Wait, what's this - a product update post on the weekend?? Yep, we're still churning them out! This one is pretty small and covers 10 updates we did a few days ago, but we wanted to get it out the door quickly so that we could settle into the new week. Another update will drop this upcoming Monday, and we'll be back to our normal once-per-week output. No more playing catch-up.
If you haven't seem them already, read about the new "refundable" type security deposits, quotes holding dates and QuickBooks batch post I put out a few days ago, and then the awesome rate calendar overhaul post a few days before that. Today's update covers just a few minor enhancements and bug fixes. Let's get to it!
Enhancements & Tweaks
Our recent overhaul of security deposits was pretty huge, and we noticed a couple things we needed to tweak after putting it out. One of those was massaging how users did their own own "refundable" surcharges to do an RDD by hand. While that is still allowed of course, we wanted to make sure it flowed well with the new RDD changes that are now built into OwnerRez, so we made some tweaks. To be clear, you can still use your own "refundable" surcharges without turning on our new security deposit features. Entirely up to you!
A few weeks back, we fixed a bug in our our QuickBooks integration to allow you to set a different Rent mapping per property if you had a multi-currency account. This was because QuickBooks requires that the currency for Product or Service Items be the same as the Invoice currency which means that your "Rent" line has to be able to be changed. Right after we released that, we realized that everyone should be able to set a different Rent mapping per property, whether the account is multi-currency or not. So we did that!
When you edit your property mappings now, you'll see an option at the top to use multiple Rent mappings, and then down below there will be a Rent Mapping column for each column.
To be clear, turning on multi-currency no longer has any impact on the Rent mappings per property.
Here's another enhancements that was made after a new feature came out. A few weeks ago, we added support for the Vrbo Property Status API. OwnerRez now shows you, on-demand, what your property status and URL is on Vrbo as returned to us by Vrbo's system live. That got us thinking - why not add that as the "Status" column on the Vrbo API dashboard in OwnerRez just like we do for other channels (eg. Airbnb)? So we did!
When you open your Vrbo API dashboard in OwnerRez now, you'll see a new Listing Status column there.
This new Listing Status column is for display purposes only. You cannot activate or disable listings on Vrbo from our API dashboard. To do that, you still have to use Vrbo's control panel or reach out to Vrbo's PM support group.
Last enhancement for today... We know there are a lot of steps for new users to complete. We're working to reduce that barrier to entry as much as possible, so we just updated the system to automatically create a default agreement along with an email template and trigger as soon as a user signs up. The system already used a "default" agreement if none exist so that guests have to sign something, but we wanted to take the additional step of dropping it into each new user's account so that there is something to read and edit. Same with the email template and trigger that asks channel guests to sign agreements after booking on a channel - it's now in there by default. If you're an existing user, this won't mean very much, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
Bug Fixes
LQA check for missing city. Our Listing Quality Analyzer tool already validates for Street and Country, but Vrbo also requires City, so we updated the LQA tool to look for that as well. If you don't know what the the LQA tool is, drop everything and go check it out. It's a great way of seeing what's wrong with your OwnerRez account or what we recommend you update.
PDF are allowed. Some PDF attachments were confusing our file upload subsystem causing it to reject them as invalid type. Well it is valid, so we allow those now.
The order of tag groups on search widgets. Previously, when you used tag groups to create custom filters on search widgets or hosted websites, the list of tag groups that showed in the drop-down filter live was in a random order. We fixed this to make it alphabetical order.
Agreement editor should look more like final agreements. Stylistically, there were some differences between between the editor for agreements and the final agreement render. We've cleaned those up so it should be much closer now.
Brivo phone number errors will not appear. If Brivo gives us an error because your guest's phone number is too long, we'll now tell you that, instead of telling you "Unknown lock error." Super helpful, right?
Extra comma in file validation when attaching files to Airbnb message thread. Just what it says. The extra comma has been removed.