Version 9.3 has arrived

You can download this update by going to the help menu inside RentMaster and choose Download RentMaster Update.  If you have any problems downloading the update automatically, you can also download it manually from http://www.rentmaster.co.nz/update.aspx

Main Highlights

The main change in this release is the ability to have multiple tenant contact details on the one tenancy record.  So now for example you can add the mobile phone number or email of both the husband and the wife.  Each entry will also be added to the phone book screen automatically.

What else is new?

• The tenant details screen now allows multiple contact names, each with their own phone and email details.  A primary contact can be specified.  During the upgrade, the currency tenant details will be entered as the primary contact.
• Automatic extra fees associated with an expense group can now be defined as a fixed value.  The option to enter a percentage is still available.  You can't specify both.
• A new Disbursement Preview report has been created which lists all the undisbursed transactions associated with an owner and show how a disbursement would be calculated if one was to be done right now.  This can be used to diagnose a disbursement value which looks to be incorrect.
• The phone book and print button on the tenant details screen will print or show each contact as entered on the tenant details screen.
• A new feature has been added which enabled you to turn off functionality you don't use.  This includes holiday homes, depreciation, disbursements, inspections and mortgages.  During the upgrade, all options are turned on by default.  Features can be turned on and off from the Maintenance/Options menu.
• Automatic fees and automatic extra charges will no longer generate for closed owners or tenants.
• The Rent Status report now has an option to filter by owner.
• The Trial Balance report now excludes closed owners who have a zero balance.
• During the last release, a change to the way the cashbook screen was updated means the running total was not being updated.  This has been fixed.
• On the Bank Reconciliation report the running total has been made wider and the transaction group narrower.
• When windows are opened, if they out outside the view of the current main window size, the window will be moved to the top left corner of the screen to bring it back into view again.

As a result of the recent change to include multiple contacts on the tenant details screen, flow on changes have been made to the phone book and the tenant print functions.

The phone book now includes all contacts listed on the tenant details screen.

Also the print button on the tenant details screen, which prints a comprehensive report on everything to do with the tenant, will also prints the full list of contacts as well.

This has been asked for often, so it is finally here.  On the tenant details screen you can now load multiple contact names.  Each contact can have their own separate name, description, email address, home phone, work phone, mobile and fax number.

You can use this feature to store separate details for the husband and wife, as they may have different mobile and work phone numbers and email address etc.

You can also choose one of the contacts as the primary contact.  The details of the primary contact are used in the Tenant List report, as well as work order contact details, the inspection schedule report and the SMS/TXT message sending mobile number.  The email address of the primary contacts is also used when sending receipts and tenant statements.  So the primary contact works in a very similar way to the single contact details RentMaster has always had.

When you upgrade to RentMaster version 9.3, the current contact details will be automatically migrated to be the primary contact if the current tenant details contains at least one of home phone, work phone, mobile, fax or email.  If the existing tenant does not have any of these fields set, a default contact record is not created.  For people with a lot of tenants, you may notice a slow down when you run the program for the first time as the new contact records are created.

Note - a contact is not a separate tenancy.  The contact does not have a separate rent amount.  Multiple tenants with separate rent amounts would still be handled by creating multiple separate tenant records.

RentMaster has an automatic extra fees and automatic extra charges feature.  This allows you to define a regular occurring transaction such as monthly broadband internet charges etc.

As of version 9.3 of RentMaster, automatic extra fees for owners and automatic extra charges for tenants will not apply if the tenant or owner are closed.  In the case of tenants, the option to keep open for transaction entry only will still not apply automatic extra charges.

Sometimes people forget to delete these automatic transactions, and they are continued to be applied when they shouldn't.  So this should help.

A new report has been created in version 9.3 called the Disbursement Preview report.

This report will show the disbursement amounts and fees which would be charged if a disbursement was done at that time.  It also includes a breakdown of how those amounts are calculated by showing the income and expense and fee transactions that would be included.  This report is designed to be used as a diagnostics report for the property manager, to show how a fee is calculated, and can be run for a single owner.

In a previous version, a feature was added which allowed extra fees to be automatically created each time expense transactions are created such as repairs.

In version 9.3 this feature has been extended to allow both a fixed value fee or the previous fee percentage to be specified.  This is specified on the expense group screen.

In the last release, the way the cash book is updated was changed so that as new records were added or changed, it did not reload the entire list from the database again.  This made the screen update faster.  However the side effect the was the account balance shown on the screen was not being updated.  Previously the balance was recalculated after a complete reload. As of version 9.3 the balance is again updated dynamically, without needing to do a complete reload.

People have commented that the software seems to be more complex than it needs to be.  This is a trade off software develops have to deal with.  By providing more features, the software provides more people with what they need.  But those additional features also seem to just get in the way for those people who dont need or want it.

So in version 9.3 there is the ability to turn off a few features which not everyone will need.  Those features are...

