Feature Requests

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Hi Gotomike,

We use the 'running total' invoicing method to calculate all fees. There's no special formula or secret way that the fees are added on, it's just based on a running total of what comes before it, excluding taxes.

For instance, if you had the following items on your invoice:

Rent $500
Cleaning Fee $50
Processing Fee 3% (would be $16.50)

The Processing Fee is calculated on all of the line items that came before it, excluding any tax line items. In the above example, that means that the 3% is calculated against $550.

When we do our surcharge overhaul, one of the features we are planning to add is an option per surcharge for:

* Calculate on all preceding rent line items
* Calculate on all preceding surcharge line items
* Calculate on all preceding tax line items

And you can pick any combination of the three.

Does this make sense?

One thing that confuses my renters and myself is what the payment processing fee of 3% is calculated on. Is it based on the net rental alone (daly or weekly rates), the rental plus cleaning, or the rental plus cleaning plus deposit?

It's planned, but it hasn't been worked on yet.

To give you some context, we have almost 300 ideas on the development roadmap.

We're thinking about using something like UserVoice (http://uservoice.com) to show all submitted ideas and let users vote them up/down.

As was mentioned in the first post, "Is there any way to change the template of the paragraph of the email quote? I would like to customize it with additional information."

Is the feature Jim requested above in the works?

Thanks,
David

www.shakennotstirred.info

Hi David,

That one is on the development roadmap as well. It's been requested several times, but no one ever posted it to the forums.

Thanks for the feedback. (And please keep it coming)

Since I am on a roll with the feature suggestions...

It would be nice to be able to see if someone has 'clicked' through on the quote form to view more details. It would be good to be able to track that to help to ensure th email got to them.

David

Hi David,

You're right that without this ability it would be manual work to use the system. You'd have to ask the individual, first, if they want a particular optional feature and then manually add that to the quote.

Fortunately, it is very easy to manually tweak quotes. You can add or remove a line item very fast.

Custom/optional/taxable surcharges is high on the development roadmap. It will be worked on within the next 3 development sprints.

Thanks for the quick response Michelle.

It turns out this is essential for me to be able to use the system. Also you need to be able to specify if individual are taxable or not. Depending on the local code some items are taxable and some are not.

I hope you get this implemented soon, I like the site, but can not use (with a lot of manual intervention) as it is.

Hi David,

Your request is not only on the development roadmap, but it's high on the list. This feature is requested quite often.

If you open one of your properties and click the Surcharges menu, you'll see a number of hardcoded surcharge types - taxes, cleaning, etc.

We're planning on extending this Surcharge area to make those custom. So you'll be able to enter any type you want, with any description/amount, and select its order of importance, whether its taxable or not (cleaning fees shouldn't be taxed since they are a pass-through or "reimbursed" expense on the owner)

At the same time, we'll be implementing an 'optional' feature so that guests can choose to include the surcharge or not. This should cover things like pool heat or linen service.

This will be coming very soon in the release schedule.

There are times when I do a quote I want to be able to give renter the option of additional features. I.E. pool heating fee. This is an additional fee. I could create a different rate type for each period for this. I think it would be preferable if there were additional optional charged that could be added to a quote. That way if I have two or three different add-on's I don't need to make all the possible combination of rates for each season.

Thanks,
David

Looking forward to trying it! Bummer that the ski season is over so my rental activity won't pick up until next winter. Kirkwood has over 700 inches of snow so far this season though, so spring skiing should be awesome!

Jim

www.homeinkirkwood.com
twitter.com/skikirkwood

Jim, I wanted to reach out to you on this... The rate engine overhaul was released this past weekend. There are several new blog posts covering it, and more to come. Has this update made your quote generation easier? Holidays and weekend charge types are now fixed.

Jim, you must have inside access to our developer road map. Almost everything you mentioned is something we already want to/plan on doing, including the middleman inquiry parsing (from sites like VRBO).

The rate updates will be done very soon.

Thanks for the feedback, Jim.

This is exactly what we are in the middle of working on. We have had at least a dozen people mention that in the past few months.

There are a lot of weird permutations that can occur when you have a lot of options, both in rate periods and charge types. But I think we've got the logic finally licked this time. We changed several core aspects of how things are auto-calculating and the initial results are looking great.

We've also expanded the rate settings so that you can quite a few other things.

For instance, we've been asked if extra guest/adult/child/pet fees could be charged against the entire stay, instead of per charge unit. So you may want to add a $30 pet fee once no matter how long the guest stays. The new settings allow for that.

The new rate settings are also much easier to understand. The current one way they're laid out is a bit confusing.

Hi There,

I've been using ownerreservations.com for a few weeks now and thought I'd share my initial feedback.

Overall, I think the site is awesome! I'm new to the vacation house rental business, and using your web site has really made it much easier for me to manage my workflow and generate professional looking quotes to prospective renters.

I know you're working on the quote generation engine to be smarter about holidays and things - that's the number one area I'd like to see an improvement in. Most of my inquiries come in for holiday weekends, and I find that I need to often manually edit the quote to generate the correct rate.

I just started adding tax to my quotes. I'd like to have the tax computation added to the rental fee, but not the cleaning fee. As of now it's adding it to both and I don't see a way to configure the site to just add tax to the nightly rental fee.

Is there any way to change the template of the paragraph of the email quote? I would like to customize it with additional information.

90% of my inquiries come in through vrbo.com, where I get an email from their site after a person has submitted an inquiry form. It would be awesome if you guys had a feature where I could forward the email from vrbo.com to <my user ID>@ownerreservations.com, you parse the email, extract the person's name, email address, check-in/out dates, number of adults and children, and automatically generate a quote. I'm often out of the office when a request for a quote comes in, and while I could generate a quote from my iPhone with your site, it's quite cumbersome on a small screen with limited cut & paste capability. Since VRBO.com generates these emails in a standard format, the regular expression parsing to extract the renter information would be quite straightforward.

I might move to an enhanced renter screening workflow where I have them give me more information before they can be in a position to accept a quote from me. For example, I might start asking prospective renters to send me their LinkedIn public profile. So it would be great to be able to generate a quote and email it to people, but have an option where they cannot click on a link and accept it, but instead, there's another step I have to activate before that can occur.

That's all for now. Again, the highest priority request I have is to get your new quote generation engine out that reliably works with holidays and override dates, followed by not adding taxes to non-rental fees.

Overall though, the site is really well done, and I've been enjoying using it for my new vacation house rental business!

Jim