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Chuck - I think you might be talking about custom sources. I just emailed the OR folks and got a response that the way to distinguish (for example) expedia bookings from vrbo is to create a custom source for expedia. Otherwise the default is vrbo.

If you are just dealing with historical bookings you should be able to create a custom source where the Name is 'EVOLVE' and just leave the domain name field blank. You might need to update your past bookings manually, or hopefully you could do some kind of import from a spreadsheet where you update all of those bookings in one pass.

Any way to create/use a custom booking channel?

I left EVOLVE recently but am still honoring a lot of bookings I am managing in OR. I have entered all the details through either Excel imports or manual entry. But now, I have a need to differentiate an EVOLVE/VRBO booking (example) from my own VRBO booking to build some triggers and different email templates. But, I *want* to list channel as VRBO even if it came through EVOLVE as I want to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the different channels. I thought about using a CUSTOM FIELD but don't seem to be able to use that in some triggers AND I would really like to see EVOLVE reservations indicated in some of the reports and grids in OR.

Any ideas?

I've previously asked for a sparkline type of history on spot rate changes, but a simpler to implement but still useful feature would be for OR to keep a record of the last pushed rate/min night setting for each property. That would give users a useful way to double check in the details (before pushing rates) which dates have changed. Might be a little complicated since the listing collapses common values into groups and maybe only some dates changed, but possibly there could be a toggle to show the changed history ungrouped.

As it is it's not really easy/practical when making 20+ changes to visually see them in the details listing, so one must just hope it is all correct.

(edit) Would also be nice of the date/time of the last push was captured on the channel bridge page with the 'push' button. It's necessary to push all properties individually, and then wait 60 seconds for the push, so it's easy to be distracted and miss a property. Or maybe add a method to 'push all' properties.

Would be nice if the current date was prominently highlighted.

Here's my simplistic view...

- Deposits on Rentals - INCOME
- Invoice Posting - DON'T CARE ITS JUST AN INVOICE
- Handling Credit Card Payments that get imported as 3rd Party payments (Lynnbrook vs Guest Name) - INCOME
- Credit Card Fees - FEE (but you may not see this)
- Security Deposit, whether in cash or as a Credit Card Authorization - TYPICALLY IS OFFSET BY REFUNDS. ANY POSITIVE==INCOME
- Refunds of the Security Deposit - SEE PREVIOUS

If you do direct bookings and accept credit cards, just put those fees against some kind of FEE account, probably those are useful to reduce income.

An accountant primarily cares about how much you earned in income, and then they'll look at your expenses and see if any of that can offset your financial picture, perhaps by reducing income or by adding to the cost basis of your property (ie: repairs).

You'd be pretty close if all you did was put income in one quickbooks account and expenses into another, no need for tracking guest names or anything more fine grained.

None of the above addresses sales tax payments, maybe that's part of your question? In the state of CO I've been told that you don't need to pay sales tax on the amount due to cleaning. I personally have been paying that in the past, but next quarter I'll look more closely.

Are there any users that have a "Best Practices" write up on how to handle the various entries required from OR to Quickbooks Desktop?

- Deposits on Rentals
- Invoice Posting
- Handling Credit Card Payments that get imported as 3rd Party payments (Lynnbrook vs Guest Name)
- Credit Card Fees
- Security Deposit, whether in cash or as a Credit Card Authorization
- Refunds of the Security Deposit

In my case my sister in law (part owner of a condo) wants to see details that help her associate payments from vrbo/airbnb to her checking acct with a particular stay. I don't really need a full blown portal, just a link that shares enough info.

Hopefully OR will add an ability to create a custom report some day and then I can just email her a weekly report that lists all stays within a time period, that's all she needs.

Hi Rich,

OR's "Hosted Widget link" can be shared by URL, but it does not show any details of the booking (like the guest's name). Not sure it that will help you in this situation.

When completing the Contact Information manually, how about allowing users to enter ZIP code, then doing a lookup for City and State and populating those fields? It would speed up manual entry quite a bit.

This, ideally, would be added to the Info Form guests complete when booking as well as the Booking Info area.

