Release Notes
PropertyBoss 2016 - Release Notes v10.03
Accounts Payable
- The PropertyBoss Accounts Payable functionality now supports the ability to add additional media even if the invoice has been approved for payment.
- Invoices can be entered in Accounts Payable for Internal Vendors. A warning message will be displayed when an Internal Vendor is selected.
Affordable Housing
We now support having properties that are not designated as Affordable Housing in the same database as properties that are designated as Affordable Housing.
Applicant Screening
Canadian vendor, Rent Check, is now available as a vendor in the Applicant Screening module.
Assets
When importing assets, if a unit and lease start date are included, the asset will automatically be assigned to the lease rather than the original behavior which assigned it to the default storage location.
Audit Logger
Audit Logger has been greatly expanded and now includes a more extensive list of edits and changes made in PropertyBoss. Included are:
- All changes made in the E-Payment Module.
- Changes to Contacts, Prospects, Owners, Vendors & Transaction definitions
- Using HTM and HTML files as the body of email is now supported.
- Email addresses now support most special characters. Each email provider (Google, Yahoo, etc.) may have specific rules governing which characters are accepted.
E-Payments
The E-Payments Module has been revised and now includes additional options and allows more flexibility in managing Service Fees. These changes affect all customers who use Electronic Payments. Changes include:
- All Web Payment Portal settings are now maintained in PropertyBoss including:
- All fee setups for payments entered directly in PropertyBoss.
- All fee setups for payments and recurring payments entered on Portals and in the Application process.
- All messages shown to web payment portal users.
- Managing payment and recurring web payment portal capabilities.
- Multiple Fee Schedules support charging different service fees for Prospects, Residents, and Owners
- Fee Schedules can:
- Limit the accepted payment types
- Define the service fee amounts
- Define whether the service fee will be absorbed by the Property Management Company.
- Messages shown to a Payer before entering a payment on the Web Payment Portal are customizable in PropertyBoss. These messages support HTML formatting and external links.
- When using PayLease as your Merchant Provider, you can choose whether the tenant is billed the service fees directly by PayLease or have the service fees show in PropertyBoss as separate charge transactions.
- An Account Test Mode is now available which allows for a “test” transaction to be created which will be sent to your Merchant Provider to verify that your account information is set up correctly. All "test" transactions can be deleted from the register.
- Other basic changes are:
- The billing country is now passed to the Merchant Provider.
- The AutoPost Transaction log now includes the Payer name and amount of the transaction for EFT Payments.
- Duplicate web payments are now allowed on the same day if the prior payment was reversed.
For PayLease clients, a new B311 PayLease Deposit Report is available to assist with accurate balancing since PayLease close times may vary from deposit dates in PropertyBoss.
General Ledger
Chart of Accounts
The ability to sort by account numbers on the General Ledger Chart of Accounts has been added.
Bank Statement Reconciliation
We now require that an Interest or a Bank Charge account exists. These accounts are pulled from the most recent reconciliation.
L380 Check Register Report
The L380 Check Register Report no longer shows accounts of type "Asset-Bank" and is a "parent" account.
Inspections
Inspections Navigator
The ability to select a group of incomplete inspections and mass update all remaining items as "good".
Inspection Item Conditions
- The standard conditions now include Billable vs. Billable-Repair options to handle situations where a tenant can be billed for damage that does not warrant an actual repair.
- The requirement of pictures is now selectable for each standard condition within each type of inspection. Options to require a picture for a Note condition on a Move-In Inspection but not on a Move-Out Inspection now exist.
- The "Show Only Billable" option will now show all items with a billable condition (Billable and Billable-Repair).
- The "Bill All Repairs" option will show all items with a billable condition that has not already been billed.
- Modification to the wording of non-standard conditions will update any inspection that is not at "Complete" status.
Inspection Reported Conditions
- The report will now show the "Completed Date" rather than the date the report is printed.
- The report will no longer include rooms or items that have been marked as N/A.
- The Assigned To copy of the Inspection Work Order Print will no longer show the contacts on the lease if the lease has ended.
Inspection Templates
An Inspection Template that has been used to create an inspection, and the inspection has not been deleted, cannot be deleted. The obsolete option should be selected.
Late Fees
- The following Late Fee Methods have been renamed to better reflect their functionality which did not change. These methods do not charge an “Initial” late fee in respect to other methods.
- Use Ranges: Single Charge
- Use Ranges: Daily Charge
- Use Ranges: Monthly Charge
- The Monthly Charge on Bill Day which is only available in HOA databases now handles Late on Day options of 1 month, 2 months, and 3 months.
- The ability to charge Late Fees on unpaid Late Fee transactions is now available.
- Late Fee explanations displayed on portals now display correctly when either appended or replaced in either Setup Preferences or at the property/membership level.
Letters
The following enhancements have been implemented in Letters:
- Prorated Rent Amount fields are now available for Letters to Tenants.
- The assignment of a letter to a property is now respected when PropertyLists are active. Letters restricted to a property now on the active PropertyList will be omitted from the displayed letters.
- HOA databases now have the ability to send letters about work orders.
- The window displaying the list of letters has been resized and will retain the settings.
Media
- Media saved for a Lease now have separate options to define if the media is available on the Resident or Owner Web Portals.
- When creating a new unit, the media saved to the original unit or template will be copied to the new unit.
- The deletion of a unit will also delete all associated media.
Merlins
Major improvements were made to the look and operation of Merlins throughout the system.
- The Merlin Wizard has been redesigned to simplify their creation and to give additional functionality.
- We have seen as much as a 75% improvement in execution times depending on the complexity and volume of information being returned.
- The following fields have been added to the RentRoll Merlin:
- Cell Phone
- Move-Out Date (for contact)
- Unit Description
- Receives Statement Via
- The following fields have been added to the Owner Navigator Merlin:
- Accounting File
- Transaction Set
- Name on 1099
Owners
- The "Owner Info" button content available on the Owners Register now includes the owner's email address.
- When importing Owner information, the Tax ID data will be encrypted correctly.
Portals
Resident Web Portal
- Added the ability to show designated Contact Details fields. The detail fields can be defined as "Display Only" or "Allow Edit". Updates by a resident will be received as web activity.
- PropertyBoss now supports a new setting that allows Reversal transactions to be hidden. This setting works the same way as the option on the A148 Lease Statement.
- Web Portal registrations now support email addresses that contain single quotes.
Package Tracking Web Portal
- The emails used in Package Tracking are now stored in PropertyBoss. The resident’s picture will now be shown in the web portal, and the resident’s signature will be captured and stored as media when the "Sign For" button is clicked.