Holiday Homes

Depreciation

Mortgages

Inspections

Disbursements.

Landlords generally don't need disbursements and possibly inspections.  Property managers generally don't need depreciation and mortgages.  And most users don't need the holiday home features.  So now you can turn them off which hides them.

When you upgrade, all features will be turned on by default so you wont notice any change.  You can turn them off by going to the maintenance menu and choose options.  For new installs, the initial setup wizard will prompt to include or exclude these features, so new users can turn them off at the beginning.

On the bank reconciliation report, the Balance column has been made wider to accommodate different currencies which can sometimes result in much larger numbers.

Unfortunately that means taking space from somewhere else, so the transaction group column has been made slightly narrower and the columns have been moved closer together.  It is a bit of a balancing act trying to fit everything in, as that report does have a lot of columns.

When a RentMaster window is closed, it automatically stores the location of the window so that when it is opened again it will be opened in the same location and same size as when it was last used.

The problem that can have is when someone makes the main window smaller, the location of the window may now be outside the boundaries of the main window.  This results in a number of people thinking the software is not working because they click a button expecting a window to open, which it has, but they can't see it.  They can find the window again by clicking and dragging the scroll bars inside the main window, but people often overlook these scroll bars.

So now when a window it opened, if RentMaster determines the window cannot be easily seen inside the main window without scrolling, it will automatically be moved back to the top left coordinate of the main window.  From there it can be manually repositioned somewhere else again if required.

Version 9.2 has arrived.

You can download this update by going to the help menu inside RentMaster and choose Download RentMaster Update.  If you have any problems downloading the update automatically, you can also download it manually from www.RentMaster.co.nz/Update.aspx

Main Highlights

The biggest change over the last few weeks is the all new landlord and tenant logins at www.RentRecall.com.  The landlord login now gives the landlord the ability to download their transactions in a CSV file format which can be opened in Excel.  It also has a new payment timeline graph, and is faster to navigate.  The new tenant login now has the same inspection results and photos the landlords have had for a while, with the addition of the new payment timeline graph.

What else is new?

• After adding or editing transactions via the cashbook screen, the transaction list is no longer reloading, making it faster. Edited transactions are updated in place, and new transactions are added to the end of the list.
• The Trial Balance report now includes owners with a zero or a positive balance, although they are listed separately from the owners who money is owed to.
• The Events screen has been renamed the Overview screen, and has been added to the toolbar by default, although it can be removed.
• Future generated rent periods are now excluded from the rent periods screen and balance due. This only applies is people have changed the date on their computer to a future date and back again.
• The database compaction option has been disabled for people running Windows Vista in non-administrator mode.
• The property count is included on the Help/About screen, even for people who have an unlimited property license.
• The Quick Start utility has had a help file added.

When RentMaster starts up, it automatically generates new rent periods if the date has advanced past the last rent period in the database.

If someone advances their computer date a long way into the future, and for some reason quite a few people actually do this, then when they start RentMaster, it will generate a whole load of new rent periods, which dramatically increases the total rent due for the tenant.  When they return their computers date back to its correct date again, the damage is already done, and the total balance due is still a large number.

What RentMaster will do now, is it will ignore all rent periods where the period start date is ahead of the current computers date.  The exception is when the tenant only has one rent period, which is the case when a new tenant is created with a start date in the future.  All tenants need at least one rent period.

This change is as a result of popular demand.

In version 9.1 and earlier, after a transaction is added or edited via the cashbook screen, the cashbook screen itself would reload all the transactions again.  The down side of this is it was a bit slower, and the cursor would always move down to the bottom of the list again.  This was a problem when someone wanted to edit multiple rows, and they had to keep scrolling back up again to find the next row they want to edit.

In version 9.2, when a transaction is edited, the current row on the screen is updated to reflect the new changes.  When a new transactions is added it is added to the bottom of the list.  It does not reload the entire list.  

One disadvantage of this, because the list is sorted, the newly updated or added item may not be in the correct place in the sort order because the row does not get resorted.  However closing and reopening the cashbook window will resort the rows into their correct order again.

One exception to this rule is if you edit a transaction and change the bank account.  This will still do the full list reload because the transaction is now in the wrong list.

There have been 2 changes made to the upcoming version 9.2 of RentMaster because of Windows Vista issues.

After running a software update, normally it would automatically restart RentMaster.  Unfortunately now it will not.  That is because in Windows Vista, the update must be run as an administrator.  When the update completes and it automatically restarts RentMaster, the restarted version is now also running as an administrator.  This can cause a lot of confusion if you don't normally run as administrator, because it will now be looking at a different database.  Because the update process can not detect what version of windows you are running, this will affect all users.  It simply means you will need to start RentMaster yourself manually.

The second change is the disabling of the database compaction option for all users who are running Windows Vista, and who are not running as an administrator.  This was causing too many problems, so now it has been removed.  This only affects people running Windows Vista and Windows 7, and are not running RentMaster as an administrator.