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Setup & Configuration

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Are you ready to start Managing properties on behalf of other owners, co-owners, or friends? OwnerRez's property management feature can help you with that. This support article will guide you through the process of setting up your Property Management premium feature.

Be sure to read the Property Management Overview support article first and consult the Property Management Common Issues & Questions support article for additional questions not addressed here.

Enable Property Management Premium Feature

To enable OwnerRez's Property Management premium feature, click on the PM link on the left menu and then click on Turn on Property Management.

To enable OwnerRez's Property Management premium feature, click on the PM link on the left menu and then click on Turn on Property Management.

Confirm your choice by clicking on Yes, Turn On.

Click on Yes, Turn On.

Owners

An "owner" is a person or business that owns the properties you manage. This is the section where you'll configure your commissions, who pays taxes, transaction and channel fees, along with some Owner Statement settings, and more.

You can add as many owners as you want, but each property can only have one owner. As a workaround, you can add multiple emails for each owner

Navigate to the PM link on the left menu > PM Settings > Owners to create and manage your owner information. Click on + Create Owner.

Navigate to the PM link on the left menu > PM Settings > Owners to create and manage your owner information. Click on + Create Owner.

Enter the owner's contact information. In the Properties section, assign the property, determine your commission, and who will remit booking taxes and, if configured, who will pay for Damage Protection. By default, the PM will remit taxes and pay for damage protection. 

Enter the owner's contact information. In the Properties section, assign the property, determine your commission, and who will remit booking taxes and, if configured, who will pay for Damage Protection. By default, the PM will remit taxes and pay for damage protection. 

Then, determine your Channel and Transaction Fees and decide how expenses and commissions are calculated on host fees, channel commission, etc. that are incurred on bookings sourced from channels and control how expenses and commissions are calculated on transaction fees. Channel and Transaction fees are accounted for when processing statements, reports, and the like for owners.

For more details on how your selections in the Channel and Transaction Fees sections can affect your property management business, see the Commission on Fee Expenses support article.

Here are the default settings. Pay close attention to the Channel and Transaction Fee sections, especially the sections on who will pay for the expenses and whether you will "give the commission back to the owner."

Then, determine your Channel and Transaction Fees, and decide what to include in your owner Statement Generation settings. Here are the default settings.

Finally, select your preferred Statement Views and how you prefer to group them and add any additional notes as desired. Click Save.

select your preferred Statement Views and how you prefer to group them and add any additional notes as desired. Click Save.

Having done that, from here on, every new booking will automatically get the owner and commission % automatically assigned based on what you configured. No old bookings will have it, but you can set those manually.

If you have a bunch of old bookings you want to set as "managed" (i.e., that need to have commission calculated), you can use the Batch Update tool in the PM > Settings > Batch Updates to find and set them all at once.

Owner IDs include the handy copy button OwnerRez In-app Copy Button  and are included in-app in the Owner Configuration Dashboard and individual Owner pages.

Lastly, be sure to review the Team Access feature. This allows you to give login access to other people (e.g., housekeepers, owners, staff) who need to see guest or booking data. You can fine-tune exactly what they see - from guest names to contact information, financial details, notes, and more.

Booking Commissions

To see a booking's commission and/or set it manually on old bookings that were created before now, open any booking.  You'll see a new set of tabs "Expenses" and "PM" on the far right.  Click the PM tab.  That will show you what the owner and commission is for this booking.  If nothing is there, you can manually set it.  You can also use this to override the commission if a particular booking is supposed to have a different %.  For instance, say the owner brought you the booking himself, and your deal with him is that instead of 15%, you'll only charge 10%. By clicking on the Change button, you can set that 10% commission on this specific booking so that it doesn't affect any other bookings.

Individual bookings feature enhanced and detailed side-by-side Owner/PM information for all new bookings, visible on the individual Booking > PM tab.

Individual bookings feature enhanced and detailed side-by-side Owner/PM information for all new bookings, visible on the individual Booking > PM tab.

While you're on the booking, take a look at the Charges tab.  You'll notice the Rate (positive/negative dollar amount or percentage), dollar Amount, Commission percentage, and Expense columns. These columns allow you to change the amount of commission on a line-by-line basis. For instance, say that "pool heat" doesn't have any commission (it all goes to the owner). You could edit that particular line item to have 0% commission. Or say that the "cleaning fee" commission goes entirely to you as PM.  You would edit that line item to have 100% commission.

The Rate (positive/negative dollar amount or percentage), dollar Amount, Commission percentage, and Expense columns. These columns allow you to change the amount of commission on a line-by-line basis. For instance, say that

If the same line item is always supposed to have a different commission, you can do that on the Surcharge directly. Go to Settings > Surcharges, and you'll see that each surcharge can have a commission set there as well. This ensures that the same surcharge always has the same commission. By default, all surcharges have the same commission that is set on the owner/property unless you override it. For instance, the "cleaning fee" always goes to you. You would open the Cleaning Fee surcharge and set it to be 100% commission all the time.