Payment Web Portal
For Version 10.03, we have completely redesigned the Payment Web Portal which includes:
- Payments are directly entered on a single page.
- Prospects, Tenants, and Owners are uniquely identified prior to accepting a payment.
- Payments are not accepted from Tenants where the Do Not Accept Payment option is selected in the Tenants notebook.
- An End Date is no longer required when managing a Scheduled Payment on the web portal.
- When a Scheduled Payment for a bank draft is being setup, the tenant must choose checking or savings.
- When a single payment via bank draft is being made, the tenant must choose checking or savings.
- The tenant will now receive an email when a payment is made or a recurring payment is set up or changed.
Reports
- Report Headings will now handle company names that contain an ampersand ( & ).
- A160 Charges Paid: now supports the multi‐database option
- A185 Move‐Out Reconciliation
- Added option to Hide Notes
- Modified select option to reflect Balances as of Move‐Out vs Prior to Move‐Out
- A240 Lease Abstract: now includes all phone numbers for a contact
- A410 RentRoll: added the “Lease Cost/SF” column which calculates based on the sq. footage unit detail field and the lease amount on a current lease. The column will default to $0.00 if the unit’s sq. footage is missing.
- A510 Delinquents and Prepaids: now supports the selection of more than one guarantor
- A530 Collections Activity: now exports correctly to Excel
- A565 Trust Account Balances: now includes inactive owners with no assigned properties with a negative balance
- A590 Activity Consolidation: added taxes and deposit charges for the selected period and removed the LTV and LT Prelease values from the A540 section to balance correctly
- Owner Reports O186, O260, and O261 can now be run for inactive owners
- O186 Owner Summary Profit and Loss
- Moved Credits to Owner transactions from Adjustments to Income
- O260 Owner Statement Summary
- Can now select owners by property
- O261 Owner Statement
- Can now select owners by property
- Added option to Include or Exclude Notes
- Added option to Hide Transaction Source/Comments Column
- Ability to send a generic message
- Ability to select based on Owner Balance
- O186 Owner Summary Profit and Loss
- General Ledger Reports that support being run within report groups
- L301 Income Statement
- L302 Income Statement for Property
- L303 Income Statement for Year
- L311 Balance Sheet
- L315 Cash Flow Statement
- L325 Disbursements Report
- L330 Trial Balance Report
- Can also be exported to Excel and contains detail data
- Now allows any begin date even in the middle of the month. The previous period close date is defined as the day before the begin date.
- Can now filter to not show rows where the Net Change is not equal to 0.00.
- Budgeting Reports D281, D282, and D283 can now be exported to Excel.
Security Settings
Settings for user privileges now provide more granular control for maintaining Units and Leases. Separate options now exist for:
- Create/Delete Properties and Units
- Create/Delete Leases
- Make Properties and Units Inactive
Transaction Security
- Both Enter and Reverse security must be authorized to reverse a transaction.
- Both Enter and Move security must be authorized to move a transaction.
MaintTech Portal Security
In PropertyBoss:
- Each Portal Role (except those that correspond to Package Tracking Work Order Groups) have 2 new security options added to the Work Order Groups tab: Add Work Order and Update Work Order
- Add Work Order replaces Add New Work Orders for Web Portal - MaintTech.
- Upgrade: Users with access to Add New Work Orders for Web Portal – MaintTech and have Use Group access for work order group will be given Add Work Order privilege on the work order group.
- Upgrade: Users with access to Use Group for a work order group will be given access to Work Order for that group.
MaintTech Portal
- The Add Work Order privilege will control whether the Add New Work Order button shows for the corresponding work order group.
- The Update Work Order privilege for the corresponding work order group will be checked before the other privileges in Web Portal – MaintTech. The user must have Update Work Order privilege for the work order group before the portal will check to see if they have any of the update privileges on Web Portal – MaintTech.
Utility Meter Readings
Users without System Setup privilege will now be able to set up Meters in Setup Preferences if they have Enter rates for meters privilege.
Tools - Recalculate All Amounts
The Recalculate All Amounts options now include the ability to include all Owners or select by Owner. The ability to include all Leases or select by a specific Lease is also available. Selecting a specific Lease will automatically select all owners associated with the property.
Units and Leases
- The Units and Leases Navigator can now be organized by Agent.
- If an Agent is defined:
- Will show in the title of the Property, Unit, and Lease notebooks
- Will show when a work order is entered for the Property, Unit, or Lease
- The Comments tab of the Lease notebook now includes an Internal Comments box that can be used to record general comments or notes.
- When a tenant is transferred from one lease to another, the Allow Login to Web Portal checkbox on the new lease will be set based on the value in the old lease.
- The primary contact on a lease can now be transferred to another unit even if they are already on another unit. The user must confirm that this action is correct.
Vendors
Vendor Notebook Insurance Tab
- Now contains a Coverage field which previously had to be maintained as a Detail field.
- The Expiration Date, Coverage and Information fields located on the Insurance tab can now be included on a Vendor merlin allowing the data to be exported.
- All calendar buttons now work.
Work Orders
Enhancements to Work Orders include:
- Activity History now sorts by Created in descending order so the most recent entries are listed at the top. Click the column header to change the sort order like other merlins.
- Repeated work orders can now be viewed on the Property, Unit, Lease, and Owner notebooks.
- The Completed Date/Time entered cannot be earlier than the Started Date/Time.
- The W310 Work order Print report now includes an option to include the Work Order Completion Information.
- This option defaults to NOT checked and is not stored to prevent the accidental inclusion of comments.
- Added the ability to add a letter as the body of an email when sending an email related to a work order. The text of the email can now be edited before sending.
- Two new Work Order reports have been added:
- A125 Work Order Completion
- A126 Work Order Performance
- Changes to better support tracking the elapsed time for work orders:
- Each Standard Short Description can now have an associated category for reporting.
- Each Work Order Group can have a unique set of Work Order Locations which enables users to define the area within the unit where the work is being done.
- Current Schedule date and time fields were changed to:
- Original Schedule Date/Time
- Current Schedule Date/Time
- The Work Order Navigator Merlins now support the following fields:
- Category
- Location
- Original Schedule Date/Time
- Current Schedule Date/Time
- Elapsed Time from Original Schedule
- Elapsed Time from Current Schedule
- Elapsed Time from Created Date/Time
- The PropertyBoss Today Boxscores and Graphs were modified to calculate Elapsed Time and schedule information on these new fields.
