Tenant Portal Repairs Tab
This has been one of our most frequent requests by property managers; to allow tenants to place workorders via the tenant portal. We’re pleased to report that this new feature is released!
Tenants will have a new tab called ‘Repairs’ when they login to their tenant portal. Within this tab they can see a list of workorders associated with the property they are renting. Clicking on any of the items will give them limited details (only what a tenant should see). Tenants can also click the link at the bottom to Report an issue, where they can enter details of the problem which will automatically enter a workorder inside your Rentec Direct account, and email you about it’s existence.
By default this functionality is enabled for all new workorders. If you want to prohibit tenants from placing workorders or modify the email preference, you can easily adjust these settings at Settings, Program Defaults. You can also prohibit a tenant from seeing an individual workorder by de-selecting the ‘Tenant view‘ option when creating or editing workorders in the upper right.
Product Update, Rentec Basic, Rentec Pro
repairs, tenant portal, tenant repair, workorders
We’ve had a lot of interest lately from landlords requesting weekly or daily rental support. We’ve previously had support for these; however, the process was a bit tedious. We’ve added support within the move-in tenant screen to select Daily, Weekly, or Monthly rental period.
For standard monthly rentals, just leave the selector on ‘Monthly’; however, for those renting more short-term choose Weekly or Daily from this drop-down menu. The system will then take care of all necessary calculations for you and place the appropriate values into the tenant ledger and the recurring transactions.
Product Update, Rentec Basic, Rentec Pro
daily, rental period, weekly
We’re introducing another great improvement to kick off 2010. Your ledgers (tenant, property, and bank account) are all downloadable in CSV format which opens directly into Excel! Don’t use excel? No worries because CSV is a universally recognized format that pretty much every application, including Quickbooks, Quicken, Google Docs, and others widely use and accept. It’s also easily readable via a text editor such as notepad.
Additionally, this opens up the ability for you to backup your own data if you choose. Any time, to use this new feature just open up any ledger. At the bottom of the ledger is a link that says download this data. If you have Excel installed it can be opened directly into Excel, or saved to your computer where you choose.
Product Update, Rentec Basic, Rentec Pro
backup, csv, download, excel, export
Rentec Direct property management software has always un-officially supported adding multiple tenants to a property; however, we’ve officially added and expanded the support and made it easier to use and to report on.
If you want to add multiple tenants to a single property or unit, you can do so just by choosing Place New Tenant from the Properties tab. What’s new is as you add additional tenants, they will all show up right on the properties tab so you can easily see all of the tenants instead of just the primary.
Additionally the reports have been expanded to support roommate scenarios. Both the All Tenants Report and the Rent Roll Report now show in sequence all tenants associated with a property. Here’s a snippet of the Rent Roll Report with the three tenants moved into the test property 1429 SW Foundry.
For more information on how to use this feature, choose need help? in the upper right once logged in, and select the topic labeled How can I add multiple tenants or roommates to a single property?
Product Update, Rentec Basic, Rentec Pro
college, multi tenant, roommate, shared housing, split rental
A new option has been added to the edit property screen. You can now specify separate income and expense accounts. Prior there was a single default account which defaulted for both income and expenses. With the addition of bank deposits and undeposited funds tracking it made sense to separate these since most expenses come directly from a checking account, whereas undeposited funds are handled differently.
By default, your Income account and Expense accounts are the same as you have already defined, or set to None if you have not previously set them. To update the defaults, click the Properties tab, then right-click on your property, and select Edit Property. From the drop-downs here you can specify your default income and expense accounts individually for each property.
In addition, any workorders expensed to a property will automatically also post to the default expense account for that property.
From the Rentec Team, we wish everyone a very happy new year!!
Product Update, Rentec Pro
bank accounts, default account, expense account, happy new year, income account, undeposited funds, workorders
We are pleased to announce a new feature-set to Rentec Direct. Landlords/property owners can now quickly and easily track their depreciable improvements and report on them with just a click at tax time.
