arrival, 2 days after departure, etc). It even has the ability to create and use user-defined fields (such as my lock code), etc. Customers are stored in its database to allow you to rate them (privately) and therefore offer specific discounts on repeat business.

It is not as nice or user-intuitive as this site, but I have to admit that I am torn now, as I really like its flexible emailing capabilities.

Has anyone had any experience or a proposed solution to managing emails to customers? I have a process wherein I send at least four separate types of emails to my renters based on things such as full balance paid, 2 days before rental, and a follow-up two days after rental. I create these emails manually which is tedious and error prone. I have tried toutapp.com and it is ok.... but not great.

Glenn

Thanks for letting us know. I'll look into this and have them include a fix for the upcoming release. If you send the email address you'd like to use to the support system (help@ownerreservations.com) I think we can update your billing record manually.

Hi Jon,

Reporting is high on the to-do list. We have a design update being released shortly with new grids. The plan is to include some simple Excel exporting as a part of that design so that users can begin exporting data on any of the overview grids which should lessen the burden of reporting (as you mentioned). I don't believe the Excel button will be in the upcoming release itself, but it will be following that shortly.

In general, reporting is sorely needed. It is one of the most often requested/asked about issues, and we feel your pain. We're pushing forward on a lot of fronts. Expect to see a lot of updates coming shortly.

-Michelle

I agree.

I would like to know what the status is on reporting capabilities/data extraction from this application. I'd like to be able to simply export all of my bookings to Excel for further analysis, with details of each booking for a property (total rental fees, any surcharges added, taxed amounts, and fees from ownerrez). For book keeping purposes (both income and state sales taxes) it seems like this would really be needed... in fact, the "Bookings-Grid" view is similar to what I need, but just need total taxed amount and taxes paid or something added. Even a simple dump to CSV would be fine for this. How do other users manage their income taxes/sales tax payments without this basic capability?

Analytics-type capabilities, like you describe on the external web site (average rates, repeat renters, etc.) would be nice but I think the above is really more important.

Another one for you - just put in my credit card for monthly ownerrez billing, used my email address for the business which is around 32 characters but got a warning that my email address was too long, a 64 character limit..had to just change to my personal email address.

Hi Jon,

All email address fields in the system are supposed to allow 64 characters. They were expanded from 32 awhile back. That field must not have been expanded. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I will have the dev team fix this for the next release.

In the meantime, if you send an email to the help desk (help@ownerreservations.com) we can add that Third Party Alert for you from this side.

Hope this helps,

Michelle

Can the email address length for third party alerts be increased? It seems to be around 32 characters now, it just so happens that an email address I need to add has 33-34 characters.

Thanks sounds great! I look forward to the next two weeks!

I hope it has something like a customizable field to accommodate a lock code per rental event. I struggle the most to keep this specific code correct in my emails to guests. It would be terrible if they arrived and the lock code was wrong. (I generate a unique one for each new rental www.erentallock.com) I have to be careful when copying emails from other rental events to the current rental event.

Glenn

Glenn, I agree completely, and we're working on more now than ever. Don't take my word for it - check back in the next two weeks or so. We're finishing the first release of a design overhaul and some of what you just mentioned. Trust me, 2013 isn't "dry" on development. It will be far FAR bigger than 2012. ~Sam

At the very least it would be nice to be able to create email templates that pull mail-merged data from a booking and allow for some simple rules around generation and delivery. For example, once my guests have made their final payment, I email them the lock code to our house, our neighbourhood (gated community), etc. A few days before arrival, I like to send out a reminder summary email with their lock code, etc. Finally after they have left, I like to send them a thank you and a request for review.

Also in sync with a rental, I usually have several emails I need to write to my homewatch and cleaning services people as requests/reminders before and after a rental.

It gets tiresome writing all these emails constantly and although I love this site, the lack of this feature has sent me off searching for alternative cloud based rental systems.

Is anything like this on the development path? 2012 had a lot of development activity, but that seems to have dried up to little or no new development anymore. I really need to find a solution to my emails.

Glenn

Hi Michelle,
Thanks - and last night while transferring over some sample bookings, I think that's what we found we could do. We did two bookings that have already paid so we could work through the entire exercise (or a lot of it):

1. Add a $200 security deposit as a surcharge to the initial booking.
2. Record payments as we normally would - so all payments received including deposit.
3. Remove the security deposit from the charges.
4. Now we have an "overpayment" by the security deposit amount which we can refund manually with a check.

I think that works at least..it seems like in general the system is flexible enough that we can make things work via workarounds until we migrate to a new rental process that is more in line with how this site works.

Hi Jon,

You can collect payments as check, but security deposits are still credit card only. There is a To-Do for adding check support, but it has still not been scheduled for development.

The workaround is to ignore the security deposit feature and add extra charges for the security deposit which are collected as regular payments. Then, after the booking, refund the security deposit as a regular refund.