- The A120 Work Order Status Report now includes elapsed time based on the Current Schedule Date/Time.
- The new A125 Work Order Completion Report provides metrics on completion times per category of repair.
PropertyBoss 2014 - Release Notes v10.02
Introduction
Release 10.02 brings a significant number of enhancements. 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 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:
Industry | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
Residential | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant or Resident | PropertyOwner |
Multifamily | Property or Community | Unit | Lease | Resident | N/A |
Association | Association | Home | Ownership | Member | N/A |
Student Housing | Property or Community | Bed | Lease or Contract | Student | N/A |
Commercial | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
Asset Tracking
PropertyBoss’ new Asset Tracking Module provides a rich set of customizable capabilities to identify and manage assets of all types including parking spaces, appliances, and furniture. The functionality includes maintaining a list of individual assets and assigning assets to units and leases while applying charges to the residents and/or owners.
Unlimited Asset Types – PropertyBoss supports defining an unlimited number of Asset Types to categorize assets Property Managers want to track.
- Customizable charges to be applied to the assigned unit and/or lease for each Asset Type. Changes for an asset type can be one-time charges for a lease or property or can be recurring charges on a lease or property
- Define unlimited number of Detail Fields for each Asset Type
- Automatic numbering format for each Asset Type
- Asset Types may be configured as individually tracked assets (washer, dryer) or as not individually tracked assets (plates, sheets)
Asset Module Configuration – Property Managers can customize the Asset Management Module to fit their specific business needs.
- Define Storage Locations where assets are stored when not in use
- List of Movement Reasons lets users select what type of actions they are performing on the assets, ex. Assign to Unit, Send for Repair
- Lists of Manufacturers and Manufacturer Websites allow easier entry of asset information for manufacturer
Asset List Maintenance – The following information for individual assets can be maintained in PropertyBoss:
- Purchase history
- Manufacturer information
- Warranty terms
- Media to upload images, purchase orders, and other documents for an individual asset
Asset Navigator Merlins provide users invaluable visibility of their assets with user-built reports that can slice and dice the asset information in an infinite number of views.
Asset Movements – PropertyBoss supports users performing movements on assets to record activities such as moving asset to a unit, removing from a unit, sending for repair, returning from repair, and disposing of the asset.
- When assets are assigned to the units and leases, one-time and recurring charges are applied to the owners and residents based on asset type configuration
- Move Out Lease process has a new Assets step which allows the user to view the assets assigned to the lease and take appropriate action
- Transferring Leases and Moving Leases automatically transfer the assets to the new unit
- At any point, a user may view the history of an individual asset to see every movement and work order that has occurred over the course of the asset’s life
- New Asset tabs on the Property, Unit, and Lease Notebooks provide details of the assets currently assigned to the property/unit/lease along with a complete history of all the assets ever assigned
Asset Movement Navigator Merlins provide users a powerful tool to monitor asset movements. This visibility can aid in identifying asset trends that affect business performance, such as problem appliances.
Asset Work Orders - Asset Tracking is integrated with the Work Order system to manage the repair and replacement of assets. Users can assign assets to a work order to indicate work is being performed on the asset. Work Order Navigator Merlin has a new Asset column which displays the assets assigned to the work order.
Asset Wait Lists – PropertyBoss allows users to build wait lists of residents for individually tracked asset types such as parking spaces. Asset Wait List Merlins provide the ability to report and search the wait lists. Wait List actions are added to the Property, Unit, and Lease notebooks.
Mass Edit and Import of Assets – PropertyBoss supports mass importing asset information from text files and Excel spreadsheets. User can also perform updates on multiple asset records at once.
Inspections
PropertyBoss’ new Inspection Module, PBInspector, provides the richest, most powerful set of capabilities for Unit Inspections available.
Native Mobile Applications – PBInspector is available as a free application for Android devices in the Google Play Store and will be available soon in the Apple Store for IOS devices. This native application supports both residents and administrators inspecting units. The application supports move-in, move-out, and miscellaneous inspections. Some of the features of the native applications include:
- Synchronize your list of inspections to the device at the office. No wireless access is needed in the field
- Single click for directions and maps to the Unit
- Full Contact information for the occupants of the unit
- Fully usable on both phones and tablets. Screens optimize the use of additional real estate on tablets
- Smart Templates handle different unit types so you do not have to customize for each unit
- Integrated camera functionality. Pictures are associated with the inspection and do not clutter your image gallery on the device. When submitted, the inspection and all images are removed from the device
- Move-Out Inspections show the condition of the item at move-in
- Not Good condition requires entry of an explanation. Optionally, you can require a picture for Not Good conditions
- Administrators can enter repair comments that appear on the repair work orders
- Administrators can enter billable amounts on the inspection which will automate the charges to leases
Support for Vendor Inspections – PBInspector supports outsourcing of Unit Inspections to 3rd party vendors or Administrators. Simply assign the inspection to a vendor in PropertyBoss that has access to the Vendor portal and they can handle the inspection for you using the PBInspector app.
Resident Self Inspections for Move-In Inspections – Both the native Android/IOS applications and the Resident Portal support residents self-inspecting their unit. To implement, simply assign the inspection to the resident.
Continued Support for Printed Inspection Forms – PropertyBoss allows you to print a manual inspection form if you’d prefer to continue using paper forms
Unlimited Smart Templates – PropertyBoss supports defining an unlimited number of Smart Templates for Move-Ins, Move-Outs, and Other Inspections (e.g. Health/Safety, Grounds, etc.). Following are some of the features of Smart Templates:
- Customizable Terms of Use, Instructions, and Sign-off
- Unlimited Rooms – You only have to define Bedrooms and Bathrooms once. PBInspector automatically creates additional rooms based on the value of the corresponding Detail field on the unit
- Define an item like Carpet once and use in multiple rooms
- Multiple ways to define inspection items:
- List-StdValues – Supports values of Good, Note, Repair, Billable, and N/A (optional). Only Administrators see Billable on a Move-Out
- List-SingleValue – Supports selection of a single value from a user-defined list of values
- List-MultiValue – Supports selection of multiple values from a user-defined list of values
- Text – Supports entry of free-form text
- Define repair work order information for each item
Full and Automated Integration with Work Orders – When an inspection is submitted, you can choose to have PropertyBoss automatically create repair work orders for items in need of repair. Based on how you set up the repair information on the items, a single work order or multiple work orders can be created. The created work order contains information about the item, the condition reported, and any repair comments entered on the inspection.
Integrated Billing – When a move-out inspection is submitted, you can bill residents for move-out damages. For Student Housing, you can choose how to split the bill among suitemates.
