PropertyBoss Release Notes 9.07

Introduction

Release 9.07 is one of the most comprehensive releases to PropertyBoss in many years.  We have listened to our client requests for the kind of changes they would like to see to the product.  This release includes several major enhancements that have been requested by clients.

This release went through an extensive Quality Assurance processing and has been used by a number of companies in a structured Beta process for several months.

We are proud of what we’ve accomplished and hope you enjoy these improvements!

Notes on Terminology used in this Document

PropertyBoss is used in several different industries where terminology like Owners can have different meanings.  The following table highlights the standard usage in this document and how you should read the terms for your industry:

General Ledger

The major enhancement is the new internal General Ledger system, a full-featured, flexible system that works seamlessly with PropertyBoss to provide a complete solution for your property management accounting needs. 

At PropertyBoss we enable our customers to choose the solutions that best fit their needs.  We will continue to support and enhance the QuickBooks interface along with other supported journal-based interfaces including Microsoft Dynamics and Peachtree.

The General Ledger is implemented using the Accounting Files on the General Ledger Navigator.  The General Ledger is implemented for an Accounting File by choosing PropertyBoss General Ledger in the Application field. 

The Accounting File approach allows PropertyBoss to support an unlimited number PropertyBoss General Ledger and QuickBooks accounting groups within one database.  You can view and manage all Properties in a single database while keeping the accounting details completely separate.

Each Accounting File is completely independent and has separate Chart of Accounts, Budgets, Statement Layouts, etc.  Since the PropertyBoss General Ledger supports simultaneous Cash and Accrual accounting, you can view any account or report in Cash or Accrual format at any time.  Following are a list of the standard features of the PropertyBoss General Ledger:

1. PropertyBoss automatically creates a Chart of Accounts when you turn on the General Ledger for the Accounting File.
2. The Chart of Accounts is easily customizable.  You can override the names of existing accounts, use Account Numbers or not, combine accounts for reporting purposes, create your own accounts and define a hierarchy of accounts.
3. PropertyBoss automatically creates journal entries for all PropertyBoss transactions simultaneously for both Cash and Accrual reporting.
4. The Pay Bills function facilitates combining multiple bills for the same Vendor or creating checks separately. Partial payments are supported and well as the application of Vendor Credits and Discounts.  For Residential managers the Pay Bills function works with all the Held Bills and Work Approval features that provide a fine-grained control over the releasing and printing of bills for Vendors.
5. The Make Deposits function, EFT Submission, and NACHA file creation processes of PropertyBoss automatically create deposits in the correct Checking account.
6. The checking system supports an unlimited number of checking accounts.  Print Checks including MICR encoding on blank stock.  Full customization of the check layout is supported.
7. A robust reconciliation process includes a fast sort and transaction search.  Save reconciliation activity to finish at a later time.  Reopen reconciliations to correct mistakes.
8. The Miscellaneous Journal - create manual journals for handling generic accounting activity.
9. The complete Budget capability allows multiple budgets to be defined for an Accounting File.  Simplified entry of budget amounts.
10. Full Drill-down capability through General Ledger reports to account detail and then down to the source PropertyBoss Transaction.
11. View Journal entries that PropertyBoss created for any transaction from the Actions button on the Transaction window.
12. The following reports are provided with the General Ledger:
    • Account Detail Prints
    • Income Statement
    • Balance Sheet
    • Cash Flow Statement
    • Trial Balance
    • Budget Listing
    • Budget Variance
    • Bank Statement Reconciliation
13. Create multiple, named, customized layouts for the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. Change grouping levels, which groups display totals, and the terminology used for each group. Completely customize the statements to meet the needs of any audience.
14. General Ledger Journal Merlin - create customized reports of General Ledger activity.
15. The rich set of security options enable control of who can do activities within the General Ledger.

PropertyLists

• Accounting Files on the General Ledger Navigator now show based on the current PropertyLists in effect.
• When you change the currently selected PropertyLists, PropertyBoss now closes open windows and refreshes Navigators to reflect the current PropertyLists.
• New button on the PropertyLists window enables you to see which PropertyLists a property is on.
• The Prospect Navigator now restricts the list of Prospects to prospects specifically for the current Propertylist.

Accounts Payable

Major changes were made to simply the navigation and use of the Accounts Payable module.  Some key enhancements include:

• To standardize terminology in PropertyBoss, wording was changed to use the term Bill to Pay instead of Invoice.
• When all lines are fully paid, change status to Paid.
• Media can now be linked to each line item.

Interface to QuickBooks

• Corrected a couple of situations where the order of processing of NSF or EFT Reversals and when they were added to deposit batches did not correctly send information to QuickBooks.

Transaction Management

• PropertyBoss now automatically adds a Web Payment comment to transactions that come from the web.
• If the post date for Web payments is in a closed period, PropertyBoss now posts the transaction as of the Close Date + one day instead of the current date posted.  This change reduces the chance of late fees being posted for the account.
• DropDown for identifying the Tenant for a Web Payment now also shows past Tenants who have moved out and still have a balance.
• To support companies managing multiple Multi-Family Properties/Associations in a single database, PropertyBoss now supports multiple EFT/ACH Setups per database.  Each setup is given a unique name and can have entirely different setup options and fees.  Properties/Associations can be assigned to a specific setup.  The Resident and Owner Portals show available options and fees based on the setup options in the PropertyBoss database.
• Added a new option for outgoing NACHA payments (payments to Tenants and 3^rd Party Owners) to either group the payments as a single entry in the checking account or post each payment as an individual payment.  This option only appears for customers using the PropertyBoss General Ledger.  This change greatly simplifies the checking account reconciliation process if your bank posts a single charge to your checking account for these outgoing payments.
• A number of US banks now require separate NACHA files for incoming and outgoing payments.  The NACHA export process US-based customers now always create separate files for incoming and outgoing payments.  The NACHA export process for Canadian customers has always created separate files.
• To simplify account reconciliation, NACHA file setup now has an option to separate NACHA files by month.  If selected, separate NACHA files will be created if you process transactions at the first of the month and there are unprocessed transactions from the previous and current months.
• The Deposit Batch for incoming NACHA files are automatically closed when the NACHA file is created.
• The Transaction Import feature now supports the ability to import Note and Tenant Payment transactions.
• Added the ability to sort the transactions on the Make Deposits window by entered timestamp to simplify the verification of a stack of checks.
• When entering a payment, added ability for the user to immediately modify the Late Payment Comments and Do Not Accept Payments checkbox.  User must have security to update contact information.
• Some bank software for scanning checks supports the ability to import a validation list in a dropdown field.  We added a new ability to export a list of formatted user names and Lease Numbers (20 characters standard format) that can be imported into the bank software.  As checks are scanned, users pick the name from the dropdown.  Later scans of the same routing and account number automatically associate the same information in the dropdown. When the transactions are exported from the bank software, this field is also exported.  The Lockbox Import feature of PropertyBoss recognizes the information in the field and automatically associates the check to the correct account.
• Lockbox and Transaction Import can now associate a transaction to the current lease if only the Unit is passed in as the identifying field.
• Added ability to enter Credit Entry transactions for any transaction posted on a Property/Unit of type Charge to Owner/Association, Charge to P&L, and Maintenance Paid by Owner/Association.  This capability allows entry of a negative amount on the transaction.  This situation allows the entry of a credit for a bill that has been paid to an external vendor without having to create a new transaction of the corresponding type ‘Credit to …’

Email, Mail Merge, and Letters

• Implemented a new Email control that provides a richer set of capabilities and supports enhanced security.
• Added ability to choose the number of copies to print when doing a mail merge letter.
• PropertyBoss now supports sending Email via services that require Authentication and SSL including services like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, MS Exchange, etc.  Predefined setup parameters for common service providers simplify the setup of these services.
• PropertyBoss now validates the format of any email address you enter.  Multiple email addresses must be separated by a semicolon (e.g. fredmertz@gmail.com;ethel@lucy.com).  During the email process, if an invalid email is found, PropertyBoss will no longer attempt to send the email.  Instead, the error will be shown on the Email log.
• PropertyBoss now formats outgoing email with the name of the recipient.  For example, when sending an email to a tenant, PropertyBoss will format the outgoing email address as (John Smith) jsmith@gmail.com .
• To simplify the Mail Merge process, the reference address capabilities are turned off by default.

General Changes

• Added management of Workman’s Comp and Liability Insurance for Vendors.  The Vendor Notebook now includes a tab for optionally tracking both Workman’s Comp and Liability Insurance.  The expiration date and information about the insurance is tracked.  When entering a bill for the vendor, if their insurance has expired, a popup message notifies the user and display information about the insurance.  The user can choose to cancel the bill or continue the process to pay the bill.
• For Vendors, PropertyBoss now supports a field for recording the name that should appear on the 1099.
• Added a new column in RentRoll Navigator to calculate the number of future occupants of each unit.  This column enables Student Housing projects to run reports calculating their occupancy for a future semester.
• When a Tenant transfers to a new unit, PropertyBoss now requests verification that you want to change the Tenant’s mailing address to the new Unit’s address.
• The Utility Billing Module was enhanced to be in compliance with the latest Texas State laws that regulate what information is displayed to Tenants on Bills sent to submetered units.
• For all industries, a Remit-To address can now be entered on Setup Preferences -> Company Information.  This remit-to address appears on the Payment stubs for Statements.  For Multi-Family and Association databases, you can now also enter a different Remit-To Address for each Property/Association.  The payment stub prints the Rent-To address by taking the first address it finds in this order: property/association remit-to address, company remit-to address, company address.
• Added the ability to mass change Property Detail fields on the RentRoll Navigator – Mass Change feature.
• Added a new Upgrade Notification window that appears when a new Patch build or major Enhancement is available for download.
• Units marked as Offline no longer will appear in Unit counts on PropertyBoss Today, the RentRoll report and the Unit Availability report.

Specific to Residential Management

• Added your company’s phone number to the 1099 print.
• The Work Order Merlin now shows the Third Party Owner on the Merlin.
• The Third Party Owner Notebook now allows clicking on the owned properties to go directly to the Property Notebook.
• Added the ability to selectively print, email, and/or publish to the website the Third Party Owner statements.
• A565 – Trust Account Balances – A number of changes were made including excluding Owner Held Deposits from the report and including detail balance information for prospects.
• O210 – Held Bills Report (renamed from Outstanding Bills Report)
  • Added Grouping by aging (0-30, 30-60, 60-90, > 90)
  • Added a Filter button to the report
  • Added drill down to the transaction
• O187 – Property Profit & Loss
  • Added ability to print for inactive owners.
  • Added ability to print a single Profit & Loss for a specific property.  Previously this report printed all properties for a selected owner.
• Third Party Owner Statements - Manually entered Management Fee Transactions now show in Management Fees section on all Third Party Owner statements.

Specific to Association Management

• Added ability to make an Association inactive.
• The following reports are now available for Association management: A574 Open Transactions, A576 Open Charges Detail, A570 Activity Reconciliation, A571 Activity Reconciliation Alternate

Tax Credit Compliance

• The Lease End Date on new leases now defaults to the Next Recert Date minus 1 day. 
• Provided new option to support situations where the Tax Credit programs in place do not require an annual recertification.  This change flows to both the recertification process and the Compliance Report.
• Changed the generation of the TIC to run as a separate thread in Windows.  This process frees up the user to continue working in PropertyBoss while the TIC is generated and uses less Windows resources to generate the TIC.
• Added ability to mark Races as obsolete for situations where the State Agency has changed the Race categories, but the race is used on current TICs.
• Added the Maximum Housing Credit Dollar Amount Available to the Georgia Compliance Report.
• Program report now pulls the Max Income Limit as of when the Certification was completed.
• Added ability to handle units marked as Exempt – Manager on the Compliance reports.

