System Message for final payment notification would be a great tool

I would like top suggest that OwnerRez creates a system message to send a renter notification that a final payment is scheduled to be made for their reservation. I had this option with another PMS and it was extremely helpful. I often get inquiries from renters wanting to know when and how to make their final payment (I have mine scheduled for two weeks prior to check in).

Even though there is a system message when the first payment is received that states when the second payment is due and how the second payment will be handled, the majority of my renters make their reservations in advance and either don't read through the entire email or delete it once read and then forget!

Thanks for considering. 

Hi Roanne,
 
There is a System Message that will notify the guest of a second payment due if there is no credit card on file for the payment to be collected automatically.
 
If you'd like to, you can always create a custom email Template for a payment reminder, with a Trigger set to send that Template to guests who have only partially paid, do have a credit card on file already, and use the Booking Fields criteria settings to tell it to fire off X amount of days prior to arrival. For example, if you collect the second payment 30 days prior to arrival, you may want to send the reminder out 35 days prior so they have a few days of advance notice before the payment is collected automatically.
 
If you'd like more detailed instructions on how to go about creating that Trigger for yourself, please write to us at the helpdesk at help@ownerreservations.com. We'd be happy to provide screenshots!

I understand how I can do this myself, but I thought it would be a nice tool for everyone. Stephanie at the helpdesk suggested I write this on the forum.

Thanks!

While OR is very flexible and you can accomplish a lot of things like this with careful creation of templates and triggers, there are a number of things that would be nice to just work automatically like this. It's clear that OR was designed and coded by a bunch of software engineers who didn't have the budget to hire a good team of UI/UX/HID designers.

I love OR, but with as much growth as OR has experienced, it really is high time they bring in a good HID person and do a wholesale UI revamp so the product is more approachable by non-technical people and just works out of the box for a lot more situations. :) (Also overdue is rewriting a lot of the default system messages to be more human-readable and friendlier...)

Anyway, this thread should probably be moved over to the Feature Requests forum so it can be voted on and considered by the OR team. Perhaps Ken or someone on the OR team can take care of that.

I've moved this thread as requested.

Yes, we've often talked about hiring a UI expert.  The problem is that that alone wouldn't do much good - we'd also need one or two dedicated devs to work with them, at least for a good long time, implementing the "wholesale revamp" you're talking about.

And, as you can tell from our Feature Requests, there are a million other functional things that people are clamoring for, enough to keep the devs busy for a long time to came.  Yes we've grown the size of the team considerably, and will continue to do so, but somehow we never quite seem to catch up... :-/

The voting on functional feature requests has always greatly exceeded that for UI rework, so that's what tends to get priority.