Got a case of the Mondays? Grab an extra coffee, and hopefully, this little product update post will clear that up for you.
Today, we have a final warning about Stripe/SMS Brands and then a couple of bug fixes to discuss. ☕️
Final Warnings
When some of you logged into OwnerRez a few days ago, you started noticing some persistent red alerts screaming at you from the top of every page. No matter where you go in OwnerRez, the alerts follow. We call these "global alerts", and they are used to show you really important things you need to take action on in your account.
You might have global alerts about other things, but the two I want to discuss today are about old Stripe connections and using SMS Messaging with a "Brand" on file. We have emailed and blog-posted about these topics numerous times before, but a deadline is now looming that you need to take seriously.
If you don't have any global alerts showing in your OwnerRez account, you can skip on down to the Bug Fixes section. Nothing for you to see here. For those of you that do see them, sit up and pay attention - there's work to do!
Old Stripe accounts that need to be upgraded
If you see the following red alert at the top of OwnerRez, this Stripe issue applies to you.
Attention needed! You are using an old version of Stripe. Your credit card processing will stop working in [x] days if you don't upgrade your Stripe connection.
The fix for this is very simple. It will take you no more than a few seconds. Go to your Stripe payment method and click the Upgrade button at the top. That will take you to a Stripe login page where you will authorize Stripe to work with OwnerRez, circling you back into OwnerRez.
It really is just a few seconds to complete, so take care of it today.
As mentioned above, this warning is serious and final. Looking back, we have reached out to (ie. email-blasted) old-Stripe users at least half a dozen times. This Stripe upgrade first entered the conversation back in August of 2021, so it's been more than 6 months since we've asked you to upgrade. This will be the final warning before your credit card processing stops working.
Using SMS Messaging without a "Brand"
The other big one is SMS Brands. As announced recently, SMS Brands are now required across the board. If you haven't submitted one, or you have but it was rejected, you will see the following global alert in your account:
Attention needed! SMS Brands are now required to use SMS messaging. Your SMS messaging will stop working in [x] days if you don't submit a Brand.
As with Stripe, this is final. All of your SMS messaging will stop working in a couple of weeks (end of March) if this is not taken seriously.
Please understand that our hands are tied here. The mobile carriers have had to create and adopt better sending practices to reduce spam to their recipients. As part of that, "applications" like OwnerRez that send SMS messages must include brand information so that sending reputation can be monitored over time. For more information about this, check our SMS Brands - Common Questions.
Unlike Stripe, this requirement sprang up on us a bit more quickly, so we apologize about that. It's only been a few weeks since we announced the change, but it's an easy change and only takes a few seconds, so please take the time to resolve it right now today.
Bug Fixes
Regression in renter agreement URL cleaning. In a recent release, we did some URL cleaning to handle the case where the ?a= parameter was doubled up in renter agreement links. However, we cleaned too much and were just removing the parameter entirely in many cases. We fixed this so that we now take the first value if the parameter is doubled up and leave it alone otherwise.
Held dates should still use quote rules. Previously, we were not applying the rules from the quote to the booking if the quote was in "hold dates" mode. That has now been fixed to work like any other quote and booking.
Vrbo review format for Channel Bridge. Do you use our Channel Bridge tool to import Vrbo reviews to OwnerRez? If not, you should - it's awesome! We recently noticed that Vrbo updated its review format, matching parent-company Expedia's review format, which made Channel Bridge miss some of the review data it looks for. That is now corrected, and everything works again.
HomeAway still hanging around. Speaking of Channel Bridge, we noticed some places where "HomeAway" was still showing up where listing sites are shown. Last year, we announced that we were removing all references to "HomeAway" in our main app as Vrbo was the name of the future. Evidently, "HomeAway" was still hanging out like a stowaway in Channel Bridge. All gone now!
Security deposit dates off by a day. We noticed that in some very rare situations, the security deposit "Reserved" date was using an Eastern US time zone which was being converted to UTC (London) and then back to the user's preferred time zone. This was making it appear like the security deposit was off by one day. This has been fixed.
PM Lock and scheduled payments. Previously, if you attempted to PM-lock a booking that had scheduled payments, the check-box was disabled with a tooltip saying "There are still some outstanding scheduled payments" even if all the scheduled payments were processed. This has been fixed. The PM Lock screen will now check if the scheduled payments are pending before showing that disabled message.
Updating multiple QuickBooks accounts. Do you use OwnerRez to sync to two or more QuickBooks accounts? If so, you might have noticed that the QuickBooks > Batch Update page wasn't showing your other QuickBooks accounts. If you tried to run the batch update, an error would come back asking for you to pick a QuickBooks account since you have more than one. This is now fixed. If you have more than one QuickBooks account, you'll see a neat little drop-down selector asking you to pick the account you want to use.
Half baths on Airbnb. Airbnb supports half baths in terms of what they show on their live website. We do too, but, we noticed that we weren't always passing that information correctly. This is now fixed. Your half bath counts should be showing correctly on Airbnb.
Double stays or double vision? We recently noticed that the Stays Daily Checklist report showed duplicate rows when blocked-off time is included. This is now fixed.