Changes to Reports

• A146/A148 – Tenant Statements – Regular, Large Format, & Invoice Format -- Numerous changes were made to these reports.  The selection criteria and printing/publishing options were made similar on these reports.  Additional enhancements include:
  • Previous versions of PropertyBoss sent statements addressed to the primary contact on the Lease.  We have added the ability to send statements addressed to multiple contacts on a lease/ownership.  New options on the Lease Notebook enable you to selectively choose who and by what method contacts receive a statement.
  • Added ability to print a comment on all statements.  The comment prints on both the statement and the payment stub.
  • When emailing statement, users can now choose the criteria to use to determine whether to use the Late Email format or Regular Email statement.
  • Added ability to print a payment stub on the statement.
  • Remit-To address on the payment stub can be defined by property (for Multi-Family and Associations) or be defined at the company level.  This change allows a different address to print for clients who use lockbox capabilities.
  • Added date range ability to restrict charges that show on the statement.
  • New option on criteria window to choose the A146 or the A148 report as the standard report for sending statements.  The report selected as the default will automatically print from the Lease/Ownership Notebook, Lease/Ownership Register, and from PropertyBoss Today.
  • Added new selection criteria to select a) all current leases with balance > $amount  b) all leases (both current and prior) with an open balance > $amount or c) specific leases
  • Added new print and publish options that enable users to selectively print, email, and/or publish statements to the website.  This change along with the new setup options for contacts on a lease enables much more flexible control over the handling of statements.
  • Added optional ability to print the lease dates on the statement.
  • Added option to not display transaction comments on the statements.
  • Added option to not print subsidy information on the statements.
• A480 - Address Directory – New report available for all industries which lists contact information organized by the Unit Address.
• A481 – Contacts Directory – New report available for all industries which lists all contact information and is organized by Contact Name.
• A510 – Delinquents and Prepaid Report – Added ability to not show Credit transactions in the Prepaid column.  Added Cell phone to the report and new sorting options for sorting by total balance due.
• A535 – Subsidy Activity Report – Added new option to include or exclude Security Deposits and Payments from the report.
• A512 – Delinquency by Transaction – New report similar to the current A510 – Delinquency and Prepaids.  The new report provides a breakdown by Transaction for each Tenant.
• W312 – Move-Out Inspection Report – This new report, part of the Inspections module, is used in states requiring tenants who have been moved out to be provided with an Inspection Report that shows the condition at move in, the condition at move out and any damage charges. An inspection work order group of type "Inspection" must be created for this report to be produced.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 9.06

Changes to Batch Deposit Handling

The major enhancement in Release 9.06 is a rewrite of how payment, NSF, and correcting batches are handled for both regular and electronic payments. This simplifies the handling of deposit batches, automates many of the current processes, and resolves a number of prior limiting issues. All open batches must be closed prior to starting the upgrade process.

• The term Deposits is used instead of Batches. References to Security Deposits now use the term Security Deposits instead of just Deposits.
• The limit of 99 batches per day is expanded. Up to 1,000 deposits of each type a day per accounting file can be created.
• A new numbering scheme is used to differentiate between deposits for different accounting files. The new numbering format is ppp-yymmt-9999 where:
  • ppp - one to three character prefix of the accounting file. The prefix is not used if you only have one accounting file or do not use an interface to an accounting file.
  • yymm - current two digit year and month.
  • t - type of batch (P for Payment, C for correcting, N for NSF, S for Security Deposits, or E for Electronic)
  • pppp - sequential counter by type of batch.
• Users no longer specify the batch as transactions are entered. Front Desk users no longer need to understand the different types of batches and their use.
• A new Create Deposit window automatically separates the transactions that have been entered based on the following criteria:
  • accounting files and transaction sets
  • Month of the Transaction Date (based on a setup option)
  • Type of Transaction (payment, correcting, or NSF)
• Electronic transactions are automatically assigned deposit numbers. Deposits are automatically closed on the day following submission. Deposits can still be closed manually as needed. A Deposit number is not assigned to an electronic transaction until the transaction is Approved or Declined. New setup options allow electronic payments to be separated by type (Bank, Credit Card, or by specific type of credit card).
• Deposits can still be re-opened (with appropriate security) to add or remove transactions from the Deposit until they are sent to your accounting system.
• The Correcting Deposit process has been simplified. When a payment is reversed, the reversing transaction is automatically marked as a correcting entry. When entering the new payment, it can be manually marked as a correcting entry. An option on the Actions button allows a change on whether a transaction is a correcting entry.

Most correcting entries are the result of posting a payment to the wrong resident/owner. See the section on the new feature for moving transactions to another account.

Electronic Payments

• supports the export of Bank Drafts for Canadian Banks (if PPI is the Merchant Gateway Provider)
• LockBox import function now provides the ability to override the transaction date provided by the bank on the import file. Some banks were returning their processed date, and not the date the transaction should be applied.
• LockBox has also been enhanced to support Bank scanning software that allows matching of the check account information to tenant names in the Bank software. In the PropertyBoss Lockbox windows, you can now export a file containing tenant name and lease id information. If the bank software supports this capability this file can be imported into the Bank software and be used to match the check information. When the lockbox file is exported from the Bank software it should contain this identifier. When the lockbox file is imported into PropertyBoss, the identifier uniquely identifies the lease the payment should be posted to.

Moving Transactions between Accounts

• A transaction can now be moved from one account to another when the transaction is accidently posted on the wrong account. When used, the transaction will be reversed on the current account and posted as a new transaction on the To account.

Property-Specific Transactions and Letters; Generating Transactions from Letters

• On Setup Preferences, Define Transactions window, transactions can now be restricted to specific properties. While available for all industries, this feature is especially useful for companies who manage Associations where different types of Assessments apply to different communities.
• On the Define Letters window, transactions can now be defined that are automatically created when the letter is printed for a lease/home ownership. A transaction posted on the lease/ownership can be associated with a different transaction to be posted to the property/unit (this transaction can pass on charges/credits to the owner of the property for Residential managers). The following examples show how this option can automate daily tasks:
  • For the Residential/Multi-Family industries, when an Eviction notice is printed, the posting of an Eviction Fee to the Lease Register can be automated.
  • For Associations, when a Violation notice is printed, you could a) bill the Homeowner a fee for the Violation and b) bill the Association a fee for printing the letter.

  Duplicate transactions will not be created on the same day. A warning message is given if the letter has been printed and transactions posted within the last 30 days. The user can choose to create the transactions or skip the transaction if they are just reprinting the letter.

General Changes

• PropertyLoan - Added remaining principal as field to display on the PropertyLoan Navigator.
• Late Fees - can now be waived for a specific period by creating a Note transaction with the words waive and late in the name (Capitalization does not matter). A late fee will not be charged through the date of the transaction. Settings on the transaction definition determine whether the tenant sees this transaction.
• Transactions are not allowed in different accounts to have the same name. For example, you can no longer have a transaction called Maintenance that charges Tenants and a different transaction called Maintenance that charges for maintenance on a Property. The upgrade process renames any transactions it finds with duplicate names with a suffix (-p for property/unit related transactions and -o for owner-related transactions).

Tax Credit Compliance

• Added ability via a Supervisor Override to exceed the Max Rent Limit for Section 8 tenants. In certain situations, it is permissible.
• PropertyBoss now supports the Missouri Tenant Income Certification (TIC) form.
• A number of enhancements were made to support new/modified sections of the Florida TIC and Quarterly Compliance reports.
• The contact/prospect is updated with the new name if the name on an initial certification or recertification is changed.

Changes to Reports

• QuickBooks Checking Transaction Source Report. This new report lists all the checks in the QuickBooks checking account and traces each transaction back to the originating PropertyBoss transaction(s).
• Property Specific headings are now supported for reports that are typically provided to residents and board members of Associations. This enhancement applies to databases where the industry is Multi-Family, Student Housing, and Association. The option is not available in databases for Residential and Commercial managers. Either the standard or property-specific heading can now be selected when running the report. The Property Specific Headings are maintained on Setup Preferences, Report Headings. By default, the Property Specific Headings include the Property Name, the address of the property management company, and a property-specific logo. The headings can be customized to include the property address instead of your company address.
• Significant reduction in run time for complex reports such as Recap Journals and Net Rental Income
• A175 - Profit & Loss Report - added a column showing the property owners
• A155 - Unit Rent Changes Report - a new report showing the history of rent changes for a unit for a given time period
• A146 - Tenant Statement - added option to print a deposit slip on the bottom of the report. Some sites have banks that accept rent payments and the bottom stub acts as the deposit slip for the bank.
• O240 - Owner List by Tenant and A490 - Tenant List Report - modified to include the Tenant Cell Phone Numbers on the reports
• A489 - Certificate of Rent Paid - a new report to support the Minnesota Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) form; Minnesota requires property managers to produce this report for each of the tenants living in a unit to show the dollar amount of rent paid. This report creates a merge document from an underlying Word source file. While setup for the Minnesota requirement, the underlying Word document can be customized to print similar forms for other jurisdictions that have similar requirements.
• W310 - Work Order Print - Owner Copy - added ability to hide any tenant information on the copy of the work order that goes to the property owner

PropertyBoss Release Notes 9.04

Contacts and Address Changes

This release includes major structural changes to Prospects, Tenants, Tenant Relations, and Lease Addresses. Following is a list of the major changes in this release:

• All Tenants, Tenant Relations, Prospects, and Lease Addresses are now stored in a single Contacts table. This change has a number of advantages including:
  • A standardized set of fields including phone numbers, email addresses, and custom fields now apply to tenants, tenant relations, and the addresses (guarantor, emergency, legal, billing, etc.) that were stored on the lease itself.
  • Leases no longer have mailing addresses; only contacts have mailing addresses. Therefore, each tenant/contact on a lease can have a different mailing address.
  • You can now send letters and email any contact on a lease including guarantors, emergency, legal, etc.
  • You can now define an unlimited number of contact types. Different industries can have different contact types. For example, for student housing properties contact types like guarantor, emergency contact, and parent. For a home owner association property, contact types might include homeowner, tenant and property management company. For a senior housing community, contact types might include resident, son, daughter, doctor, internist, and dentist.
  • Since Prospects and Tenants share the same contact information, you can reactivate a prospect by changing the status and the information on the prospect is current.
  • The Contacts Navigator (formerly the Tenant Navigator) can now search and report on all Contacts including Tenants, Guarantors, Emergency Contacts, Children, etc.
• The Contact Notebook opens instantly. If you open the Contact Notebook from the Tenant/Contacts Navigator, the next and prior buttons work through the list of contacts you selected on the Navigator. If you open the Contact Notebook from the Lease Notebook, the next and prior buttons work through the list of contacts on the lease.
  Each Contact can have an unlimited number of addresses. Each address is associated with a user-defined address type. Sample address types might include Summer Address, Permanent Address, and Prior Address. For each Contact, one address must be marked as the current mailing address and an address must be marked as the current billing address. Other features that have been added include the ability to schedule an address change in the future. The following screenshot shows the setup window for addresses on the Contacts Notebook.

• The Lease Notebook now supports the ability to put an unlimited number of contacts on the Lease Notebook. Any contact, including non-occupant contacts, can be marked as the primary contact. The following sample window shows how the contacts appear on the lease. A new popup window displays contact information for the contact on the currently selected row.