Custom Detail Fields Redesign
PropertyBoss has further enhanced your capability to manage and report on detail information on Prospects, Contacts, Properties, Units, Leases, Vendors, Owners, Work Orders, and Assets. In this release we have standardized the capabilities throughout the system including the following capabilities:
- The Detail Field Definition window was re-written to simplify the definition of detail fields
- Contacts and Prospects now share a common set of custom fields and values. Existing data was converted to this common pool. This change simplifies the maintenance of information as we now support moving a person from a Prospect to a Lease and back to being a Prospect. The Contact and Prospect Notebooks can have different layouts and show the same or different fields
- Work Order Groups, Contacts/Prospects, and Asset Types which support multiple layouts from a single source of field definitions are now much simpler to maintain
- Each Notebook now supports up to ten tabs of custom fields. Before Release 10.02, only the Prospect notebook supported multiple tabs
- Each Tab can have an unlimited number of groupings within the tab
- You no longer have to name the tabs, groups, and fields with numeric values to have them in a specific order. The definition window supports moving the information up and down as you wish
- All notebooks now support the following types of fields: Checkbox, Currency, Integer, Number, Percent, Text, List-SingleValue, List-Selfbuilding, List-MultiValue, Date, Time, and Phone
- Customers have been very prolific at creating helpful detail fields on contacts, leases, vendors, etc. All Merlins were modified to support querying and displaying a much larger number of custom fields. Up to 100 Text fields, 100 Numeric fields, 25 Date fields, 25 Checkboxes, and 10 Time fields can be accommodated on any Merlin
Rent Schedules for Student Housing
The Rent Schedule capability for Student Housing has been completely redesigned to enhance the ability for Student Housing Managers to handle their unique billing needs including:
- Billing Rent multiple months before the lease starts
- Multiple Rent charges in a single month
- Multiple months with no rent charged
PropertyBoss supports defining multiple Rent Schedules and assigning the Rent Schedule to Prospects and Leases. When a rent schedule is assigned to a lease, the Lease Type is changed to Scheduled and rent is posted based on the specific schedule that is defined. PropertyBoss handles all the unique conditions that occur when a student transfers to a different unit, moves out early, changes their rent plan, etc.
Reservation System for Student Housing / Enhancements to Gender Support
Student Housing has many unique requirements including:
- Managing gender by suite including units that are male, female, coed, or switchable based on the first assigned prospect
- Students who move out for a semester but come back to the same room in a following semester
- Prospects are reserving rooms or unit-types while the unit is currently occupied
Prospects can now reserve a Unit-Type in addition to a specific unit.
Prospects now support storing information about a reservation including the Lease Start/End Date, the room/unit type being reserved, rent schedule, etc.
PropertyBoss now supports an additional move-out option for Residents who are coming back for a later semester in the same unit. This option creates/re-activates the resident as a prospect and creates a reservation for their unit.
The Gender reports were enhanced to provide a detail and summary breakdown of reservations by gender, unit type, and unit. With these reports, Property Managers can accurately gauge availability for any time period.
Email & Letters
All emails sent from PropertyBoss are now logged. The Email Log includes the date sent, email address, and subject. A window for displaying this Log is available from the Tools Menu.
Email Providers such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. are constantly changing their setup parameters. In Release 10.02, the Email Setup samples in PropertyBoss pull these default settings dynamically.
When emailing Lease Statements, PropertyBoss sends the emails using either the Regular or Late Notice templates. A new option was added to only send using the Regular Statement template.
The ability to create letters about a Property was added. These letters merge information about a property and unit and are useful for formatting brochures or forms for the property.
The Property Management Company’s FAX number was added as merge field for Letters.
The Vendor Notebook Email address now supports multiple email addresses separated by semicolons.
When emailing Vendors/Tenants/Owners about a work order, you can now use mail-merged work order letters as the body of the email.*
Credit Reporting
PropertyBoss now supports multiple payment accounts to be defined for credit reports submitted to Online Rental Exchange. The Detail field, 'ORE ClientID', on the property containing the Online Rental Exchange account number is now sent with each credit report.
Security Changes
All Tax Identification numbers (SSN / Tax ID / SIN ) are now encrypted in the system and the database. Only the last four characters are shown in PropertyBoss by default. New security settings control which users are allowed to view the un-encrypted values. For compatibility with earlier releases, all Merlins that show these values now have two fields for displaying these values: (e.g. SSN and SSN Unsecured). The SSN field only shows the last four characters of the number. The Unsecured column will only show a value if the individual has rights to view the number.
A new user level security option has been created to allow the management of Detail fields without having system setup privilege. For instance, a user can be given the authority to Add or Change Details fields but not Delete detail fields.
Added ability to define language setting by Security Role. The user is automatically given the language for their assigned role, but can choose to override the language.
Late Fees
The Late Fees Definition was modified to support charging Late Fees on a monthly basis or on specific days without charging an initial late fee. This change supports situations like Home Owner Associations where the member is charged a percentage monthly on a specific day and there is no initial late charge.
Changes to Merlins
PropertyBoss has now added management functions to Merlins that enable Administrators to view information on how often Merlins are used and by whom. Administrators can now mass delete Merlins that are no longer commonly used.
Modified the Excel export to prevent Excel from dropping the leading zero on text fields.
The Save a Merlin functionality has been redesigned to support descriptions for Merlins and the choice for Public/Private Merlins has been made more prominent. The choice of Public/Private will default on all future Merlins. The descriptions now show in the Report Name dropdowns.
The Work Order Navigator Merlin now shows a field for Initiating Work Order. This capability allows users to see if a work order is the result of a call, inspection, or a follow up to a repair work order.
The RentRoll Navigator Merlin now includes a field for the Property Number.
The Contacts Navigator Merlin now includes a field Web Portal Access for Leases. This field is primarily for Student Housing properties where students can grant their parents, guarantors, emergency contacts, etc. rights to log into their portal. Since a contact may be on multiple leases as guarantor, emergency contact, parent, etc., this new field displays which leases where the contact has the right to log into a portal.
The RentRoll Navigator Merlin now includes a field Lease Delinquency Comments.
Clients have been very prolific at creating helpful custom fields on contacts, leases, vendors, etc. All Merlins were modified to support querying and displaying a much larger number of custom fields. Up to 100 Text fields, 100 Numeric fields, 25 Date fields, 25 Checkboxes, and 10 Time fields can be accommodated on any Merlin.*
The Transaction Search Merlin now supports ability to search transactions based on Transaction Batch Type.