Deposits

Regarding "deposited" payments: This refers to the Deposits feature. Essentially, a payment, refund, or host fee can be marked as "deposited" when the actual dollars are sent or withdrawn to/from your bank account. For Airbnb, this is commonly the day after arrival. Non-airbnb bookings can of course follow many various timelines dictated by the credit card processor (or non-cc payment mode). For owner statements you have the choice to wait until the funds are reflected in your bank account (deposited) before including a booking on the statement, or to include it as soon as the payment is received (undeposited) even if the funding might be well out in the future. 

Expenses

OwnerRez tracks all of your expense records for Commission, Taxes, and Damage Protection (if applicable) on new bookings. This means your Owner Statement Summary report can break these items out for more accurate Profit and loss statements in the Owner Statement Summary report. 

Any "hidden expenses" are marked as "permanently excluded" in the system to prevent them from appearing on future owner statements. Instead, Statement Views have a "Hide Booking Expense Category" option to control owner visibility. Any related expenses are also excluded when a booking is excluded from owner statements.

In the PM > Expenses > Settings area, you can configure the booking default dates for your expenses, which controls how the payment date is calculated, and select your Damage Protection PM Account (if configured) globally.

Default PM Expense Settings

See the Record Expenses support article for more details.

Reports

While PMs can share reports with their owners, other than Owner Statements, most reports are meant for the OwnerRez user to view.

Owner Statements

Now that you've done all that, let's talk about Owner Statements. Issuing professional, timely owner statements that display revenue and expenses is an essential aspect of your property management business. OwnerRez can help you easily generate customized monthly branded Owner Statements.

Before you jump right into configuring an Owner Statement, we recommend creating a Statement View first. Creating a specific Statement View that you can select for your Owner Statement allows you to customize and display varying amounts of information about your revenue and expenses. This way, you can tailor your monthly branded Owner Statements to show as much or as little detail as you want for your owners. And, you can create multiple Statement Views, allowing for many iterations of Owner Statements. 

Learn more by first reading the Statement View, then moving on to the Owner Statements support article.

OwnerRez also includes a default email Owner Statement template that users can edit. Go back to the PM menu, click Owner Statements, click Create Owner Statement, select the owner and put in a date and click the "Preview" button.  This will show you what the statement will look like when you go to create one (before it's actually created).  When you're ready to generate the statement you'd click the "Create" button instead of Preview.

Have questions about older bookings? See our Extra Bookings (Too Many Bookings Showing Up on Statements) support article.

Owner Payouts

The Owner Payout menu is where you will record payouts sent to the owner.  Statements and payouts are separate entities in the system.  Each owner statement will typically have a corresponding payout (to pay the owner whatever is on the statement), but you don't have to do that.  You can apply payments to different statements and for different amounts.

Owner payouts have been around for a long time, but they are often less understood and less utilized compared to statements and expenses, which tend to get more attention. Payouts are a record of the actual money transferred to the owner, while a statement indicates what the owner is entitled to receive. Although they sound similar, they are not the same.

For example, an owner might have a negative statement for a particular month. Instead of the owner sending a check to cover this negative amount, you may choose to carry it over to the next month. If the following month, the owner has a positive statement; the owner payout will reflect both the negative and positive statements combined.

Remember that OwnerRez has no direct connection to the banking system and is not able to actually move any money anywhere.  All OR can do is track and calculate what money needs to be paid to or by themselves or the property owners; users have to actually make the payment some other way, and then record that in OwnerRez. However, users with an active QuickBooks account (QuickBooks Online, not QuickBooks Desktop) connected to OwnerRez can follow the instructions in the Owner Payouts support article.

You'll notice a corresponding PM Statements and PM Payouts section as well.  These are similar to the Owner ones, only they create statements and payouts for the PM (you!).  This is important because in a trust/escrow accounting model, the money flows first into the escrow bank account, not the PM's general operations bank account.  Only then does the PM get paid out of escrow, according to the commissions earned.  Every time you prepare Owner Statements and Payouts, you'll also want to prepare PM Statements and Payouts so that you are recording your own payout.

Property Management Accounting

The term "trust accounting" tends to be an umbrella term for many things related to Property Management (PM) operations.

In the strictest sense, we do not yet have a real trust accounting module, end to end, where owner money is held in "liability accounts." You can see each owner's balance, and you move money from their liability account to a payout. 

However, most PMs do not need that level of accounting and simply are looking to accomplish the following.

  • Keep track of which owner owns which property
  • The amount of commission you are earning from each owner/property
  • Keep track of the commission earned on each booking as they come in
  • Be able to record expenses against bookings, properties, and owners
  • Generate monthly statements for owners to show their bookings, expenses, and total owed to owners
  • Create payouts based on those statements and send those Owner Payouts to QuickBooks for easy payment options (ACH, check, etc)
  • Generate reports for all of the above
  • Customize the above for items to display on statements
  • Other owner-related tasks like an owner portal for showing them their bookings, statements, etc

OwnerRez does all of the above well so if that is all that you need, be assured that our PM module provides just what you need.  

If you have to have the strict "chart of accounts" style of trust accounting, where money is moved from account to account, then OwnerRez does not support that at this time. However, one of our accounting integrations, Clearing, does claim to support trust accounting tailored to property managers.