• The Units and Leases Navigator now shows the following contacts in the list: Primary Contact and all occupants including dependents.
• Mail Merge was updated to enable sending letters to one or more contact types on a lease and choose which address type to send the letter to. Another contact and their address can be referenced in the letter. Some examples of where this feature is helpful include:
  • For student housing properties, send a letter to a guarantor on a lease and reference the resident.
  • For student housing properties, send a letter to a student at their current address and reference their summer address in the letter.
  • For residential property management, send a letter to the primary tenant referencing their emergency contact.
  • For Associations, send a letter to the homeowner, the resident, and the property management company about a violation.
• The Label printing report was modified to allow you to print labels for multiple contacts at the same time.
• The Resident Portals were modified to enable residents to modify specific addresses as allowed by the site.
• The Contacts Navigator now allows you to select two contacts and combine their data into a single contact record. This enhancement allows you to easily remove duplicate contacts if the data were entered accidently.

Transaction Processing

• For Residential management, PropertyBoss now supports a new method for handling Lease Up Fees. By default, PropertyBoss will continue to use the existing Lease Up Fee logic as it existed prior to this release. The new method creates a separate Lease Up Fee transaction of type Charge to Owner/Assoc on the property/unit. The bill is held based on the settings you define for bills. Typically, the bill will be held if the owner does not have enough funds to pay the Lease Up Fee. See the Help Documentation for how to change to the new method.
• For Residential management, PropertyBoss now supports a charging a Lease Renewal Fee. You define a transaction of type Charge to Owner/Assoc at the property level and mark the transaction as the renewal fee transaction. Then, define a fixed or percentage of rent amount on the Owners tab of the Property Notebook. When you renew a lease, PropertyBoss will automatically generate the Lease Renewal Fee based on any Rent Changes you schedule during the renewal. You can also choose the date to post the Lease Renewal Fee. The bill is held based on the settings you define for bills. Typically, the bill will be held if the owner does not have enough funds to pay the Lease Up Fee.
• PropertyBoss now supports transactions of type Credit Lease; Charge Owner/Assoc transactions as Lease Repeating transactions. This change enables you to give repeating credits to Tenants that are billed back to the Property Owner.

Work Orders

A new mail merge capability has been added for work orders. This feature enables users to create letters/post cards that can be sent to owners, tenants, vendors, etc. that reference a work order including fields like description, assigned to, etc.

PropertyWeb & Web Portals

• PropertyBoss calculates a Date Available for every unit based on when the current lease is scheduled to end plus the days it takes to make a unit ready. This Date Available is used by the Prospect portal to determine when a unit displays on the portal. This release adds a new Date Available field on the Property/Unit Notebook that overrides this date calculation. If you enter a date in this field, the unit will show on the Prospect portal based on this date regardless of whether the unit has a current lease. The Rent Roll Navigator was modified to allow you to search and display this field.
• The Resident and Owner Portals now allow users to view associated media on transactions.

Electronic Payments

• PropertyBoss now supports Bank Drafts for Canadian Banks if you use PPI as your Merchant Gateway Provider.
• The logic for opening and closing Electronic Batches has been modified to separate credit card payments from Bank Drafts and to better handle payments received on a weekend at the end of the month and processed the next month. Transactions are now grouped on electronic batches based on the submitted date of the transaction versus the post date of the transaction. Note: These changes were also delivered in later of the previous release.
• To encourage clients to pay electronically, some clients do not charge service fees for automatic electronic payments. A checkbox was added to the recurring payment setup window for tenants that allows you to not charge a service fee.
• A new report B525 - Batch Summary Balancing Report was added that displays batches based on when the transactions were submitted vs the batch close date. This new report has greatly simplified the process of checking account reconciliation for some of our clients who process thousands of electronic payments per month.
• A NSF can be applied to an electronic Bank Draft in any state of submission.

Late Fee Calculation

Prior to this release, one of the criteria used for Late Fee calculation was the Paid Thru Date of the lease. This reliance on the Paid Thru Date had the unintended consequence for many clients that Late Fees were not charged if they posted a late payment before AutoPosting the Late Fees.

With this release, Late Fees are calculated based on the date when the Rent was fully paid and not based on the Paid Thru Date of the lease. Because of this change, you may see additional late fees to post after upgrading to this release.

When entering transactions, some clients have used the posting date on the transaction and not the date the payment should have been applied to the account. For example, if the rent is late on the 5th and the tenant drops off the payment the evening of the 5th and you post it on the 6th, you should post the transaction with the date of the 5th or a Late Fee will be assessed.

If you entered payments based on the date you posted them and not the effective day of the payment, you can waive ALL the Late Fees by following these steps:

• Click Setup Preferences/AutoPost Preferences
• In the field 'Earliest Date to Charge Late Fees' put the earliest date you want PropertyBoss to consider charging late fees. All Late Fees before this date will be ignored.

To handle the Late Fees on an individual basis, you can do one of the following:

• Post a Late Fee transaction with the current date and change the amount to zero
• Post the Late Fees and then reverse them
• Change the post date of the Tenant Payment to a date prior to the 'Late on Day'

The date you enter on transactions should be the date the payment applied to the account; not the date you are posting the payment.

General Changes

• PropertyBoss now supports a message block on the Navigator bar. On Setup Preferences, Global, you can enter a message that appears for all users in the current database. If you are a network user with multiple databases, you can also enter a global message that appears for all users in all databases at your site.
• PropertyBoss now supports the ability to create a global message when an emergency work order exists in a database. This message will display to all users in all databases. When the work order status changes to a non-emergency status, the message is automatically removed.
• A new field, Last Contacted Date, was added to the Prospect Navigator to allow you to write reports based on the last contact date of a prospect.
• Users with standalone systems can now use all the features of PropertyBoss Security including defining multiple users with different security rights. Because it is a standalone system only one person at a time can log into PropertyBoss.
• A new filter button was added to the QuickPay and the Tax Credits Recertification windows. This filter option enables you to narrow down the list based on a filter you define.
• (Available in 9.04a) For Residential Property Managers, you can now choose to not print the Tenant contact information on the Work Order print for Owners.
• (Available in 9.04a) Google Mapping of Properties. From the RentRoll Navigator you can select a list of properties and select to have the list displayed on a single Google Map.

Tax Credit Compliance

• PropertyBoss now supports the Missouri Tenant Income Certification (TIC) form.
• PropertyBoss now supports the West Virginia compliance forms.
• Florida now requires that their Word and Excel compliance forms have protection from changes enabled for the non mail merged sections of the forms. PropertyBoss now supports Mail-merged protected Word and Excel compliance forms.

New Reports

• (Available in 9.04a) QuickBooks Checking Transaction Source Report. This new report will list all the checks in the QuickBooks checking account and trace the transaction back to the originating PropertyBoss transactions.
• (Available in 9.04a) New Property Vacancy Report. This report gives an abbreviated vacancy report that prints each available report in paragraph format including directions to the property.
• A565 - Trust Account Reconciliation. This report is designed for Residential Property Managers and gives totals organized by Owner and Property of the amounts held in Security Deposits, Prepaid Balances, and Owner Balances.
• A155 - Unit Rent Changes. This report is designed to give a history of all the rent changes on a Unit. Similar to the A154 Lease Rent Changes, this report does not separate the rent changes by lease. This report is helpful for jurisdictions that control the number of rent changes that can be made on a unit over time.
• B525 - Batch Summary Balancing Report displays deposit batches based on when the transactions were submitted vs the batch close date. This new report has greatly simplified the process of checking account reconciliation for some of our clients who process thousands of electronic payments per month.

PropertyBoss 2010 Release Notes 9.03

The following link has video demonstrations of a number of the enhancements identified below:

PropertyLists

PropertyLists provide users with the ability to define a subset of properties and give the subset a name. Some examples of PropertyLists include all properties for a specific owner, all properties managed by a specific agent, or all properties in a price range.

When a PropertyList is selected, all of PropertyBoss including the RentRoll Merlin, Owner Merlin, Tenant Merlin, PropertyBoss Today, and reports will only reflect the properties on the PropertyList.

Users can create an unlimited number of PropertyLists and PropertyLists can be defined as either private or public. A new security option controls who can maintain a public PropertyList.

Users can select one or more PropertyLists as currently active and select one or more PropertyList as their default.

Link Media to Transactions

PropertyBoss now enables you to link media to transactions. You can attach multiple media to a single transaction. For example, you can now scan invoices into PropertyBoss and attach the invoices to the bills. Owners/Residents can view these linked transactions on their web portal. There are two ways to associate media to a transaction:

• Using New Link Media option on the Tools Navigator - This option is especially useful for rapid, mass-handling of invoices. Users can scan a series of invoices to their media inbox. Then, the Link Media window is opened. By choosing Account=Transaction, users can view the scanned invoice on the left hand of the window and enter the corresponding transaction on the right hand of the screen. This method allows quick entry and filing of media for invoices. The media is sent to the web portal and can be viewed by the owner and resident.
• Using the Transaction Window - You can add media to a new or existing transaction by clicking the new Add Media hyperlink on the right side of the transaction window. If the transaction already has media associated, the hyperlink will be View Media which allows you to view or add additional media to the transaction.

Enhanced Media Module

This new optional module provides the following abilities:

• Create Media from Outlook E-mails - PropertyBoss scans selected folders in Outlook looking for e-mail messages related to vendor, owner, tenant, and prospect e-mail addresses that exist in the PropertyBoss database. When a matching address if found, PropertyBoss exports the e-mail content and attachments and associates the items e-mail as media in the PropertyBoss database. The e-mail is marked in Outlook with the Filed in PropertyBoss category. This feature is currently only available for non-hosted customers. A future enhancement will add support for hosted customers.
• Print Letters to Media - PropertyBoss now supports saving a copy of mail-merged letters as media for each recipient. The feature works with both the PropertyBoss internal word processor and with Microsoft Outlook. In the case of Microsoft Word, the mail merge process works as it does today. After you make modifications to the merged document and exit Word, PropertyBoss will ask you if you want to save copies of the document as media. If you answer yes, PropertyBoss will analyze the merged document and split the document to individual PDF files and automatically associate the document to the corresponding account.
• Save E-mails as Media - PropertyBoss now supports saving copies of e-mail messages and associated attachments as media for each e-mail sent. When an e-mail is sent, you are given the option of filing the e-mail and attachments as media.

New Optional Approval Process for Bills (in addition to Held status)

Before Release 9.03, PropertyBoss supported the ability to define by transaction name if a bill should be held when entered or only if the owner did not have enough funds to pay the bill. With 9.03, we have expanded the capabilities of PropertyBoss to support a two-stage approval process 1) The property manager can approve the work to be done and 2) the bookkeeper can determine when the bill is released for payment.

For each Charge to Owner/Association or Maintenance transaction in PropertyBoss you can define whether the bill requires work approval by the property manager and whether the bill is always held. Additional options allow you define specific days in the month to automatically hold and release bills.

The existing Release Held Bills window has been modified to support handling both Work Approval and/or Releasing of Bills.

New fields have been added to the Transaction Merlin to support reports on Approval and Held Bills. The new columns are: must_be_approved_flag, approved_by, approved_date

Ability to change Management Fees for special situations

The primary purpose of this enhancement is to support charging different management fees on Late Fees based on the day of the late fee. The rationale is that if you pay owners on the 12^th and the owner was not affected by the tenant paying the rent late, then the property management company keeps the late fee.

The Owner tab on the Property notebook now supports charging one management fees before a certain day of the month and a different management fee after a certain day of the month. PropertyBoss automatically charges the correct management fee based on the late fee post date.

The complexity of when payments are applied means there are situations where the post date does not always determine the management fee percentage. Therefore, we now give you the ability on transactions of type Rent/Fee Due and Late Fee to change the management fee percent. You can change this percent until the period is closed or underlying transactions are sent to accounting.

A new icon appears on the Transaction window next to the amount applied. When clicked a new window opens to allow you to adjust the management fee percentage. PropertyBoss handles any changes to tax amounts during the change.