General Ledger
Check Registers now show the memo for check concatenated with the notes on the check.
In the PropertyBoss General Ledger, a transaction can be restricted for use to one or more accounting files. PropertyBoss always creates accounts for these transactions in all accounting files in case the user changes their minds. Now, PropertyBoss will mark the transaction as obsolete if it is not used in the accounting file.
L303 – Income Statement by Year – This new report shows the General Ledger Income/Expense Statement by Month for any 12 month period.*
General Ledger Reports – The accounting file name has been added to the headings of General Ledger related reports.*
Print Checks Option of the General Ledger - now provides an option to override the designated printer selected in the Check Printing Setup Options. This change allows each user to select a different printer. The system will retain the selection of the override check printer for the user.
(Soon) PropertyBoss will support the ability to generate management fees transactions for a General Ledger Accounting file based on posted transactions and a percentage management fee for each transaction.
Requisitions
A new security option allows the Purchasing department to change requisitions after the Expenditure is approved and before it becomes a purchase order.
Vendor comments on Requisitions can now be edited until the requisition is sent to the vendor. Internal comments can now be edited at any time.
You can now only reference a work order that is not in a completed or cancelled status on a Requisition.*
Properties and Units
Mass Change on the Rent Roll Navigator now supports mass changing Default Unit Repeating Charges that will be applied to new leases.
HomeOwner Association databases now support making an entire HOA inactive without having to end all of the memberships for the HOA.
Vendors
The Vendor Notebook now has a Work Order Tab to show the work orders assigned to the Vendor.
The Vendor Notebook Accounting Tab now shows Check Numbers associated with Payments to the Vendor.
The Vendor Notebook now has a Web Portal Email field used for the Vendor Portal which allows separate emails for the Vendor Portal vs. emails sent from PropertyBoss.
(Soon) – Vendors will support selection with PropertyLists.
Owners
The Owner Notebook now has a Work Order Tab to show the work orders assigned to the Owner.
Work Orders
The ability to create a prospect directly from a Work Order notebook was added. This ability supports Call Centers where a new prospect calls in and the call is logged in a Call Logging group.
You can now reference only work orders that are not in a completed or cancelled status on a Requisition.
When emailing Vendors/Tenants/Owners about a work order, you can now use mail-merged work order letters as the body of the email.*
Repeating Work Orders can now be set to generate daily with a 0 days in advance setting.
The Lease Balance is now displayed on Work Orders that are assigned to a Lease Account. The balance is displayed to the right just above the Work Order Tabs.
Work Order Checklists can now be created and assigned to a Prospect. This enables the use of Workflow processes against Prospects.
MaintTech Portal
Prior to Release 10.02, PropertyBoss provided capabilities on the Resident and Vendor portals that enabled selected individuals to search for resident information and to enter and manage the repair work order backlog. As of Release 10.02, these pages have been removed from these portals and consolidated into the MaintTech portal. The setup and security options have been simplified and are now security options instead of detail fields assigned on the Vendor and Contact notebooks. A new window is provided for assigning portal security to Contacts. This new window has a separate security privilege and does not require granting a user the System Security privilege.
The MaintTech portal was modified to add the ability for users to enter non-unit work orders for common area maintenance.
Resident Portal
For Student Housing customers, the Resident Portal now supports the ability of the primary resident (i.e. the student) to grant the right for guarantors/emergency contacts/parents/etc. to log into the Resident Portal.
The Resident Portal can now show documents linked to the Contact, Unit, Lease, and Property. The documents that show are based on the Publish to Website flag on each document and whether the setup preferences allow these types of documents for your resident portal.
The Resident and Owners portals were modified to show the Activity History on the Work Order Details page.*
Owner Portal
The Resident and Owners portals were modified to show the Activity History on the Work Order Details page.*
Affordable Housing
PropertyBoss now supports the Texas Tenant Income Certification form (TIC)
The ability to attach media to a certification was added. This enhancement enables any form to be scanned and attached to the certification for later review. This feature also supports the secure media capabilities of Enhanced Media.
The ability to transfer a household from one unit to another unit in the same BIN was added. A new set-up option on the Project and a new security option were added. Transfers can only be done if the option is turned on for the Project and the user has the new security option. The units swap status when the transfer is completed.
Transactions
The Transaction window was modified to have two buttons for entering a new transaction. New Trans saves the current changes and positions the user back to the transaction name field. New Acct saves the current changes and positions the user to the Account field for easy selection of a different account.
The Register windows now support the ability to export the register information to Excel.
When you move a transaction, PropertyBoss now also moves any media associated with the transaction to the new transaction.
The ability to move a prospect transaction to a lease and vice-versa was added.
Electronic Payments
(Soon) An email is now sent to the resident whenever an online payment is made or the resident changes information about their recurring payment. Also, we now include IP Address and Confirmation number in the XML that appears in PropertyBoss Today.
(Soon) Customers using PayLease for the processing of electronic payments will now have the ability to view all Bank Drafts that have been returned for invalid account information or because of insufficient funds. Options on this new window enable users to mass reverse, NSF, or resubmit the payments.
(Soon) PropertyBoss now supports an interface with Payment Services Network (PSN) to support their payment portal. Information about the user’s account and balances displays on the PSN portal and payments are sent via PropertyTransit to PropertyBoss users. This capability is also available for other third party portal providers.
Leases
The handling of the setup preference, Leases go Month-to-Month after Lease Ends, was modified. Most clients have this value checked and there are no changes to the way the system works in this situation. If the checkbox is not checked, PropertyBoss now shows the Open-Ended checkbox on the Lease Notebook which allows a decision to be made for whether the Lease goes Month-to-Month when the lease ends. This capability is not available for Association databases.
Users can now select multiple Move-Out Reasons during the Move-Out Process. Performance reports were modified to handle multiple move-out reasons.
The Lease Notebook now displays the current lease balance in the upper right corner of the notebook window.
The Move Out process now warns the user if they enter a move-out date that is over 30 days in the past. This warning helps prevent problems when a user mistypes a date.
Report Headings
All reports were modified to support showing information about selected properties on the report heading. To use this capability, customers will have to manually add the field PropertyList to their Report Heading Layouts in Setup Preferences. We could not automatically add this field because most customers have customized the headings. This field shows the first value that is true in the following:
- Only have access to a single property then show '<property name>'
- If have access to multiple properties but only select one then show '<property name>'
- Selected multiple properties then show 'Multiple Properties Selected'
- Running with single PropertyList selected then show '<PropertyList Name>'
- If two or more PropertyLists selected then show 'Multiple PLs Assigned'
- Assigned a secured PL then show '<Security PropertyList Name>'
General Ledger Reports – The accounting file name has been added to the headings of General Ledger related reports.*
Specific Report Changes
A148 – Lease Statement – The lease statement can be printed directly from a Lease Register or the Lease Notebook. The Lease statement has a large number of options for customizing the report. The option selection was simplified to give users the ability to print a statement using the default criteria in a single click.
