On Monday, we commented about adding new page numbers to the renter agreement PDFs. In the same update, we also released a significant set of improvements for security deposits. You can now schedule security deposits for future collection or reset security deposits that have already been collected.
After navigating to one of your bookings, click on the Security Deposit link and you'll see where the changes begin.
That 'Schedule It' button at the top right is the new guy on the block. If a security deposit has already been scheduled, the button will be called 'Change Scheduled One' instead, which will allow you to edit the scheduling details. If a security deposit has already been reserved, no schedule button will be displayed. Bookings can only have one security deposit so if one is already reserved, any scheduled ones disappear.
Click on the Schedule It button or Change Scheduled One button and you'll see a new page layout with scheduling options.
The options are very straightforward. You can either have your security deposit collected on a specific date, or you can schedule it for a certain number of days before the arrival date. In either case, the collection date must be in the future. Most of the time, you will want to use the 'days before' option so that if the booking changes dates, the security deposit will move right along with it. When a booking is created by the guest and a security deposit is automatically scheduled by the system, the 'days before' option is always used.
The bottom portion of the page, which allows you to pick or enter a credit card for the guest, is exactly the same as the billing sections you've seen elsewhere in the system such as for collecting or scheduling payments.
The system will not allow you to schedule a security deposit if one has already been reserved. Occasionally, if the security deposit was already reserved and you need to schedule one for the future - perhaps the current one was collected prematurely - you need to release the current one and do a reset. We added the 'reset' option in the latest update which allows you to start over, essentially. The Reset button will only appear after a security deposit has been reserved and released.
On Reset, any existing security deposit or scheduled security deposit will be removed from the booking.
With these new scheduling and reset options, you should now be able to control security deposits much more completely. We already have a lot of ideas about how to enhance these options, but please give us your feedback so we know what you like or dislike about what we've done here.