Mass Changes on Repeating Charges

PropertyBoss now supports the ability to add, modify, or delete repeating charges on leases. This enhancement built on the existing ability to post charges to multiple leases. The option is available using the Post Multiple Charges option on the Actions button on the RentRoll Navigator. The new features allow you to:

• Add a new repeating charges to a selected group of leases or all leases.
• Modify an existing repeating charge (vendor/payee, amount, frequency, etc.) by specifying the name of the charge and the start date of the charge.
• Delete an existing repeating charge by specifying the name of the charge and the start date of the charge.

Improvements to Pay Owners

The Pay Owners window has been enhanced with the following changes:

• Some Property Management Companies hold back funds from the owners for Held Bills. A newcheckbox was added to allow users to subtract the Held Bills amount from the amount paid to owners. Checkbox defaults in from the last-used value and current setting applies to all users.
• If you specify an EFT payment transaction and one or more selected owners do not have EFT information on their account, an error message is given and no payments can be generated until EFT information is created for the owner.
• If you specify a non-EFT payment transaction and one or more selected owners have EFT information, a warning message is given and the user can choose to continue to pay the owners non-electronically.

Web Portals

• New Site Administration Portal allows Site Administrators to:
  • View applications received from the application portal
  • Log into Owner, Vendor, and Resident portals to see what the owner, vendor, or resident is seeing. Access is display only. You cannot make any changes to the information on the portal.
• Transaction Media now displays on the Resident and Owner Portals when the user drills down to a transaction.
• Customers can now prevent users from making a payment by specifying the Do Not Accept Tenant Payment option for the Tenant in PropertyBoss.

New Percent Field type for Unit and Lease Detail fields

Added support for custom fields of type Percent on the Unit and Lease Detail fields. This new field type supports up to six decimal positions. The new field type was added to support the new Mass Change Recurring Charges enhancement for customers who charge repeating amounts based on a percent of ownership.

Work Order Checklist now shows status of Work Orders

The current checklist display now shows the status of the existing work orders for the checklist.

Electronic Deposit Batch Improvements

When EFT payments are received from the web at the beginning of the month, but the payment was entered online in the prior month, PropertyBoss now creates deposit batches for the prior period to match the payment date.

Low Income Housing

The following enhancements were made to the Low Income Housing module:

• Added support for the new Georgia Tenant Income Certification (TIC) and Quarterly Report.
• Added support for updated Florida TIC and Compliance Report. This new report meets the security requirements of the Florida Housing Authority.
• Users now have the ability to rename a Project. Key Numbers (for TIC and Compliance Report) can now be synced with the Project name.

Report Enhancements

• A130 - Unit Availability and Pre-Leased Report - Report now displays the Date Ready value when all work orders have been completed for a checklist. The Date Ready is the latest completion date of work orders on the checklist.
• A154 Lease Rent Changes History Report - Report now allows selection of complete history of rent changes for a unit (all leases current and past) or only current leases (the default value).
• P113 Agent Activity Report - Report modified to allow report to summarize information by either the Assigned Agent or the Agent completing the activity.
• P110 Prospect Activity - Added a new section giving contact information for the Prospect and Contacts. Also added the ability to select prospects. Report now sorts in descending order by activity.
• A190- Late Payment Report - Added the ability to run this report as of a selected date.

Can now prevent Accepting a Payment

On the Tenant notebook, Misc tab, a new checkbox was added: 'Do Not Accept Tenant Payment'. When checked, users will receive an error message if they attempt to accept a payment from this tenenat.

Added New Security Action for Delete Repeating Charges

A new security option, Allow deletion of rent changes and repeating charges was created to limit who can delete the history of repeating charges on a lease. Previously any user who had Edit Lease Contract Terms privilege could also delete repeating charges and rent changes.

Find/Search Enhancement

On the Prospect, Tenant, Owner, Vendor, and RentRoll navigators, users can now select whether they want the search to position the cursor to the first row that matches the value the user types or to filter the displayed rows to rows where the name contains the typed value.

New Transacation Type that Charges Percent of Rent

Added new ability on the transaction definition window to default in an amount when the transaction is entered. The default amount can be a combination of a fixed amount and/or a percentage of the current rent amount. This feature supports pre-defining amounts for transactions like parking charges, cleaning fees, and eviction fees.

Web Activity Shows more information in PropertyBoss Today and Autopost

PropertyBoss Today and AutoPost now display more detail about Web Activity to enable users to locate specific activity. For example, Web Payments now who is making the payment and Work Orders show the Property affected.

PropertyBoss 2009 Release Notes 9.01 - 9.02

Enhancements to PropertyBoss Today (9.01)

The PropertyBoss Today Navigator has been totally rewritten to allow users to customize PropertyBoss Today to their specific needs.

• The Boxscores section has 25 to 50 boxscores depending upon your setup and industry you can display.
• Sites/Users can turn on/off boxscores. Each user can have a different set of boxscores they use.
• You can set up site-wide rules to color code the boxscore based on the boxscore value. For example, you could setup rules to highlight the Work Orders Days Open to yellow if days open > 5 and red if days open > 10.
• Mouse-over the boxscore to get help on the boxscore.
• Drill-down on the details of each boxscore by double-clicking the boxscore value.
• Depending upon the resolution you are running, there are 2 or 3 graphs that can be displayed. Each user can now choose which graph appears in each graph section.
• Weather Center - shows current conditions and three day forecast for your area.
• A number of graphs have been added:
  • Current Occupancy - By default shows a pie chart of occupancy by lease status. Drill down to the details of the values by clicking on the pie or legend.
  • Owner Balances - For Third-Party management companies, this bar graph shows the number of owners with balances < 0, < reserve, at 0/reserve amount, and positive. Drill down to the list of owners by clicking on a bar in the graph.
  • Prospect Activity - Shows an area graph of the prospects added during a period and the new leases signed during the period.
  • Work Order Group Graphs - For each work order group you have defined (e.g. Work Orders, Call Logging, Violation Tracking, etc.), the following graphs are available:
    • New by Status - Shows a bar chart of the new work orders/phone calls by month.
    • New by Type - Shows a bar chart of new work orders/phone calls by the user-defined type.
    • Time to Completion by Type - Shows a bar chart for the year with the average time to completion

New Package Tracking Module (9.02)

For Multi-Family, Student Living, and Senior Housing communities, PropertyBoss can now track packages from when they are delivered by the carrier (FedEx, USPS, UPS, etc.) to who picked up the package. The Package Tracking module with web interface is only available for customers hosted by PropertyBoss, though many of its features could be emulated with a work order group. Some of the features of this new module include:

• Web-based interface tied directly to your PropertyBoss database provides real-time lease and contact information.
• Web-based mass entry of packages enable users to specify information about the packages received including fields like carrier, size, color, and where the package was stored.
• Users can print sign-off sheets for all packages
• Residents are automatically sent E-mail/text notification of received packages and reminders when packages have not been picked up.
• Each site can customize the email notifications sent to customers.
• Residents receive notifications on the Resident Portal if they have a package waiting.
• Automatic Return-to-Sender options for packages not picked up by a certain date are available
• Historical record of packages received and picked up is kept in a Package Tracking work order group within PropertyBoss.

New Inspections Module (9.02)

PropertyBoss now supports an integrated Inspections module that supports both Administrative and Resident inspections. Some of the features of this new module include:

• Each site can define an unlimited list of items to inspect. Each item can have a separate list of pre-defined values like Good, Damaged, Dirty, etc.
• There is a new inspection report that can be printed for manual inspections.
• Each site can define its own set of statuses for the inspections.
• PropertyBoss can maintain the current state of the unit. For instance, if the carpet is listed as having a cigarette burn, the current state is copied to the new inspection.
• Create inspections to be filled out by the Resident or by the Administrator.
• Attach scanned in images to inspections.
• The inspection process begins by highlighting a series of rows in the RentRoll Navigator and clicking Actions Create Inspection.
• The last inspection date for the unit or lease can be displayed on RentRoll.
• If you are a hosted client, the Resident portal enables residents to fill out resident inspections online. Once the resident marks the inspection as complete, the Administrator processes the inspection and creates maintenance work orders. The resident can view the status of their inspection and see the status and disposition of related maintenance work orders for the inspection
• The Administrator can mark multiple lines on the Inspection and click a button to transfer the inspection details to a maintenance work order. The maintenance work order is tied back to the original inspection.
• If you are maintaining the current state of units, when the maintenance work order is completed, the user is prompted to enter the new condition of the inspected item.
• For Administrative inspections, PropertyBoss allows you to enter damage fee amounts on each inspected item and automatically create a damage fee to charge the resident for the damage.
• If you are maintaining the current state of units, a new tab on the unit notebook displays the current state of the unit.
• The inspections and related work orders can be viewed by the Owners on the Owner portal.

Work Order Enhancements (9.02)

Based on your user security, from a work order you can now create work orders directly into any other work order group. The relationship between the work orders is maintained. For example, a resident calls and you are recording the call in the Call Logging group. The call is a request for maintenance work to be done. You simply click on New and select Create New Maintenance Work Order to record what work is to be done. The two work orders are related. Later when the resident calls back, you can trace the original call from the Maintenance work order and from the original Call you can see what work orders were created.

Other 9.01 Enhancements

• Added new setup option for the number of days to post payments early. This feature is designed for clients using NACHA files for automatic drafts from residents. Some banks require a minimum two-day processing period. This option allows you to create the PropertyBoss payments early and create the NACHA file and send it early. The payments in PropertyBoss are still dated when the money should be drafted from the resident’s account.
• Added support for sending NACHA files to CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce).
• Modified the RentRoll Navigator to allow queries to show historical leases. By default, the RentRoll Navigator only shows current and future leases.
• Rent Schedules now allow you to specify a range of dates for the schedule. On the first month on the schedule, Rent posts on the schedule start date. This change support student housing properties where the contract runs from August 28 – May 15. PropertyBoss also calculates and displays the physical and fiscal days in the schedule.
• The Resident portal now supports residents entering and maintaining recurring draft/credit card charges. Previously this feature was only available for clients hosted by PropertyBoss.
• If QuickBooks classes are enabled. Property Revenue transactions are now sent to QuickBooks using the property as the class.

Other 9.02 Enhancements

• The PropertyBoss Registration window now supports the automatic download and update of registration numbers from the PropertyBoss Help Desk.
• New A578 Report Accounts Receivable Summary. This report was written primarily for companies that manage Associations to hand to the Board of Directors. It reports in either summary or detail format any transactions that are currently due.
• A222 - Profit & Loss by Property. This new report designed for the property manager and selectable by property shows a breakdown by transaction name of the profit and loss for each selected property. This information was previously available on the Property Notebook and can now be printed for multiple properties at the same time.
• To simplify the balancing of PropertyBoss and QuickBooks, we modified PropertyBoss to change the Bill Date to the current date in PropertyBoss when a Held Bill is released. The original bill date was added as a comment in the transaction.
• PropertyWeb now supports the ability for prospects to fill in a complete application online including online payment of the application fee. The entire application data entered by the prospect is sent to PropertyBoss and appears on the Prospect Notebook. The application as entered by the prospect is available as a hyperlink on the Prospect Notebook.
• On all custom fields, PropertyBoss now supports entry of web addresses. An icon will appear for all web address to allow users to click to access the website.
• Added option to Deposits Held report so users can select to only show deposits that need to be returned.
• Added options to work order group setup to allow sites to determine which work orders groups are shown to users on the resident, owner, and vendor portals
• Work Order Merlin - Added tenant phone numbers, elapsed time, parent account, parent property, parent unit, parent lease start date, parent owner and last changed timestamp fields to the Work Order Merlin
• In prior releases, the budgeting module was not available if the Owners feature was activated. The Budgeting Module is now an available for all industries. Activating this module allows you to create multiple properties for properties you select. Budgets are always from the perspective of the property owner; not the property manager.
• PropertyBoss now fully supports the Canadian NACHA formats enabling customers to transmit files containing both drafts for Tenant Payments and outgoing payments to Residents and Owners.
• PropertyBoss now supports creating test zero dollar NACHA files for both Canada and the US. These test files enable you to validate routing/account numbers for all your residents and owners.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 8.03

Work Order Module Modifications

The Work Order system in PropertyBoss was totally re-written to support many requested features from Clients and to support the varying requirements of the different industries PropertyBoss supports.