A158 - Current Lease Listing – Report now shows the Days Occupied for each lease. A summary section now shows the average Days Occupied for each property.
A185 - Move-Out Reconciliation Report – Major changes were made to this report to provide more useful information and to simplify the re-running of the report. The report can now be run as of a specific date or as of the move-out date. The sections on the report now include Security Deposits Held, Balances Due Prior to Move-Out, and Activity since Move-Out. If the move-out is the result of a transfer to a new unit, the report now provides wording to handle the transfer of funds to the new unit. The report also picks up future address changes based on the As of Date.
A270 – Manitoba Electronic Notice of New Tenant – new report for Canadian clients with operations in Manitoba which electronically sends a notification of a new tenant to the provincial government.
A271 - Manitoba Electronic Notice of Rent Increase - new report for Canadian clients with operations in Manitoba which electronically sends a notification of a Rent Increases to the provincial government.
A410 - RentRoll - now includes options to include Future Leases and Prospect Held Units.
A410 - Rent Roll / A411 RentRoll Repeating Charges / A412 RentRoll Charges and Credits - now limits the properties that show on these reports to properties purchased on or before As Of Date. The property Acquired Date is maintained on the Directions Tab of the Property Notebook.
A440 – Repeating Charges – now Shows Primary Tenant if there's no Payee on a transaction.
A510 – Delinquency Collections Report – A number of enhancements were made to this report including:
- Guarantor contact information displays on the report
- Communication attempts with the tenant/guarantor are shown
- Users can now directly email or print a letter to tenants/guarantors from the report
A565 – Trust Account Balances – now reports on Security Deposits paid by Prospects.
A590 – Activity Consolidation Report – new report compares the totals from several PropertyBoss reports to point out balancing problems prior to Month-End close.
B310 – Deposits Summary Report – now supports turning off some of the warning messages about Deposits made out of the period.
B525 – Deposit Summary Balancing Report – now includes selection criteria to allow the report to include batches opened within the period, batches closed within the period or both.
L303 – Income Statement by Year – This new report shows the General Ledger Income/Expense Statement by Month for any 12 month period.*
E101 EFT Reconciliation Report – now supports selection criteria to show All EFT Transaction Types, Bank Drafts Only, or Credit Cards Only
L330 – Trial Balance Report – now support selection criteria to allow the report to be run for all dates or for the current year only. Now includes an option to remove beginning balances from the report.
L380 – Check Register Report – This new General Ledger report provides a listing of all transactions in a checking account including breakdowns by PropertyBoss transaction of Payments to Vendors and Deposits of Tenant Payments. This report is especially helpful as a handout to HOA Boards.
O261 – Owner Statement - now shows the PB generated Check Number for each Payment to Owner.
P130 - Completed Activity for Prospects Summary – now has a selection option to include prospects not assigned to a property. This property restricts prospects to the active PropertyList selection. This selection allows you to include prospects without an assigned property when using PropertyLists.
W310 – Work Order Print – now supports Property Specific Headings.
PropertyBoss 2013 - Release Notes v10.01
Introduction
Release 10.01 brings an updated look to PropertyBoss. 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 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:
Industry | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
Residential | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant or Resident | PropertyOwner |
Multifamily | Property or Community | Unit | Lease | Resident | N/A |
Association | Association | Home | Ownership | Member | N/A |
Student Housing | Property or Community | Bed | Lease or Contract | Student | N/A |
Commercial | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
PropertyBoss Style Changes
Different color and font schemes are supported. This ability updates the appearance of PropertyBoss and supports different appearances for different tablet devices. By default, the new style for PropertyBoss is a much flatter look with a larger font and basic color scheme. Users can choose other styles on Setup Preferences à Personal Preferences. For customers who prefer the Release 9.08 look of PropertyBoss, there is a style with that name in the list of supported styles. We will be enhancing the existing styles and delivering additional style choices in upcoming releases.
Requisitioning and HDSupply
A number of major enhancements were made to the requisitioning system including:
- A Requisition History window accessible from the Requisition Merlin or the Requisition Notebook will enable viewing of the history of status changes to a Requisition.
- Added Unit of Measure to the Requisition Line and Requisition Print.
- A Purchase Order line number is assigned to lines when the status changes to Purchase Order.
- A Requisitioning setup option enables users to specify the General Ledger Account number on requisition lines and prints the GL account number on the Requisition Print.
- Added ability to copy line items from an existing Requisition. This feature enables users to quickly create a requisition from an existing requisition that is similar.
- Added ability to create a requisition directly from the Work Order Notebook. The Requisition is then tied to the work order. The Work Order Notebook shows the related requisitions on the Related tab of the Work Order Notebook.
PropertyLists
The Security PropertyList feature has been enhanced to allow users that are assigned to a security PropertyList to define their own private PropertyLists.
Media Linking
Major enhancements were made to the Media Linking abilities of PropertyBoss. The enhancements include:
- Organization of Media – The Media windows in PropertyBoss now allow users to Organize the media by Media Type, Name of the Media, and/or LastChanged Date/Time. Users can also filter the media to look for a specific linked document or group of documents.
- Media Types – PropertyBoss now supports user-defined Media Types when linking media to PropertyBoss. These media types allow sites to have different default settings for security and for publishing media to the Web Portals based on the type of media. These settings also enable users to group media by Media Type on the Linked Media windows.
- A standard set of Media Types is delivered with this release that you can modify for your own needs. This field is required, but can be set to default to a specific value based on different media uses (email, statements, images, or other). Each media type can also have different values for setting the Publish flags and Security Level when new media is linked. The user can change these default values when linking new media.
- Media Security – The Canadian government now requires any document with personal information to be encrypted. PropertyBoss now supports a robust security capability for secure documents. The Enhanced Media add-on in PropertyBoss now supports defining up to 4 different levels of security for documents: No Security, Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 (most secure). Your users can be assigned rights to view only up to a specific security level. The documents appear on the Media tabs, but show with a secure icon.
- Each document is encrypted and secured with a different internal password. If the user double-clicks the media and they have an appropriate security level, the user will be able to view the secured document. If the document is published to the website, by default PropertyBoss allows the resident/owner associated to the document to view the secured document.
