Sending of SMS or TXT message directly from RentMaster has been available for a while.  Not it just gets easier.

On the tenant and owner details screens, the Link To button at the bottom has been extended to sending SMS messages.  This means that it will preselect the tenant or owner you were currently on, and put you on the screen ready to start typing your message or selecting an existing message.

For this to work you need to have already set up your SMS account with ClickATell.com, and the owner or tenant needs to have a mobile phone number set up.  If either of these 2 things have not been done, the procedure will go as far as it can, and then stop.

(As an aside, why did they have to call it SMS in some countries, and TXT in other countries?  It makes life difficult for software developers, and probaby for others too.  But that is probably a whole different discussion for a whole different web site).

On the manual income entry screen, after selecting a tenant, it currently shows the tenant balance owing before and after the entry of the rent amount.

In version 8.5 it will also show the current rent amount at the time of the entry.  This can be useful for people that collect money over the counter for rent, as the operator can see if the person is paying the full rent amount or not.

A new warning message has been added to the manual income and expense entry screens when you are editing an existing transactions. 

This only applies to transactions which have already been disbursed by the property manager to the property owner.  If the the operator changes either the value of the transaction or the property associated with the transaction, a new warning message will be displayed, saying that saving the transaction will invalidate the previous disbursement.  This is because once a transaction has been disbursed, changing the transaction wont undo or adjust the previous disbursement.  Once a transactions is disbursed, it is not recommended you attempt to modify the transaction again, but instead create a new reversing transaction or adjustment, which will be picked up in the next disbursement run.

Sometimes important updates are made to the software.  A new mechanism is being added to the next version of RentMaster which will make communicating these notifications to you, the customer, quicker and easier.  Email is too slow, and often gets blocked or ignored.

The new mechanisn is to use the existing Blog reader which is already inbuilt into the software.  When an important blog post arrives, this message will be shown in a large font in the middle of the screen.  It will also still be visible via the normal web based blog screen or via the blogs on the Events screen.  Not all blog entries will be shown as an important notification, only the really important ones.

In order to see thse notifications, you need to have the blog reader turned on.  To check the status of the blog reader, go to the General menu group and choose Events.  The blog reader is the last item on the left.  The ability to turn the blog on and off is shown in the lower right corner.

Use of this mechanisn will be used sparingly.  Normal software updates will most likely not use this mechanism, although they will still get a normal blog entry.

 

The ledger transactions report (as well as the related monthly and yearly transactions reports) are reports which show transactions in columns across the page.  The problem with this report is that eventually you run out of page space if you have a very large number of income or expense categories.  So this report is designed to split the transactions totals and column headings into multiple rows if there are a large number of categories, so this reduces the chance of the columns joining together.

This report has now been changed so that when output to file, the row splitting no longer happens.  This is because a file has no width limitation like a screen or printed page does.  So you can output the report to a CSV file and open it in Excel and all the column heading and totals will line up correctly.

 

Via the work orders screen, you may access the contractors list screen.  This lists all contractors on file.  At the top of this screen is a drop down list which allows you to filter the output to only certain types of contractors such as electricians or gardeners etc.  As of version 8.4 this filter has stopped working, so this has been fixed.

This fix is for people who do monthly rents.

When a tenant moved in part way through the month, the first months rent is calculated as a percentage of the normal rent based on the number of days the tenant will be occupying the property.  However this rent calculation was not correct when the move in date is a month with only 30 days.  Months with 31 days were correct.

The rent split calculator found under the general menu group has always had the correct values.