PropertyBoss now provides you with the ability to create an unlimited number of work order groups with totally different setup, processes, and display properties. You can create different work order groups for Move-In/ Make Ready processes, Call Tracking groups, Violations Tracking, etc.

Release 8.03 delivers four default groups:

• Work Order Group - for maintenance-related work orders, this group contains all the converted work orders from Release 8.02. All setup and security settings are based on your existing settings in Release 8.02.
• Call Logging - a default Call Logging group is created for every industry. The purpose of this group is to track incoming/outgoing phone calls. This group is delivered marked as Obsolete. Security settings are copied from the Work Order group. The work orders are called Phone Calls. The statuses, types, and short descriptions all represent typical verbiage for tracking the status of phone calls. If you want to activate this group, open Setup Preferences -> Work Orders and edit the Call Logging group and uncheck the obsolete flag. You should review the security settings after activating the group.
• Violations Tracking - This group is delivered for databases where the industry is set to Associations. The work orders are called Violations. The purpose of this group is to track the status of a homeowner violation. Standard Checklists provide a workflow for the Violations process. Security settings are copied from the Work Order group. If your database industry is not set to Associations and you would like to use the Violations Tracking group, go to Setup Preferences ' Work Order Groups and click Import Work Order Group. Import the group definition file located in c:\PropertyBoss Data\Language\Association\ WOGROUP_Violations.xml.
• Architectural Review - This group is delivered for databases where the industry is set to Associations. The work orders are called Architectural. The purpose of this group is to track the status of an Architectural Review process. Standard Checklists provide a workflow for the Architectural Review process. Security settings are copied from the Work Order group. If your database industry is not set to Associations and you would like to use the Violations Tracking group, go to Setup Preferences ' Work Order Groups and click Import Work Order Group. Import the group definition file located in c:\PropertyBoss Data\Language\Association\ WOGROUP_Architectural Review.xml.

Each work order group has totally separate setup options including:

• Work Orders can be called by different names. For example, the Call Logging Group and the work orders can be called Phone Calls.
• Different Statuses
• Different Security settings by user
• Different Checklists which represent a workflow to be executed (formerly called processes)
• Different Types
• Different Custom Detail Fields
• Different Repeated Work Orders
• Different Short Descriptions
• Different Sign-off forms
• Different Numbering schemes
• Different Navigators with different Merlin Reports

The following list includes some of the other major modifications delivered with the Work Order Modifications:

• Each Work Order Navigator has graphs for tracking total Work Orders by Month, Type, Status, and Time to Completion.
• Each work order group has an alphabetic prefix for numbering work orders. All existing work orders have been renumbered with the default W prefix (for example W0005611).
• Follow-up or related work orders can be created with the same work order number and a unique, automatically-generated suffix (for example W0005611-A).
• Checklists (formerly Processes) have been emphasized and simplified. All work orders created from a checklist have the same base work order number with different suffixes for each step. You can now create checklists with required and optional steps. When implementing a checklist, you can determine which steps are created immediately. At any time during the life of the checklist, you can create additional work orders on the checklist from the predefined steps. You can also add additional steps to the active checklist during its execution.
• Added ability for users to define their own work order types. Whether the work order displays on the Resident and Owner Portal is now controlled by the work order type assigned to the work order.
• The Work Order Detail report now prints the list of transactions associated to the work order. On the Tenant copy, transactions related to the Prospect are printed. On the Owner copy, transactions related to the Property, Unit, or Owner are printed.
• PropertyBoss now captures a timestamp for the start and completion of work orders. The Time to Completion is calculated for each work order.
• New Security options provide control over who can see each group, can enter work orders, update work orders, complete work orders, delete work orders, etc. Some clients do not allow work orders to be completed in a closed period. For customers who do not track completions as part of their closing process, a new security option allows users to complete work orders regardless of the accounting close date.

Property Work Order Comments

• Added two new fields on the Property Notebook to handle property-specific comments for use on work orders. The first field displays when a new work order is entered for the property. The second field prints on the work order for the vendor. Prospects
• Self-building lists defined on the Guest Card/Interview no longer show duplicate entries. Lease-Related Changes
• PropertyBoss now supports the ability to move-out a tenant on the last day of a closed period without having to open the closed period. Any transactions that are reversed and prorated are created in the current period.
• Prior to this release, PropertyBoss only handled pro-rates on repeating charges if the schedule for the repeating charge matched the rent schedule. Now, PropertyBoss handles prorating on move-out repeating charges on different schedules (annual, quarterly, weekly, etc) than the rent schedule of the lease.
• PropertyBoss now supports a global option to never prorate charges on move- in/move-out and transfer. If selected, PropertyBoss charges the full amount of a charge on move-in/move-out and transfer.
• Extensive enhancements were made to Rent Schedules to enable users to implement partial schedules during transfers or to fix problems when the wrong rent schedule has been implemented. A new rent schedule can be applied even if the existing rent schedule overlaps the dates of the new rent schedule. Only the un-applied scheduled changes will be applied. Also, if the period is closed, users are given the option to open the closed period (with a supervisor override) or to apply the changes after the closed period.

Owner Statements

• PropertyBoss now shows the 100% Lease-up Fee amount on the Owner Statement. In previous releases, the amount was not shown if the lease-up fee was 100% of the first month's rent.
• On both the O260 and O261 Owner Statements, you can now choose to hide reversed/reversing transactions if the transactions both occurred within the report period. This feature enables you to hide corrections made to Owners' accounts if the corrections do not affect the Owners' starting balance from the previous period. Deposit Batches
• Each Batch Type definition now has a field which limits which types of transactions can be placed on the batch. The PropertyBoss transaction windows will now prevent mixing Tenant, Owner, and Property/Owner Revenue transactions on the same batch at time of posting instead of waiting until the batch is closed.
  ***To take advantage of this feature, you will need to edit the list of batch types in Setup Preferences -> Processing Options -> Edit List of Batch types and assign each batch a Restrict To value.***

Electronic Payments

• The logic that determines if a payment is a duplicate was improved to prevent duplicate messages in situations where two roommates both make electronic payments for the same amount on the same day.
• PropertyBoss now support recurring electronic drafts against an Owner's account.
• When defining a recurring payment from a Tenant, a new option enables you to draft the current balance of the Tenant's account instead of a fixed amount.< /li>
• When defining a recurring payment from a Tenant/Owner, a new option enables you to choose whether the fixed draft amount should be increased to cover the service fee charged for the transaction. For drafts for the current balance, the service fee is calculated and charged before calculating the amount of the payment.
• PropertyBoss now supports using industry-standard NACHA files for both drafting Resident/Owner accounts and for bank transfers to Resident/Owner accounts. As part of this enhancement the PropertyPay and PropertyBanking modules were integrated into a new E-Payments module.
• PropertyBoss now supports Canadian NACHA file formats in addition to the US NACHA file format.
• If the Merchant Gateway returns an error code of 5, a severe error occurred processing the transaction through the Merchant Gateway. PropertyBoss now stops the submission of any additional transactions through the Merchant Gateway until a user calls the Merchant Service Provider and verifies the status of the submitted transaction with the error. The error can be cleared by entering YES when the next transactions is processed. When the error is cleared, PropertyBoss logs the time and user who cleared the error.

Utilities/Word/Excel

• The Mass Backup feature in PropertyBoss Server no longer requires the WinZip® program for creating compressed backups. An internal zip utility now provides this ability.
• QuickFind now defaults to the last search criteria.
• PropertyBoss's integration with Microsoft Word was re-written to support more than 255 columns. Some clients have created more than 150 custom fields on properties, units, and leases resulting in this need. As part of this rewrite mail merge now uses text files for mail merge instead of Microsoft Excel since the Word-Excel combination is limited to 255 columns. Mail Merge is also much quicker since we no longer use Excel.
• The Export to Excel feature was enhanced to support saving Excel documents in either 2007 or 1997-2003 format.
• From the Units and Leases Navigator, users can now right-click on a Property/Unit/Lease to create work orders, call logs, etc.
• A number of enhancements were made to the Mail Merge capabilities of the Mortgage module including adding mail merge fields for Loan Principal Paid, Loan Interest Paid, and Loan Escrow Paid.

Global Search

• The Global Search capability was moved to the Navigator. Global Search enables network and hosted clients to quickly search for any type of Name, Units, or Transactions across multiple databases. After finding the information, you can right-click an item to edit the Tenant/Owner/Vendor/ Prospect/Transaction, enter a new transaction, or enter a new work order, call log, etc. All actions are controlled by the security levels of the user in each of the databases.

Reports

• The A130 Unit Availability and A135 Unit Availability and Preleased reports were modified to better handle the interaction of Actual Move-Out Date and Responsibility Ends Date. A unit is now listed consistently on the two reports if the Responsibility Ends Date is later than the Actual Move-out Date.
• The A494 Telephone List was modified for Homeowner Association databases to handle language and industry-specific requirements.
• The A510 Delinquents and Prepaid report now supports an optional capability to include Security Deposits as delinquent charges.
• The O498 Owner Rolodex Cards, A498 Tenant Rolodex Cards, and V498 Vendor Rolodex Cards were modified to include e-mail addresses.

PropertyWeb

• Work Orders entered in PropertyWeb and created in PropertyBoss now include a timestamp when the Resident/Owner entered the work order on the web.
• PropertyBoss clients have been very enthusiastic in adopting the media linking capabilities and the ability to display these documents to Tenants and Owners on the web. We now have customers who have linked in excess of 100,000 documents/images to PropertyBoss. In 8.03, we have re-written the upload capabilities to better handle the volume of documents we now transfer to PropertyWeb.

Industry Specific Changes - Associations

• Several reports were modified to handle industry-specific language and reporting requirements.
• Added Change Ownership capability - similar to the Move Wizard, the Change ownership window allows you to quickly change the Ownership of a Property.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 8.02

Late Fees

• PropertyBoss has significantly revamped the ability to post and track late fees. The Late Fee functionality in PropertyBoss has been upgraded to allow various late fee options to be defined at each Property/Unit/Lease level. Specific Lease/Prospect transactions can be marked to indicate that late fees are to be assessed when a charge is past due. The late fee method can be selected at the Property, Unit, or Lease level and allows selection of the method in which the late fees are to be applied: Initial Charge, Initial Charge + Daily Charge, Initial Charge + Monthly Charge, Initial Charge + Charge Specific Days, Use Ranges - Initial, Use Ranges - Daily, Use Ranges - Monthly, or Manual/No Late Fees. Late fees can now be assessed based on a minimum balance, an ongoing balance, and fee ranges can be set up with various penalty tiers. Users can now set late fees up for a multi-unit property at the property level and have all corresponding units reflect the same late fee structure. Prior to executing the AutoPost for Late Fees, the transactions to be posted can be previewed by double-clicking on the late fee line.

Mass Update

• Users now have several new options, such as increasing default deposit amounts, applying or removing rent schedules, and the mass application of the new late fees.

Property Notebook

• Custom fields can now be defined at the property level for a multi-unit property. Fields can be defined as either for the property itself, or for all units at the property.

Property Banking

• PropertyBanking now supports Canadian clients.