Work Orders
Work Order capabilities have been significantly enhanced. These changes affect all Work Order Groups including Call Logging, Inspections, Work Orders, etc.
- A new button has been added to the Work Orders tab of the Lease Notebook to allow users to filter the listed work orders to a specific Work Order Group.
- The Work Order Notebook was redesigned to make it easier for users to keep a history of activity against the work order. Each activity item whether a change of status, a communication (phone call/email), or a note made against the work order is now individually logged with the user who made the change and the date/time the change was made. Each activity entry can have 2000 characters of description entered.
- New fields were added to the Work Order Navigator to allow searching against activities.
- The Work Order Notebook now has a Jump button to enable users to quickly jump from the Work Order Notebook to related Notebook or Register windows for the Property, Unit, Lease, Vendor, and Property Owner.
- The Work Order Navigator was modified to include a Lease Balance and a Property Owner Balance column (for Residential Management databases). If there are multiple owners on the property, the field shows a list of the owners and their current balance.
- The Work Order Print popup window now defaults to the choices last used for determining which copies to print.
- A group of work orders can be closed either individually or en masse. When closing en masse, you can enter a comment, closing date, and manhours to apply to all the work orders. The activity log is updated with the information entered.
Electronic Payments via PayLease
PayLease was added as the transction processor. PayLease offers competitive rates and limited underwriting which enables smaller companies to quickly begin accepting Credit Cards and Bank Drafts with a minimum of signup paperwork.
PayLease also supports the PCI enhancements in PropertyBoss. If the PCI option is selected, all credit card numbers are stored with PayLease and not in the PropertyBoss database. This selection limits your liability to credit card fraud and simplifies any PCI compliance your company is required to take.
Changes to Electronic Payments
This release continues to build on the Electronic Payment features like PCI compliance introduced in earlier Releases. This release includes the following enhancements to Electronic Payments:
- Both Semi-Monthly (twice a month) and bi-weekly (every other week) recurring EFT payments are supported.
- A Mass Change EFT amounts capability was added. This option compares the scheduled EFT amount to the Rent Amount and Recurring Charges/Credits for the period and allows the user to selectively mass change the EFT amounts. The option also allows an email or letter to be sent to everyone where the amount was modified.
- Added the ability to clear EFT information for tenants on Past Leases. This feature is an option on the EFT Setup for a Merchant account.
- A number of enhancements were added to the PCI Compliance features including improving the handling of moving properties between accounting files with different settings for PCI compliance.
QuickBooks Interface
The QuickBooks accrual transaction mapping functionality now allows users to define different prefix for the items (Journals, Invoices, Sales receipts, etc.) created in QuickBooks for each transaction mapping. Before this change all transaction mappings for an accounting file were required to have the same prefix. This feature supports the requirement for Canadian customers with different tax rates for items in different jurisdictions.
Email, Mail Merge, and Letters
- The Work Order Notebook was modified to support printing of Mail Merge Letters for the Work Order Letters or Lease Letters.
- The following new merge fields were added to Letters to Tenants about a Lease:
- Deposits Held – separate fields that show up to 5 deposits, date fully paid, and the total amount paid.
- Prorated Amounts – Fields that show Prorate amounts at the start of the lease including:
- Prorate_StartOfLease_EndDate (last day of the first rental period (monthly, semiannual etc.))
- Prorate_StartOfLease_Amt_Rent (prorated rent amount from Lease Start date to End of Period)
- Prorate_StartOfLease_Amt_Other (prorated recurring amounts not specified as rent)
- Prorate_StartOfLease_Amt_Total (total of 2 amts above)
- Tenant_nn_relationship to show the relationship of each tenant on the lease.
- Added ability to specify the Save Copy to Enhanced Media setting when selecting the original email options. Previously, you had to Preview the email to select the option.
- On Letters to Tenants about a Lease, added new field to show the Balance Rent written out in legal format.
- The save Outlook emails as Media feature was modified to handle an unlimited number of folder names within Outlook.
General Changes
- When planning the move-out dates for a lease, you can now specify the Financial Responsibility Ends Date (FRED) before actually moving out the lease. When entered in advance of move-out, the FRED date is just for planning purposes and will have no effect on reports or pro-rating of rent until the lease is actually moved out.
- A unique number called the LeaseID is assigned to each lease. This field is shown on the first tab of each lease. The LeaseID is used by some systems to uniquely identify payment transactions from a Lockbox. You can now search for LeaseID on QuickFind, Global Search, and via the RentRoll Navigator.
- Two columns were added to the Rent Roll Navigator:
- Scheduled EFT Payments – The total amount of EFT Payments scheduled for the current month. This amount can be used to compare to total charges to handle discrepancies in scheduled payments
- Lease Comments – The comments on the lease notebook.
- Users are not allowed to reverse a transaction that is marked as obsolete.
- Added ability to sort all the transaction registers by clicking on the transaction name.
Specific to Residential Management
- A vacancy fee is no longer charged for Offline and Administrative Units
Tax Credit Compliance
- Added the ability to do interim certifications (i.e. Unscheduled certifications required by the housing authority for events like the need to change subsidy amounts)
- Tenant Income Certification (TIC) data can be exported in the industry standard NAHMA LIHTC Data Transfer XML Standard (1.1. or 2.0). This export specifically supports import into the Spectrum software which a number of states use.
Changes to Reports
- A251 – Taxes Charged and Collected – Report was modified to enable users to select whether to show Taxes on Commission or Regular Taxes or both.
- A510 – Delinquency Report - Added options that enable users to select whether the report should include current and/or past delinquencies.
- A510 – Delinquent/Prepaid Report - Added option to include credits in the prepaid column. If not checked, then only payments show in the prepaid column.
- A541 – Recap Journal Entries Report – This report now limits the display of data based on the currently selected PropertyList.
- A570 – Activity Reconciliation Report – This report now limits the display of data based on the currently selected PropertyList.
- The General Ledger Print Checks function now uses the 1099 Name/Print on Check field on the Vendor Notebook when printing checks for the selected vendor.
- P120 – Prospect Source Analysis report now limits its display based on the currently selected PropertyList.
- A489 – Certification of Rent Paid – Fields were added and a standard Word template was added to support a Certificate of Rent Paid for the province of Manitoba. To use this feature, select the correct Certificate in the setup. The preview will continue to show the Minnesota Certificate of Rent Paid.