To use this new feature, simply select the box that says ‘this is a depreciable improvement’ when entering an expense for a property. Alternatively if you want to track depreciable expenses without affecting the property ledger, you can do that too. Just right-click on the property, choose Depreciation, and add any items you wish. Both methods will show up on the new depreciation schedule report within the Reports tab.
For more detailed help in setting up depreciable items, click ‘need help?‘ in the upper right after logging in, and find the FAQ item listed as ‘How do I enter and track depreciable improvements? ‘.
Product Update, Rentec Pro
depreciate, depreciation, improvements, tax, taxes
We have fine tuned the bank deposit functionality a bit. When you view your Accounts which you’ve done deposits into, the bank deposits will be grouped into a single deposit to more closely follow accounting standards/practices. This also removes a fair amount of clutter from the Account view, and also gives a direct comparison to your bank statement for easy reconciliation.
From here you can click the attachment icon to view the deposit slip or deposit summary which will provide you with the granular details of the deposit.
Product Update, Rentec Pro
accounting, deposit, deposit slip
Rentec Direct has expanded our property management software interface to include full support for tracking all undeposited funds and making bank deposits. We put a lot of thought into making this interface to keep it simple and intuitive while being powerful enough to handle the variety of different techniques used by landlords and property managers. The end result is a brilliant and easy to use system which manages it for you, and even prints a deposit slip for making your deposit. It could not be easier!
Here is a brief run-down of how easy it is. When you are taking payments simply put them into the undeposited funds account. When you are ready to go to the bank, enter the undeposited funds account and choose Make Deposit. The system will let you select which items you wish to deposit into which account, and then print out a deposit slip for you to bring to the bank.
For existing Rentec users who want to see a complete step-by-step tutorial, click the need help link in the upper right after you are logged in. Find the FAQ item labeled ‘How do I use Rentec Direct to track undeposited funds and bank deposits?’.
Product Update, Rentec Pro
bank deposits, deposit slip, deposit summary, undeposited funds
We released invoice printing some time back and we’ve had a significant influx of customer requests for a more expanded option. What all the requests boiled down to was a statement print job was necessary for many landlords and property managers.
We’ve just completed the beta rollout of a statement print job. Because of the compexity of a statement, we’re going to leave this feature in beta for a period of time and request your feedback. It has gone through extensive testing, but as every landlord manages their properties a bit different we want to make sure it works for everyone before we release it out of beta.
Please try it out. To print a statement, click the Tenants tab, then right-click on a tenant. You will be presented with the following menu. Choose Print Statement.
You will be prompted with some options to define the dates for which you want to produce the statement. Choose your begin and end dates and select the options you wish to present on the statement, then choose Create Statement. You will be presented with the report preview for the new statement. Click the printer icon to print if you wish.
Please report any feedback to support@rentecdirect.com. Thank you.
Product Update, Rentec Pro
invoice, printing, statement
Firefox and Safari users may never have seen this issue, but Internet Explorer issues have often missed something when printing their reports. IE often chops off the right hand side of the report when printing to some printers. We had earlier anticipated that IE might correct the issue with the print jobs; however, we waited and waited and nothing came. We’ve taken measures into our own hands to fix the issue and also make the print engine more flexible.
You’ll notice when you pull up any report preview now that the print button opens a new window instead of sending directly to the printer. This follows common practice used by online applications such as mapquest and google maps when printing directions. This allows for a couple things.
- We can assign new styling just to the print job so when printing it does not include the border and a few other elements designed for the preview.
- We can assign custom font sizes to your print jobs so you can define the size of the print. Just visit Settings, then Program Defaults, and set the font size to your preference. The default is 12px; however, a lot of users are opting to bump this up to 14px for easier readability on paper.
Product Update, Rentec Basic, Rentec Pro
google maps, IE, mapquest, print jobs, printer