PropertyConsolidated

• This new module allows networked or web-based users to run one report across multiple databases. The report can be run weekly, and provides data on occupancy, leasing & renewal detail, prospect activity, work orders, exposure to vacancy, and collections. The report is delivered in Excel - when the module is purchased, a spreadsheet is delivered to the user for report generation.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 8.01

Vista

• PropertyBoss is now Microsoft Windows Vista compatible. Vista creates directories called the Virtual Store for any file updated in the program files directory if User Access Control (UAC) is on. If UAC is off, Vista ignores the Virtual Store. To prevent the problems with the Virtual Store, PropertyBoss files are now delivered to two directories:
  • Application files that are never changed by the user default to the c:\Program Files\PropertyBoss directory.
  • User-modified files including databases, INI files, log files, temp files, media, etc. are installed to the c:\PropertyBoss directory.
  Upon installation, PropertyBoss will automatically move any existing files found in the application directory or virtual store to the new c:\PropertyBoss directory. The PropertyBoss Server utility now runs with elevated privileges to make system changes needed for the server.

Installation Process

• Enhanced the process of creating a new database. Customers can now send information required for registration of the database to Client Care directly from PropertyBoss.

Lease Payment Priorities

• The Define Transactions window for Leases/Prospects now allows for review and setting of payment priorities for all charges at once. Payment priorities can now be set to one through nine.

Holding and Releasing Bills

• The ability to prioritize Owner-paid bills has been enhanced. Options are now available to allow you to prioritize the payment of mortgages, utility bills, and maintenance by defining payment priorities or by selectively holding bills for specific periods. A new window allows review and setting of payment priorities and hold conditions for all owner bills at once. Some features of this new capability include:
  • The payment priority scale has been enhanced to allow rankings from one to nine.
  • Transactions can be automatically held based on the rules defined by the user. Holding preferences are available based on date or if funds are available.
  • Lower priority bills can also be held if a higher priority bill is being held.
• A 'Held Bills' button has been added to the Owner Navigator for review and payment of held bills. Bills are presented in Payment order. Icons show which bills have funds available for payment and which are being held because of higher priority bills. You can search and apply filters from this window to pay individual bills, or choose to auto-select to pay all of the bills.

Work Orders

• Added ability to allow linking of multiple transactions to work orders. You can now reference a work order from a transaction, or you can see related transactions on a work order under a new 'Transactions' tab. You can pull up and modify transactions from within the work order notebook. You can assign, change assignment or remove assignment information from a transaction. The 'Transaction Search' Merlin has also been modified to allow the user to search transactions by work order.
• Users can now review held bills from the work order notebook. Selecting the new 'Release Held Bills' button allows the user to view transaction amount, date, vendor, owner, property, and remaining balance for any held transactions, and select which bills can now be paid.

Global Search

• A new Global Search option has been added. For PropertyHost and networked users, the QuickFind navigator now has the ability to search across multiple databases for names (tenants, prospects, vendors), phone numbers, unit numbers, email address, check number, transaction name, or transaction amount. Double-clicking on a row from your search results will take you directly into that database.

PropertyPay

• QuickFind has been enhanced to allow searching of transactions buy either the last four digits of the account number or the first five digits of the account number. This option should simplify finding transactions when reconciling NSF transactions.
• EFT Service Fees now automatically apply to open amounts on payments.

PropertyEmail

• A number of changes have been made to enhance this feature of PropertyBoss. Because many ISP's only allow 100 or less e-mails to be sent per hour, new setup options allow the throttling of e-mails sent from PropertyBoss. When the threshold is hit, PropertyBoss will wait for the designated time before resuming sending e-mails. When a communication error occurs, PropertyEmail how reconnects and attempts to resend the e-mail.
• We have replaced the existing PDF printer with a new product that is Vista compatible and creates smaller PDF files. This new printer driver will need to be installed on each machine.
• The Tenant Statements and Owner Statements were re-written to provide a better log of activity. In addition, options now allow for a copy of the statement to be automatically linked to the media tab of the Owner/Tenant notebook. If automatically linked, the statement is available to the Owner/Tenant in the PropertyWebHQ portal.

Reports

• O260 Owners Statement Summary - The report was modified to show if there is a future lease on the property. In addition, Payments to the Owner are now shown on the report.

Post Multiple Charges

• The Rent Roll Navigator Action to post multiple charges now allows for the posting of Late Fees. This enhancement simplifies the posting of Late Fees for clients with complex late fee conditions.

PropertyMedia

• The Media tab on the notebooks has been redesigned to show more documents at once. Media is now sorted and grouped by the modified date of the file. Media related to marketing of a property/unit is shown in the order it displays on your website.

Security Changes

• PropertyBoss Security has been enhanced to include custom detail fields. Based on the user/role, you can allow/prevent the updating of specific custom fields. This option is available for all custom fields on all notebooks.

PropertyLockBox

• PropertyLockBox has been enhanced to allow the import of Tenant Payments from a tab-delimited file you receive from you bank.

PropertyCert

• The FHFC report now shows leases based on the later of the expected/actual recertification date instead of the actual recertification date.

Letters

• All Microsoft Word merge letters are now saved to a \Letters subdirectory under the media folder. Existing letters are automatically moved to this location when the Edit Letters window is opened. This change prevents users from linking letters to locations not accessible to other users.

PropertyBoss 2008

PropertyBoss 2008 offers a number of exciting enhancements. The examples below are highlights of the features added to PropertyBoss. Review the notes for each specific release for more detail.

Vista

• The installation routine has been enhanced to make the installation experience easier for Vista users.

Holding and Releasing Bills

• PropertyBoss now allows for the user to prioritize the payment of charges for a lease, and for the release of bills paid by owners. Options are now available to allow the user to prioritize the payment of mortgages, utility bills, and maintenance by selectively holding bills for specific periods. The payment priority scale has been upgraded to allow rankings from 1 to 9.
• Transactions can be automatically held based on the rules applied by the user. Holding preferences are available based on date or if funds are available. Lower priority bills can also be held based on a bill of higher priority being held.
• Owner navigator now has 'Held Bills' button that allows for review and payment of held bills. You can search and apply filters from this window to pay individual bills, or choose auto-select to pay all of the bills.

Work Orders

• Added ability to allow linking of multiple transactions to work orders. You can now reference a work order from a transaction, or you can see related transactions on a work order under a new 'Transactions' tab. You can pull up and modify transactions from within the work order notebook. You can assign, change assignment or remove assignment information from a transaction. The 'Transaction Search' Merlin has also been modified to allow the user to search transactions by work order.
• Users can now review held bills from the work order notebook. Selecting the new 'Release Held Bills' button allows the user to view transaction amount, date, vendor, owner, property, and remaining balance for any held transactions, and select which bills can now be paid.

Global Search

• For PropertyHost and networked users, the QuickFind navigator now has the ability to search across multiple databases for names (tenants, prospects, vendors), phone numbers, unit numbers, email address, check number, transaction name, or transaction amount. Double-clicking on a row from your search results will take you directly into that database.

Reports

• O260 Owners Statement Summary - modified to show future leases
• Print options have been modified to include publish to website for owner/tenant statements, and to have a pdf file automatically added to the media tab of the respective notebook.

PropertyMedia

• The media tab has been redesigned to show documents more efficiently. Media are now sorted and grouped by the modified date of the file. Media related to marketing can be displayed independently of dated group breaks.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 7.04 & 7.05

Database Purge Process

• Added 'Database Purge' option under Database Utilities. User can create an archive database for historical data reference in order to optimize the size of their production database. Once data has been safely stored in the archive file, user can set a purge date for their production database in order to eliminate unnecessary historical data.

Language Translation Tool

• Added ability to customize terms throughout PropertyBoss in order to match your market segment (ex. for Student Housing you can have all tenants be referred to as students). Multiple languages are delivered with PropertyBoss, as well as the ability for the user to create their own. Reports can now be modified by the user to reflect the exact verbage they want to deliver.

Auto Post

• AutoPost transactions are now separated into three separate groups each of which can be restricted to specific users:
  • Autopost Scheduled which processes scheduled transactions including Rent, Late Fees, Repeating charges.
  • AutoPost Web Activity which processes web activity from the website including Payments, Work Orders, Registration requests.
  • AutoPost EFT/ACH which submits the electronic payment transactions for processing.
• Users can now view and post transactions by type. In order to just post 'Rent Due' transactions for example, you can double-click the line showing '(9) Rent Due'.
• In the lease notebook on the 'Register' tab, there is now an 'AutoPost Transactions' button that will run AutoPost for just that lease.
• Security settings have been modified to allow the administrator to restrict users based on any of these new options.

PropertyBanking

• Standard NACHA files are created for electronic outgoing payments that you upload to your bank, i.e. for deposit refunds or for payments to owners.

PropertyWebPay

• The payor on the transactions coming from PropertyWebPay is set to the name entered on the web page instead of the Primary Tenant.

PropertyWebHQ

• The website replication logic was re-designed to improve replicating client data to their websites. The new replication process has numerous benefits including:
  • Databases can be replicated automatically five times daily.
  • The automatic scheduling of replication does not require a scheduled job on the server.
  • Replication can be manually triggered to occur on any workstation rather than only from the server computer.
  • New Releases do not require the database to be resent.
  • The replication process is self-correcting. If interrupted, replication picks up where it left off when it is re-started.
• New options are available for displaying images such as ForSale, ForRent, MoveInSpecial, etc. on your website property listing. You can also enter special text for each listing.

Reports

• O187 Property Profit And Loss - added option to hide tax id number.
• A541 and A542 Recap Journal Entry Reports - now tracks Charge to Owner/Assoc and Credit to Owner/Assoc.
• New Report - A353 Rent Splits Billed - shows the rent splits billed on an accrual basis.
• A148 Lease Statement - option 'Hide Reversals' added to Lease Statement Criteria. If selected, the statement will not show reversed/reversing transactions. Your choice becomes your default choice for later printouts.
• Work Order Prints for Vendors/Owners/Residents - The current tenant now prints on the work order if the work order was entered at the unit level.

Merlins

• Tenant Navigator - added First Name, Last Name
• Transaction Search - added Primary Tenant

Additional Lease Date Fields

• Planned move-in/actual move-in datesare tracked for each lease separate from the lease start date.
• When a resident moves out early, you can now move them out and the resident is still responsible for charges through a new date called the Financial Responsibility Ends date. This date is assigned during the move out process. The date defaults to the end of the current rental period. During the interim period, the lease status is set to Past-Responsible. This new feature enables property managers to choose whether or not to pro-rate rent and other charges upon move-out.

Security Changes

• Network users now are able to have changes made to their password update all of their databases, rather than having to make the change manually in each database.
• For PropertyHost customers, PropertyBoss now accepts either their network password used to log into PropertyBoss or the password defined in PropertyBoss
• Test Mode - databases can be classified as either 'Production Mode' or 'Test Mode'. Test Mode forbids submission of EFT/ACH transactions, download of web activity, submission of collections, etc. and is activated automatically if the database is moved/backed up/restored onto any other computer to prevent accidental activities from being performed on the test/backup database.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 7.03

QuickBooks

• Modified QuickBooks interface to block voiding or deleting payments after they have been sent to QuickBooks.
• Users can select QuickBooks-Simple or QuickBooks-Detail for their accounting file. The QuickBooks Simple format minimizes the time and effort required to set up the interface, and allows for greater flexibility in changing transactions.

Transactions

• Warning issued if a payment transaction is entered with a reference number that already exists in the database.

Reports

• A130 - Unit Availability Report – modified to allow sorting by unit type.
• A146 - Statement-Invoice Format – upgraded to allow more detail on comments to show.
• A166 - Property Revenue Report – modified to include data from vacant units, and skip inactive units.
• A530 - Collections and Deposits Activity Report – enhanced report to generate more quickly.
• A541 - Recap Journal Entries Report & A542 Recap Journal Entries Report (Cash Method) – modified reports to handle funds received from owners.

PropertyCert

• Added flag to Project Options to allows users to not enforce the Available Unit Rule.

