Overview
When you first start recording deposits, one of the first things you'll start to realize is that there are zillions of past payment and refund transactions that are unrecorded in your OwnerRez account. Where do you draw the line? Where do you begin recording deposits, and if you're not recording all the historical stuff, how do you get rid of it all so that it doesn't show up on the deposits screen?
OwnerRez has created some solutions to help everyone get started as you review your Manually Record Deposits area.
Batch Update
The first thing we created is a Batch Update that finds old payments and refunds and lets you "mark them deposited" in bulk. Marking them as deposited will set a flag on the payment or refund so that they don't show up in the future. To get started, go to the Deposits overview page and click the Batch Update button on the top right. You'll see our standard batch layout form with some criteria options you can use to target the transactions you want to work on.
In the above screenshot, all payments and refunds are selected before the current fiscal year (ie. everyone on or before Dec 31, 2021). Our reasoning is that the previous fiscal year (2021) and all previous years are already closed out and reconciled, so we don't need to be concerned about ancient history. We're going to mark all that history "as deposited" so that it no longer clutters your deposit screens.
Click the "Show Transactions" button, and the page will load all of the payments and refunds that match the timeline and criteria you select. After it finishes loading, you'll see a list of the payments and refunds that will be marked as deposited.
If the list is longer than 50 items, it will show a count at the top and a footer saying "....and [x] other payments and refunds" so that the page doesn't spin and spin for hours on end. This is helpful for larger PMs who have hundreds of thousands of payments going back 5 or 10 years.
If your results look correct, scroll to the bottom of the list and click the "Mark Deposited" button. The system will now run through all of those transactions and mark them as deposited so that they no longer appear for you to include. This could take a good deal of time, so give it a few minutes to finish if you are updating thousands of historical records.
Once you've cleared out the old stuff, you can go back to the Record Deposit page, you'll see a lot fewer transactions since you just cleared all of the old ones.
Make a mistake? You can use this same Batch Update to find transactions and mark them as undeposited to make them appear again.
Everything Before July 2022
After some internal discussions, OwnerRez realized that we needed to take an additional step in helping users with historical transactions by automatically setting all transactions prior to July 2022 as deposited. Some of our large PMs have hundreds of thousands of payments going back years and the Batch Update was kind of a given.
This is exactly the same thing as if you had gone into the Batch Update tool, filtered for everything before July 2022, and set "mark as deposited". If you'd like to record deposits for transactions before July 2022, you can still do that. Simply use the Batch Update tool to find the months that you want to record, find the transactions, and select "mark as undeposited". That will flip them back so that you can see them again on the deposit screen.
You can also reverse a single payment or refund directly. Go to any payment that was marked as deposited, and you'll see a button that can reverse it.
If you click on the "Mark Not Deposited" button, the payment will revert to its original Not Deposited status.
Sifting Through Current Transactions to Record
Even with all the old transactions cleared out, there is still the problem of sifting through hundreds of current transactions when recording a deposit. If you're a PM with 30 properties, you likely get at least a dozen payments every day. Over the course of a week, you'll have 75 - 100 transactions to match up when manually recording deposits. If you have 100 active properties, you may have 5 times this much (500+ transactions) to reconcile. This problem bothered us, so we tweaked the Record Deposit page to deal with thousands of transactions in a fast intuitive way.
For starters, when you get to the Deposits page, we only load the 50 most-recent payments and refunds in your account. Typically, when reconciling your deposits, you'll start with the latest deposits and work your way back. So we figured that the latest transactions should appear at the top. If you need to find more transactions though, just scroll down and click the "Load older transactions" button and the page will instantly fill with more payments and refunds.
But we also noticed that deposits typically occur within a few properties and single payment processor, not across multiple processors.
So we added some filters to the top that let you quickly narrow down your transactions to specific properties and payment methods (eg. Stripe, Lynnbrook Group) so that you can work smartly in recording the deposits. The payment method options combine all manual payments - cash, check, offline, into one category called "Manual recorded". The credit card payment methods are broken up into individual processors so that you can prepare deposits for each one and filter out the transactions that match that processor.
Use these filters to quickly narrow down the transactions that match the deposit you are working on, then select the transactions, save and continue working on additional deposits.
Hopefully, these enhancements will allow you to deal with historical transactions and large sets of current transactions in an orderly way, so that can start using Deposits without a lot of aggravation.