For your specific case Rich, the best solution would be to grant Portal Access to that owner. Then they can see the main OwnerRez bookings screen and all their bookings in one place. But that requires the Property Management module. Are you managing the property for them? If so, it might be worthwhile.

We've had this hosted-custom-calendar feature requested before, but I'm concerned there may be some security issues with that, particularly if we're including detailed personal information like the name of a guest.

I keep running into folks who struggle to add an ical link to their calendar. Some people don't use a calendar at all. Would be nice if OR could host all ical links as a url so that folks who need to see something such as a name of guest can see that.

My specific case is another owner who gets payments from vrbo/airbnb and needs to see the calendar to make sure nothing gets missed.

No ETA on Xero yet... we got caught up in the Airbnb API integration and spent most of the second half of the year on that. Now that's done, though, so hopefully our 2020 will be a little more open.

Yep, we definitely have some ideas around saved reports where you can set up criteria and run them, maybe even automatically email to cleaners etc. Just need to get them in the dev queue!

Any word on if the Xero intergration will go live before the end of the year?
Thank you
Olivier

I love the Daily Checklist report and I use it every day.

Instead of having to go to Reports > Daily Checklist > (clicking whatever options we want) > Run Report.....I thought it would be really great if we could instead just click on the date we want to see the Checklist for in the ribbon calendar. The report could instantly open for that date based upon the last time the report was run with the same options selected.

If one wanted to see different information on the report, they could go through the steps Reports > Daily Checklist > (clicking whatever options we want) > Run Report and then the next time they clicked on a date in the ribbon calendar the report would be run for the newly selected options.

View screenshot: https://snipboard.io/iGn4gc.jpg

Would be nice if you could create a way where users could create their own triggers or reports which could access OR internals. Not sure how many people would want to do that but I would ;-)

I'm thinking of something where users could write some javascript or php or python and create whatever result they want for consumption by either a visual display in OR or send by email or webhook or zapier.

Ideally some users would play around with this and create content that other users might want.

I'm guessing this is not going to make the top of the backlog queue but I can dream, right?

Yep, we definitely want to make the custom fields more dynamic, as well as adding the capability to do some IF...THEN logic in them so that you can make things vary based on other values.

For 1) there's already something like that for quotes and inquiries: {IPROPAVAILALL} or {QPROPAVAILALL} -- those fields will show properties available for the dates on the quote or inquiry.

Another thought we've been toying with is adding some IFTTT/Zapier triggers which you could use to send your own custom emails out -- perhaps pulling in details like the weather forecast on that side. You can sort of do that already by creating a trigger in OwnerRez that sends to Zapier to trigger a flow over there, but it'd be sweet to have it all built in.

Yep, that's something definitely on the roadmap. We just need to make sure it's safe -- don't want a recursive case where one field references another field which references the first field again.

Yep, that's a good criteria -- I'll note that down here. We've got ideas to expand the "has problem" checkbox into a list so you can provide a bit more metadata about what the problem was, was it resolved, etc. Haven't gotten into the dev cycle on that yet though.

Yep, history with some sparklines would be cool to see changes over time. Right now we just track the current rate and don't factor in changes, but something to mull over to see how we can handle it. That can get to be a lot of data records to keep though :D

Yep, that's exactly it -- spot rates override seasonal rates. Think of it as spot rates "painting on top" of the seasonal rates. The Tools > Rate Calendar will show whatever rate is currently in effect for the date whether it be a spot rate or seasonal.

If you want to actually change the seasonal rates for the entire period of the season it's easier to update the seasonal rates. If you want to set just a couple nights here and there, using the spot rate is easiest.

That's a good idea!

Maybe an option to add the column because many people have the same min all the time or only for one or two seasons.

I'm creating some rates widgets to put on my website and I'm loving the clean display. I think it would be really great (for the potential guest who is looking at the rates table) if another column was added to the far right of the display to show the number of minimum nights required for each season.

It isn't looking optimistic for being able to automate Channel Bridge, because of increasing security restrictions and the way it has to operate as a browser plugin. While theoretically technically feasible, automating it would be not as stable and reliable as it would need to be to not annoy the heck out of everybody.