Unit Notebook

• Unit address will default to City, State and Zip code of Property to eliminate user’s duplication of efforts.

Navigators

• RentRoll Navigator has been modified to handle displaying roommate information more quickly.
• Owner Navigator only displays current properties and eliminates inactive properties from the list.

PropertyPay

• Added logic to prevent duplicate payments from being sent.
• Electronic payment transactions run through AutoPost are now easier to track. EFT Log has been modified to show who, when, on what computer, what results, and whether the execution was related to autopost.

General

• Installation routine has been modified to fit QuickBooks Silver Developer standard. New installations and upgrades now run more smoothly and with less complications.

PropertyLoan

• PropertyLoan tracks principal, interest and escrow for a mortgage loan, generates amortization statements, calculates payoffs, and records the payments received.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 7.02

PropertyBanking

• You can now designate between Individuals or Companies in AutoPost in making electronic payments to owners and tenants.

PropertyPay

• Added 'Reverse Due To Chargeback' option to Actions menu for Electronic Payment Transactions if a tenant has insufficient funds for a scheduled bank draft.

Reports

• A148 - Lease Statement - option to print in large font.
• A491 - Tenant List - Detail Report - shows pictures of tenants.

Merlin

• Tenant Navigator - Lease History Reports can be created in the tenants navigator that shows a full lease history as a separate field.
• Rent Roll Navigator - Added primary tenant fields; reports show details like primary first name, last name, birthday, phone number, email address, etc.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 7.01

Navigators

• QuickPay now shows details about batch Type and Description

PropertyMedia

• PropertyMedia organizes and categorizes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, images, videos, and e-mails. Media can be brought in from digital cameras and quickly linked to the associated entity in PropertyBoss. Basic image editing software is provided directly in PropertyBoss for preparing images for publication. PropertyBoss automatically organizes the media for you and creates the necessary links. Images are automatically optimized for display and viewing within PropertyBoss and your website. All documents are available from any workstation in your office. We have extended this capability to allow you to associate Media on most notebooks including Properties, Units, Leases, Tenants, Vendors, Owners, and Work Orders.
• Subsequent releases will provide a number of value-added features for capture, scanning, e-mail capture, archiving, and publishing. Clients can eliminate paper and filing issues, simplify the management of media, and search for documents and other media types.

Reports

• A310 - Suite Occupancy Report - New report shows current leases and held units, also shows subtotals for units occupied and by gender
• A260 - Financial Aid Activity - New report shows Financial Aid Transactions and their current status for date range selected. Report can be sorted with subtotals by Payee, Student, or Month.
• A510 - Delinquents And Prepaids Report - modified to now show Financial Aid information
• A140 - Expiration List - enhanced report to show leases with multiple expiration dates on separate lines
• A530 - Collections and Deposits Activity Report - enhanced report to account for income received from prospects. Also added itemized transactions for prospects.
• A156 - Renewal Report - added ability to sort by renewal date
• A410 - Rent Roll Report - enhanced report to reflect occupancy rates with overlapping leases
• A541 - Recap Journal Entries Report and A542 Recap Journal Entries Report (Cash Method) - added ability to run report with multiple transaction sets
• A496 - Tenant Birthday List - added ability to refine report to only residents
• O260 - Owner Statement Summary - modified report to allow hiding of tenant names
• All Owner Reports - added ability to hide owner tax ID number

Letters

• For Suite Level support added merge fields for All roommates in the suite.
• New Financial Aid Expected MailMerge field available fields in Letters To Tenants About A Lease
• Added ability to automatically post a transaction recording when an email is sent to a tenant or an owner

Notebooks

• All Notebooks now resize to show the maximum amount of information possible based on the window size.
• Added ability to view deposits already received from a prospect when creating a new lease. The Lease Deposits window now shows deposit amounts already received.
• Notebooks all now have Media tabs for linking documents.

Setup/General

• A message is now given when a duplicate invoice number has been entered for a vendor
• Extended Tenant Email field beyond 31 characters, now can contain up to 255 characters
• Added ability to import owner transactions
• Increased size of Text Edit window

Tasks/Work Orders

• Modified work orders so that if a database only contains one property, work orders assigned to a property, unit or lease will autofill the property

Merlin

• Gender and Roommate fields are now available on the RentRoll Merlin reports
• Added ability to run Merlin reports to show data regarding Financial Aid Activity
• Added Renew By Date to Rent Roll Merlin Reports
• Added Completion Comments from Work Orders to show on Work Order Navigator Merlin reports
• Added ability to calculate Market Cost Per Square Foot and Lease Cost Per Square Foot on Rent Roll Navigator Merlin Reports
• All Merlin reports have been modified to show thumbnail images. Example - tenant pictures, unit pictures.
• Added Prospect fields to Work Order Navigator Merlin reports

PropertyWebHQ

• Handles multiple media types.
• Prospect portal shows images and any other media types associated in PropertyBoss.
• Resident portal shows any media (documents, images, etc.) attached to the Tenant, Lease, or Work Order.
• Owner Portal shows any media attached to the Owner, Property/Unit, or Work Order.

Student Housing Enhancements

• New Suite Level Support Capabilities - This new capability adds several new options that simplify the management of suites at a Student Housing property. Rent Roll Merlin has been modified to support viewing the Roommates and Roommate contact information for units in the same suite. On the Lease Notebook, you can now view tasks for all units in the suite and quickly navigate between the students in the different rooms within a suite. Mail Merge capability has been enhanced to support letters containing contact information (names, address, phone numbers, and email) of a student's roommates.
• New Unit Gender Support - Units can now be designated as 'Male', 'Female', 'Coed', or 'Switchable'. For example, if the units in the suite are designated as 'Male', you cannot hold the unit or move in a female. If the unit is designated as 'Switchable', the gender is dictated by the first person who is moved into a unit or who holds the unit. With the new reports and fields in Merlin, you can view and manage occupancy by gender and compare current versus future requirements.
• Financial Aid Tracking - PropertyBoss now supports specialized Note transactions to track Expected Financial Aid receipts. This capability supports both a Late Fee Grace period and partial receipts of Financial Aid. Reports and Merlin allow the reported of late financial aid and the amount of financial aid expected in a given period.
• Rent Schedules - added ability to define custom schedules for irregular rent payments. Example -students who only make 4 payments during a six month semester. Defined schedules are saved and can be applied or removed to leases or groups of leases.
• Room Transfer Requests - Added ability for students to fill out date-specific online forms for room transfers between semesters and feed back into PropertyBoss

PropertyBoss 2007

PropertyBoss 2007 offers a number of exciting enhancements. The examples below are highlights of the features added to PropertyBoss. Review the notes for each specific release for more detail.

PropertyMedia

• features for capture, scanning, e-mail capture, archiving, and publishing
• eliminate paper and filing, simplify the management of media, and search for documents and other media types
• organize and categorize Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, images, videos, and e-mails
• media from digital cameras can be editted and automatically optimized for display and viewing within PropertyBoss and your website.
• associate media with Properties, Units, Leases, Tenants, Vendors, Owners, and Work Orders

Language Translation Tool

• Added ability to customize terms throughout PropertyBoss in order to match your market segment (ex. for Student Housing tenants can be referred to as students). Multiple languages are delivered with PropertyBoss, as well as the ability to create your own. Reports can be modified to reflect the exact verbage they want to deliver.

Database Purge Process

• 'Database Purge' option under Database Utilities - create an archive database for historical data reference in order to optimize the size of their production database. Once data has been safely stored in the archive file, a purge date can be set for the production database in order to delete old historical data.

PropertyLoan

• PropertyLoan tracks principal, interest and escrow for a mortgage loan, generates amortization statements, calculates payoffs, and records the payments received.

Reports

• A130 Unit Availability Report – modified to allow sorting by unit type.
• A140 Expiration List - shows leases with multiple expiration dates on separate lines
• A146 Statement-Invoice Format – upgraded to allow more detail on comments to show.
• A148 Lease Statement - option to print in large font; option 'Hide Reversals' added to Lease Statement Criteria. If selected, the statement will not show reversed/reversing transactions. Your choice becomes your default choice for later printouts.
• A156 Renewal Report - sort by renewal date
• A166 Property Revenue Report – modified to include data from vacant units, and skip inactive units.
• A260 Financial Aid Activity - shows Financial Aid Transactions and their current status for date range selected. Report can be sorted with subtotals by Payee, Student, or Month.
• A310 Suite Occupancy Report - shows current leases and held units, subtotals for units occupied and by gender
• A353 Rent Splits Billed - *new* shows the rent splits billed on an accrual basis.
• A410 Rent Roll Report - reflects occupancy rates with overlapping leases
• A491 Tenant List - Detail Report - shows pictures of tenants.
• A496 Tenant Birthday List - report to only residents
• A510 Delinquents And Prepaids Report - shows Financial Aid information
• A530 Collections and Deposits Activity Report - accounts for income received from prospects; itemized transactions for prospects; enhanced report to generate more quickly
• A541 and A542 Recap Journal Entry Reports - tracks Charge to Owner/Assoc and Credit to Owner/Assoc; modified reports to handle funds received from owners; run report with multiple transaction sets
• O187 Property Profit And Loss - added option to hide tax id number.
• O260 Owner Statement Summary - allow hiding of tenant names
• Work Order Prints for Vendors/Owners/Residents - The current tenant now prints on the work order if the work order was entered at the unit level.
• All Owner Reports - hide owner tax ID number

Merlin

• Gender, Roommate, Renew By Date, Market Cost Per Square Foot, Lease Cost Per Square Foot fields on RentRoll Merlin reports
• show data regarding Financial Aid Activity
• Completion Comments from Work Orders to show on Work Order Navigator Merlin reports
• show thumbnail images Example - tenant pictures, unit pictures
• Prospect fields on Work Order Navigator Merlin reports
• Tenant Navigator - Lease History Reports can be created in the tenants navigator that shows a full lease history as a separate field.
• Rent Roll Navigator - primary tenant fields; reports show details like primary first name, last name, birthday, phone number, email address, etc.
• Tenant Navigator - Lease History, First Name, Last Name fields added. Show full lease history as a separate field.
• Rent Roll Navigator - Added primary tenant fields; reports show details like primary first name, last name, birthday, phone number, email address, etc.
• Transaction Search - added Primary Tenant

Letters

• Suite Level support including merge fields for All roommates in the suite
• Financial Aid Expected MailMerge field available, fields in Letters To Tenants About A Lease
• automatically post a transaction recording when an email is sent to a tenant or an owner

Notebooks

• All Notebooks resize to show the maximum amount of information possible based on the window size.
• view deposits already received from a prospect when creating a new lease. The Lease Deposits window shows deposit amounts already received.
• Notebooks all have Media tabs for linking documents.
• Unit Notebook - Unit address will default to City, State and Zip code of Property to eliminate user’s duplication of efforts.

Navigators/Setup/General

• QuickPay includes details about batch Type and Description
• Duplicate invoice numbers flagged
• Extended Tenant Email field
• Import owner transactions
• RentRoll Navigator has been modified to handle displaying roommate information more quickly.
• Owner Navigator only displays current properties and eliminates inactive properties from the list.

Tasks/Work Orders

• Modified work orders so that if a database only contains one property, work orders assigned to a property, unit or lease will autofill the property

Auto Post

• AutoPost transactions are now separated into three separate groups each of which can be restricted to specific users:
  • Autopost Scheduled which processes scheduled transactions including Rent, Late Fees, Repeating charges.
  • AutoPost Web Activity which processes web activity from the website including Payments, Work Orders, Registration requests.
  • AutoPost EFT/ACH which submits the electronic payment transactions for processing.
• Users can now view and post transactions by type. In order to just post 'Rent Due' transactions for example, you can double-click the line showing '(9) Rent Due'.
• In the lease notebook on the 'Register' tab, there is now an 'AutoPost Transactions' button that will run AutoPost for just that lease.
• Security settings have been modified to allow the administrator to restrict users based on any of these new options.

