New in 8.3 - Automatic extra fees on expenses

Posted on June 2, 2008

For some property managers, it is common to charge an additional fee to the property owner when expenses are incurred and the property manager has to arrange for tradespeople or someone else to handle the expense.

So it will be possible in version 8.3 to automatically charge an extra fee each time an expense is created.  This is set up on the expense group, where you specify what management fee % you want to apply to expenses using that particular expense group.  By default it will be set to 0%, which means no fee will be applied.  To start applying fees you will set the management fee % for that group.  However any transactions created prior to setting up the expense fee will NOT get the fee.  This only applies to transactions created after that point.

When creating the expense transaction, there is also the ability to turn off the fee on a per-transaction basis.  This only applies if a fee has been set on the expense group.  If the expense group has no fee% set, then there is no option to record an automatic fee.  If a fee% has been set, then on a per transaction basis it can be either applied or not.  All existing transactions prior to upgrade will not have the fee applied.

These extra fees will automatically appear in the Extra Fees list screen just as if they had been created manually.  However you will not be able to edit the extra fee entry, other than by editing the corresponding expense transaction.  They will also appear on the standard owner transaction summary report.

In addition to this change, the Extra Fees list screen has had an additional Description column added, which makes reading the list at a glance a bit easier.