Monthly Archives: June 2008

Free Custom Report - Short Term Balances Due

Posted on June 22, 2008

This is another free custom report. 

This report lists the total rent due for short stay tenants using the booking calendar feature of RentMaster. The user gets to select a date range, which is the start date of the booking. Tenants who are fully paid up are excluded.  This is a good report if you want to know how much money is due for tenants who have not yet arrived.

This report can be downloaded started at the following link.

http://www.rentmaster.co.nz/CustomReports/ReportList.aspx

Free Custom Report - Owner Cashflow

Posted on June 17, 2008

This is another free custom report.  This is similar to the inbuilt cashflow report except it is printed from the perspective of the property owner.  Used by property managers.

This is a very simple report which prints total income and expenses for a selected date range per property for an owner. It then lists management fees as a separate additional expense.

This report can be downloaded started at the following link.

http://www.rentmaster.co.nz/CustomReports/ReportList.aspx

Free Custom Report - Payee Transactions

Posted on June 17, 2008

This is another free custom report.  This one will be useful for people who record payee names against their expense transactions.

This report provides a list of expense transactions grouped and totaled by payee name, for a specified date range.  Transactions with no payee name are excluded.

This report can be downloaded started at the following link.

http://www.rentmaster.co.nz/CustomReports/ReportList.aspx

New in 8.3 - Last Disbursement report

Posted on June 7, 2008

A new report has been added called the Last Disbursement report.

This report print the date, fees and amount paid for each owner for the last disbursement to that owner.  This report is designed for property managers who use the Bulk disbursement function, and who want to print a report for the last disbursement so they can go to the bank and do the actual payment to their owners.

This report excludes owners who have never had a payment, as well as closed owners whose last disbursement is more than 3 months ago.  All closed owners are printed at the bottom of the list.

New in 8.3 - Various stuff

Posted on June 7, 2008

There have been a number of small change made to RentMaster recently as follows.

The tenant history report was sometimes reporting the Rent Owing amount as a negative value, which meant the total balance owing was incorrect.  It should always be positive.  The printed report title has also been changed to Tenant History rather then Rent History, as that better reflects what it is, as it includes extra charges and payments as well as rent.

The Prospects utility did not allow any more than 1 yes/no question at a time on the data entry screen.  You can now have as many as you like.

On the property details screen Web tab, you can now enter the number of bathrooms with a decimal place, e.g. 1.5 bathrooms.  Apparently in some countries this is quite common.

In work orders, the job details print to contractors has had the contractors phone number shifted down, so the contractors address can now be used in a window envelope without the phone number in the middle of it.

A print button has been added to the Events screen.  The end report basically prints the grid contents.  You can achieve the same thing now by selecting the grid, then go to the file menu and choose Print Grid Contents.  But the print button just makes it easier and more obvious.

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.