Transactions

• Warning issued if a payment transaction is entered with a reference number that already exists in the database.

Additional Lease Date Fields

• Planned move-in/actual move-in datesare tracked for each lease separate from the lease start date.
• When a resident moves out early, you can now move them out and the resident is still responsible for charges through a new date called the Financial Responsibility Ends date. This date is assigned during the move out process. The date defaults to the end of the current rental period. During the interim period, the lease status is set to Past-Responsible. This new feature enables property managers to choose whether or not to pro-rate rent and other charges upon move-out.

Security Changes

• Network users now are able to have changes made to their password update all of their databases, rather than having to make the change manually in each database.
• For PropertyHost customers, PropertyBoss now accepts either their network password used to log into PropertyBoss or the password defined in PropertyBoss
• Test Mode - databases can be classified as either 'Production Mode' or 'Test Mode'. Test Mode forbids submission of EFT/ACH transactions, download of web activity, submission of collections, etc. and is activated automatically if the database is moved/backed up/restored onto any other computer to prevent accidental activities from being performed on the test/backup database.

PropertyBanking, PropertyPay, PropertyWebPay

• designate between Individuals or Companies in AutoPost in making electronic payments to owners and tenants
• 'Reverse Due To Chargeback' option to Actions menu for Electronic Payment Transactions if a tenant has insufficient funds for a scheduled bank draft.
• Standard NACHA files are created for electronic outgoing payments that you upload to your bank, i.e. for deposit refunds or for payments to owners.
• Added logic to prevent duplicate payments from being sent.
• Electronic payment transactions run through AutoPost are now easier to track. EFT Log has been modified to show who, when, on what computer, what results, and whether the execution was related to autopost.
• The payor on the transactions coming from PropertyWebPay is set to the name entered on the web page instead of the Primary Tenant.

QuickBooks

• Modified QuickBooks interface to block voiding or deleting payments after they have been sent to QuickBooks.
• Users can select QuickBooks-Simple or QuickBooks-Detail for their accounting file. The QuickBooks Simple format minimizes the time and effort required to set up the interface, and allows for greater flexibility in changing transactions.
• Installation routine has been modified to fit QuickBooks Silver Developer standard. New installations and upgrades now run more smoothly and with less complications.

PropertyCert

• Added flag to Project Options to allows users to not enforce the Available Unit Rule.

PropertyWebHQ

• handle the multiple media types.
• Prospect portal shows images and any other media types associated in PropertyBoss.
• Resident portal shows any media (documents, images, etc.) attached to the Tenant, Lease, or Work Order.
• Owner Portal shows any media attached to the Owner, Property/Unit, or Work Order.
• The website replication logic was re-designed to improve replicating client data to their websites. The new replication process has numerous benefits including:
  • Databases can be replicated automatically five times daily.
  • The automatic scheduling of replication does not require a scheduled job on the server.
  • Replication can be manually triggered to occur on any workstation rather than only from the server computer.
  • New Releases do not require the database to be resent.
  • The replication process is self-correcting. If interrupted, replication picks up where it left off when it is re-started.
• New options are available for displaying images such as ForSale, ForRent, MoveInSpecial, etc. on your website property listing. You can also enter special text for each listing.

Student Housing Enhancements

• New Suite Level Support Capabilities - view Roommates and Roommate contact information for units in the same suite; view tasks for all units in the suite and quickly navigate between the students in the different rooms within a suite; support for letters containing contact information (names, address, phone numbers, and email) of a student's roommates.
• New Unit Gender Support - Units can be designated as 'Male', 'Female', 'Coed', or 'Switchable'; view and manage occupancy by gender and compare current versus future requirements.
• Financial Aid Tracking - specialized Note transactions to track Expected Financial Aid receipts. This capability supports both a Late Fee Grace period and partial receipts of Financial Aid. Reports and Merlin allow the reported of late financial aid and the amount of financial aid expected in a given period.
• Rent Schedules - define custom schedules for irregular rent payments
• Room Transfer Requests - students fill out date-specific online forms for room transfers between semesters

PropertyBoss Release Notes 6.11

PropertyCert

• Startup Compliance Report has been revised to load the setup compliance report data from the programs tab of the units and leases notebooks

Reports

• A156 - Renewal Report - Report revised to show future rent changes.

QuickBooks

• PropertyBoss now supports interfacing to QuickBooks 2007

PropertyPay

• QuickFind has been modified to pull up EFT transactions to allow one to quickly search between many EFT transactions ex. if a credit card rent payment bounces

PropertyBoss Release Notes 6.10

PropertyPay/PropertyBanking

• PropertyPay has been separated into different modules: PropertyPay (ability to receive payments) and PropertyBanking (ability to send payments)
• Security settings have been revised to differentiate between PropertyPay and PropertyBanking
• PropertyBanking has been modified to work with a wider variety of banks - it now creates balanced NACHA files
• PropertyBanking is now able to send payments to an owner's checking or savings account

Reports

• A158 - Current Lease Listing - New Report that prints a listing of current leases that includes detail fields, lease start/end date, rent amount.
• A540/A541/A542 - Recap Report and Journal Entries Reports now support the ability to run the report with selected properties. This enhancement allows customers with multiple communities to maintain a single database.

Letters

• Letters to Tenants includes the ability to use custom fields for Units and Leases as merge fields. This feature has been enhanced to also include custom fields for the Primary Tenant.

Setup/General

• Added button to Backup Database option in Tools Navigator - Send Other Files. This allows client to ftp files directly to PropertyBoss support.
• Major enhancements to the online documentation have been made. EinsteinAnswers now launches directly from the F1 button on any window. Future releases will make the launch specific to the screen used when F1 is selected. Online documentation can be updated at any time by clicking on the Help Menu and selecting the Update Help Files option.
• PropertyPassCentral is now easily accessible from the PropertyBoss icon on the PropertyBossToday screen. This option gives immediate web-based access to the Support Forums, the latest documentation, and other support resources.

Merlin

• The RentRoll Navigator has the ability to view custom fields for Units and Leases. This feature has been enhanced to accept customized fields from the Primary Tenant/Resident. To simply selection of fields for the report, custom fields in the layout list are now appended with source of the field in parentheses: ex. (Tenant Details)

PropertyWebHQ

• Enhanced FTP control to make uploads restartable and the process stoppable if a communication error occurs.

PropertyBoss Release Notes 6.09

Transactions

• Added ability to reverse an owner's payment through use of the NSF button

Reports

• P120 Source Analysis Report - Report now shows any activity for prospects for date range selected, and is sorted by source
• A411 Repeating Charges - new column added to report to show breakdown of rent
• A135 Property Vacancy Report - report now includes properties from status On Notice to Moveout, added available date column
• B520 Batch Reference Report - added Reference Number column to report to differentiate between checks
• A560 Deposits Held Report - fixed report to now show total amount of interest accumulated for all deposits held
• B320 Batch Summary by Charges Paid Report - Report fixed to use date range entered for report rather than date of payment
• Added ability to skip generation of summary totals on reports - affects A540 Collections Recap Report, A541 Recap Journal Entries Report, A542 Recap Journal Entries Report (Cash Method), A550 Net Rental Income by Unit
• A560 Deposits Held Report - changed formatting for owner held deposits so that it balances to A530 Collections and Deposit Activity report and A170 Deposits Activity report.

Batches

• Added ability to create batches in a specific period. This ability enables users at the beginning of the month to create a batch for the past month if the period is still open or via a supervisor override.

Prospects

• Added ability to undo Move-In - you can now take a tenant and return them to prospect status

Setup/General

• PropertyACH - added ability to send online payments to owners, and tenants
• Work Orders - added comment field in Property Notebook that gives pop up window when a work order is assigned to the property. Example - if an owner performs maintenance on a property, when a property manager creates a work order on that property a pop up window can display "Owner performs maintenance"
• Added prospect and prospect transactions import capability to Getting Started
• PropertyBooks customers now able to access Work Order section
• PropertyPay - service fees computed as a percentage revised to only charge a percentage of the originating transaction
• Move Out Reconciliation - user can now choose an actual move-out date vs. a date they select

Merlin

• Prospect Merlin - Added Balance field to Prospect Merlin

Accounting Interface

• Added ability to combine multiple bills under one reference number so that only one check is printed to vendor in QuickBooks
• Peachtree Interface - PropertyBoss can now export Journal Recap reports to Peachtree in .csv format

PropertyBoss Release Notes 6.08

Navigators

• QuickPay now shows details about batch Type and Description

Lease

• Modified the Move Out Reconcilation report to use the Forwarding Address that is identified as the tenant permanent address.

Transactions

• PropertyWebHQ - added the ability for residents to make payments through a website. For prospects, added the ability to pass both a charge (i.e. Application Fee) and a payment.
• CheckScan - sorted the list of leases by property.
• When a declined EFT transaction is reversed, the status of the transaction is 'canceled'. These transactions do not need to be sent to PPI. Modified Autopost Scheduled Transactions to not send to QuickBooks.
• EFT Payments - set scheduled EFT payments posted through Scheduled Transactions to automatically apply to open charges.
• Corrected the Post Now feature of Lease Repeating Charges to post concessions as credits.
• Added ability to apply credits to Prospect transactions.
• Set PropertyBoss to require reversal of a subsidy payment adjustment to go on a batch - usually a correcting batch.
• Import transactions - added the ability for the system to determine the current lease start date when that date is not included in the import file.
• Enhanced Canadian tax support for to handle new tax regulations.
• Property Revenue - when the QuickBooks interface is used, property revenue transactions must be placed on a separate batch from lease payments. Removed this restriction when the interface is not used.

Reports

• A140 Expiration List - corrected information when run for All Dates.
• A148 Lease Statement - added this report to the main report list (in addition to PropertyBoss Today) so that the title can be customized by HOA managers.
• A152 Lease Account Status Report - extended the size of the amount fields to hold larger numbers.
• A421 Posted Charges Comparison - added ability to customize to compare date periods other than current and immediate prior period. Also added parameter checkbox to only show leases with variances.
• O186 - Owner Summary P&L - set to omit note transactions. The note transactions are included in the O260 and O261 reports.

Prospects

• Prospect Interview Questions - Fixed so when you change the list of values on an Interview Question in PropertyProspect Setup/Define Interview Questions, the custom value for existing Prospects are also changed.
• Enhanced Prospect Contacts so that the same person can be listed more than once, as long as the type is different - i.e. Guarantor and Emergency contact.

Setup/General

• Added a Processing Options parameter to Use Post to Lease Option on Move Out. Turning the option off will simplify the post charges step of the move out since most users always post charges to the lease.
• Users and Security - added a setting to allow/disallow users from making backups.
• Email - corrected error that occurred in limited situations where reports were blank when sent as attachments.
• Letters - export to Microsoft Word letter merge to not delete an existing letter on the network.
• PropertyWebHQ - enhanced the owner portal to improve communication between the owner and property manager.

Merlin

• Transaction Merlin - added the check number that is retrieved from the QuickBooks interface for checks and bills.
• Prospect Merlin - Added the following fields to Prospect Merlin: Birthday, Last Name, First Name, Middle Name, Salutation, SSN, Mailing flag and Contact OK flag.

Tax Credit Certifications

• Modified the Compliance report to use the correct certification when there are multiple leases and overlapping certification dates.
• PropertyBoss now handles starting a certification for a prospect who move out within the last 90 days.

QuickBooks Interface

• Fixed error that occurred when retrieving check numbers from a QuickBooks company file that is not open prior to running the interface.
• Fixed error when multiple tax types were sent to QuickBooks at one time.