I have had a few people ask me about this recently, so a new video tutorial has been created showing how to enable landlords and tenants to log in to view their data.

This is available on the tutorial page

https://www.renthq.net/Support/Tutorials.aspx

The Managers Summary report is an existing report which prints the total income, expenses, disbursements and fees for each owner for each month.

This report has been extended to also include the total tax (i.e. GST or VAT etc) charged on the management fees.

In RentHQ you can now change the name of transaction tax.  Previously it was called 'Tax'.  Now you can call it GST or VAT or whatever else applies in your country.

To make this change, go to the Functions/Setup/Options screen and on the first tab change the tax name.

Changing the tax name will affect how it is displayed during transaction entry, and also on some reports.  For people who dont charge transaction tax, the change will have no effect on you.

Up until now reports have always been created as PDF files.  PDF files are great because they can be viewed on screen, printed, saved to your computer, attached to email etc.

However we have now added the ability to generate a CSV file as an alternative.  CSV files can be saved to your computer and opened in Excel.  In Excel you can do further analysis or calculations or print across multiple pages.

CSV files works well for reports which have well structured data i.e. regular columns and rows like the Ledger Transactions report or other list reports.  CSV does not work so well for more unstructured reports like the Owner Transaction Summary or Tenant Invoices.

This is one of those features that will go unnoticed by most.  We have added additional security features into the software.  You dont have to do anything different to use this feature - it happens automatically.

People who will notice a difference are people who are running an older version of the software installed on their computer.  These people will get error messages every time they access the web site.  The new security features are incompatible with the older software.

For those people, we have added instructions on how to update their software here

https://www.renthq.net/support/update.aspx

One aspect of this new security is that if you remain logged into the software for a long time (we are talking about days here) you will automatically get logged out and have to log back in again.

The work order list screen has been modified in 2 ways.

1. There is a small check box at the bottom of the screen which can be used to hide closed work orders, similar to hiding closed tenants or properties.

2. The status of the work order is now shown as a separate column.

It is common for people to want to put shortcuts on their desktop to their favourite programs.

With RentHQ there are 2 ways of creating these shortcuts.

1. The first option is to install RentHQ on your computer.  You do this by going into RentHQ, and then right click anywhere in the RentHQ window, and then choose Install RentHQ on this computer.  The disadvantage of this option is every time a new version of RentHQ is released, you will need to uninstall and reinstall again to get the new changes.

2. The second option is to create a standard shortcut.  To do this right-click on your desktop and choose New/Shortcut.  In the Location box, type in this web site URL https://www.renthq.net/manager.aspx and then click Next.  For the name of the shortcut enter RentHQ.  The advantage of this option, is if there are new software changes, you will get those automatically.

If you are using Outlook to send emails, you will need to choose the first option.

Owner management fees, which are generally expressed as a percentage, can now be entered to 4 decimal places.

This is because if you enter a management fee as something like 8.5% + GST, and in New Zealand where GST is 15%, the tax inclusive fee is 9.7750%.  Previously when it was only 2dp, it was slightly inaccurate.

A small change has been made to bank reconciliations.

If you enter an end date for the reconciliation, any transaction with a date after this end date is automatically unselected.  You can manually re-include it again if you want to.

This makes sense really.  If the reconciliation ends on the 10th, then there is no point including transactions from the 11th.

Thanks to our clients for working this one out.  It is the small things that count.

A new training video has been created for doing property inspections.  

This shows how to create an inspection checklist from inspection templates.  It then shows how to create your inspection schedules, and then how to record their results.

The videos can be found here

https://www.renthq.net/Support/Tutorials.aspx