Feature Requests

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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.

Hi Ana Rita,

Multi-currency is on our to do list, but we don't have it in the near-term development pile yet. We'll keep you informed of any status changes on this.

Thanks for being patient,

-Devin

Is multi-currency any close on the road map?
Thank you,
Ana Rita

Hi Glenn,

We are very much going at full speed. Some settings changes we created had a domino effect throughout the system. We greatly appreciate your concern and thank you for patiently standing by while we are working on the system.


Thanks,

Devin

I agree that this would certainly help me. I have to compose an email message for each new renter and it usually takes a half-hour or so. Also there are a few things that at least in my case are specific to a rental - for example I am using e-lock rental, so I have a unique lock code for each renter. It would be nice if there were a half dozen user defined fields that we could enter on the general information of the booking (like the unique lock code). Thus when the system composes the check-in information, we could adjust our templates to be able to use these fields as variables.

Although I love the site and functionality, I do worry that development may have stopped. There hasn't been an update since last November - before that updates were almost twice a month.

Glenn

Any update on this feature. This is the one big thing I see the software missing.

Thanks!

Hi Michelle and Staff,

Happy Holidays!

Yes, if you can send an alert to the owner letting us know that action needs to be taken, such as purchasing Damage Insurance, that would be great.

Claudia

Hi Pawel,

Yes, optional charges are definitely on the dev roadmap. We've had to push back development on that a few times but it is a high priority item. That will definitely be released before we do any travel insurance integration. And you're right - that would allow the guest to pay for it so that the owner could turn around and buy it manually after the fact. I don't think anyone on this side has considered that. A very good point.