But the good news is, for Airbnb at least the API is out of beta and has no minimum-property restrictions. We recommend that every OwnerRez user who lists with AIrbnb to switch over to using the API right away, unless there is a specific reason why this won't work with your business workflow.

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/channel-management-api-integrations-airbnb

I just sent in a support question for this.

I could even use this for every booking. I use channel bridge after every booking (and airbnb is the worst since it only sends dates to owner rez)

Please-Please create this feature.. for Christmas :)

Thank you

I believe that spot rates can be thought of as an override to "regular rates". And spot rates are specific to a given date.

When you look at the Rate Calendar do you see the rates you expect? I would expect that the Rate Calendar will show regular rates in your case. And then if you wanted to modify a few days you could do so directly from the Rate Calendar, and I would *think* that would create a spot rate.

You should always be able to download your rates regardless of whether they are regular or spot rates. Try going to Tools/Import Export and then look for two places where you can Export Rates/Seasons or Export Spot Rates.

I dont really understand the difference between regular rates and spot rates.
Seems like 1 trumps the other - so not sure which I should change - so I just adjust my regular rates.
I currently adjust rates weekly - but agree it would be nice to download my changes or see a history to see where I started with the rates for the next year.

Would be nice to have some specialized custom fields that are dynamic.

For example, I would love to include some real time metrics about my property in emails that are sent to guests.

For instance, here are some examples:

E1) We currently have these available dates still available for the current season - Email us if you are interested!
<field would insert either a table of dates or preferably a calendar snapshot of availability>

E2) We've gotten XX 5-star reviews in the past year, can we ask you to add another?
<<XX would be replaced with the count of 5-star reviews>

E3) Not free, but would be nice to include a current weather forecast 2-3 days ahead of an arrival. Seems like you could do that with the api at https://openweathermap.org/price

E4) etc .... I bet there a lots of useful informations that would help to make emails (or eventually texts) more dynamic and interesting.

Not sure if this is needed or practical, however it seems like there may be situations where the use of custom fields would be useful to personalize property descriptions based on the different OTA sites. Specifically, I could use it now to include a paragraph in VRBO about the need to collect additional taxes 8.5% after booking.

Can y'all add a field in triggers to prevent a trigger from executing if the checkbox for 'guest has a problem' is checked?

I use the guest has a problem field to flag guests that I don't wish to host again. So with this enhancement I can avoid sending a followup email asking for reviews or for future rebooking.

If there's another way to do this already please advise !

Maybe I'm asking for too much here, but would be nice if OR would keep track of every pushed nightly rate/min nights.

For instance, let's say I'm really organized and I push spot rates every monday throughout the winter season. By summer I have pushed rates maybe 20 times for the months of Dec->Apr. For the earliest Dec dates I might have only pushed them 1 or two times, but for the late April dates I might have pushed them 20 times.

Would be nice to have a graphical view for every single day showing how and when the rate changed. This would also be a nice way to check that nothing crazy ever happened to my rates.

I'm thinking of a vertically oriented calendar with one date per row, and next to the given date is a small sparkline type of chart. If the sparkline is flat and then drops by 50% it's obvious that I kept rates high and then cut them in half. Or maybe it would show a few rate reductions. Hovering over the sparkline should show exact values.

Maybe there is an easier way to portray this, haven't given it too much thought. I just like the idea that there is a track record of when spot rates were updated, and how they changed. The fact that some dates will have just a few updates and other might have many complicates this.

In addition, another feature I'd like would be that OR only pushes changes. At the moment everything gets pushed, and it's really hard to identify what I might have changed. If I have a session of 30 minutes where I'm using the rate calendar across multiple units I might have made 30 or more tiny changes/tweaks. But I can't see just those changes in the detail before pushing. Would be nice if OR could recognize which changes were made since the last push, and then just show those in the list. That would make me more confident that I didn't accidentally change dates that I didn't intend to change. And that there are the changes I thought I made. As an example, if I accidentally am looking at the wrong property (easy to do) I could mistakenly change rates, but I'd detect it when I went to push rates if I glanced at the details of each property before pushing any. I'd certainly notice if I thought I'd changed rates for every property but one ended up with no changes.