PropertyBoss 2013 - Release Notes v9.08
Notes on Terminology used in these notes
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:
Industry | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Residential | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant or Resident | PropertyOwner |
Multifamily | Property or Community | Unit | Lease | Resident | N/A |
Association | Association | Home | Membership | Member | N/A |
Student Housing | Property or Community | Bed | Lease or Contract | Student | N/A |
Commercial | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
General Ledger
Many of our clients use PropertyBoss’s integrated interface to QuickBooks to facilitate their accounting. There is now another option available, using a new General Ledger that is an integral part of PropertyBoss. For more information, see www.propertyboss.com/why-propertyboss/accounting/. The following section describes recently added features for our clients who are already using PropertyBoss General Ledger.
Checks
- Check printing now supports continuation pages if there are more than 15 detail lines on the check.
- Manual entered checks and miscellaneous journal entries related to a Vendor now show on the Vendor NoteBook and will be included in vendor 1099 totals.
NACHA
- The Miscellaneous Journals for NACHA outgoing payments, now create a separate line item for each transaction when decreasing Accounts Payable (for accrual) and Due to Owner/Bills Paid by Tenant (for cash). A single entry is still written to decrease the checking account.
- The Journal tab of the Transaction History window now shows information about the NACHA file or deposit the transaction is on including the total amount of the NACHA file/deposit.
Budgets
- Added option on budget definition to select whether the budget uses decimals (cents) or not. Also added option to select whether zeros on the budget reports should show as $0 or dashes.
- Added ability to copy budgets. This copy ability supports three different copy options:
- Copy from previous budget
- Copy the actual totals from previous period, or
- Copy the average totals from a previous period.
Bill Payments
- When paying bills, PropertyBoss now allows you to quickly switch to a different accounting file. The popup selection shows all the accounting files and the number of bills to pay.
- The Pay Bills function now allows selection by Accounting File and Transaction Set to support paying Bills from specific checking accounts easier.
- Added ability to mark vendors as allowing Duplicate Invoice Numbers. If checked no warning is given upon entry of a duplicate number.
- Bills paid Electronically and by Credit Card are now marked as printed automatically.
- When paying bills, PropertyBoss now gives a warning if paying the bill will take the checking account balance to less than zero.
- The stub on manually entered checks now shows the distribution from each GL account.
Chart of Accounts
- Added ability to copy the Chart of Accounts from one accounting file to another accounting file.
- When a transaction is renamed, the General Ledger account is immediately renamed also. PropertyBoss does not replace Account names that you have overridden with a new name.
Miscellaneous Journal Entries
- On Miscellaneous Journals added a Find field to search for journal where the name, description or account matches the value in the find.
Reports
- L330 Trial Balance report now allows users to choose between two levels of detail and users can drill down to the transactions from the Trial Balance report.
- L311 Balance Sheet - Added the ability to provide a detail Net Income section (in effect an embedded Income/Expense statement) to show the details of the Net Income line in the Balance Sheet.
- L370 - Aged Payables Report – added new report
Prospects
- Added edits to the changing of the property on a prospect. If you change the property on the prospect and the new property is on a different accounting file, PropertyBoss will now require you to reverse/void existing transactions before you can change the property.
PropertyLists
PropertyLists is a feature that allows you to group properties in a database for security, viewing and reporting purposes. For example, a multi-family client may have multiple properties in a database. With PropertyLists, they can restrict certain users to be able to see only a certain property or properties. By using another PropertyList, a regional manager would be able to see all the properties under his management. Groups may overlap. For example, a third party manager might have two property managers, one who manages properties in the northern part of the city and one who manages properties in the southern part. Each could have their own PropertyList. Another PropertyList that the owner creates, might show inner-city properties (north and south) and yet another group might show suburban properties (north and south)
- Separated the selection and update windows of PropertyLists to simplify the user experience.
- Added security by PropertyList – Added ability to define Security PropertyLists. The user must have System Security privileges to define and assign Security PropertyLists. Once defined, you can assign a Security PropertyList to users in System Setup. If assigned to a Security PropertyList, the user cannot create or select other PropertyLists and are therefore restricted to only viewing information about the properties on their assigned Security PropertyList.
In conjunction to the Security PropertyList, you should also restrict the user to a Report group since there are summary and financial reports that do not restrict the information to a specific set of properties.
- To simplify the user experience, if a user has a PropertyList assigned, the property selection windows from reports now only allows the user to select between the currently assigned properties. If no PropertyList is currently assigned, the user can select from either PropertyLists or properties on these windows.
Accounts Payable
A number of enhancements were made to Accounts Payable including:
- Terminology standardized to use the term, Bill to Pay.
- Buttons were added directly to the Navigator to simplify processing of Bills to Pay.
- The A/P window now uses PropertyLists (see above) to limit selection of Properties and Units.
- Lines can now be charged at the Property (default), Unit, or Lease level.
- The Bill to Pay status now automatically changes to Paid when all lines are fully paid.
- Now shows Check# and Payment date for each line.
- Added ability to copy lines from a recent Bill to Pay.
- Added ability to post charges to a specific resident.
- Added ability to link media to each line.
Prospects/Contacts and Address Management
- We have greatly simplified the handling of contact addresses in Release 9.08. PropertyBoss now supports the following address types:
Mailing Address
Billing Address
Permanent Address (only available for student housing properties).PropertyBoss keeps a log of address changes. You can copy a historical address and schedule a change for the future. This future change is automatically implemented. For example, if a property owner has a different summer address, you can easily copy last year's summer address and schedule when the change is effective for the coming summer. Spouses/children can reference another contact's address. Whenever the 'parent' address changes, the related addresses are automatically changed.
- Prospects/Contacts data are stored on the same record. Therefore, if you move a contact back to being a prospect, the current address of the contact automatically becomes the current address of the prospect.
Transaction Management
Vendor
- Added ability to the Transaction window, AP Invoice Entry, and manual check entry to create a new vendor. The purpose of this feature is to give users with 'Create new Vendor' security the ability to create vendors directly from the transaction windows.
- One-time vendors can also be created by entering the vendor information and clicking the inactive vendor checkbox.
Setup Preference - NSF
- Added new setup preference to identify the NSF transaction for Payments of Security Deposits.
Account Register Default Time Period
- Changed the handling of the default time period that shows on account registers. The new logic sets the default to 3 months for leases that are weekly or monthly. For quarterly, semiannual, or annual accounts, the default is set to 3 years. Users can also now override this setting and set their own default for the time period.
Bill To Pay From Lease
- Added ability to optionally create a Bill to Pay from a lease recurring transaction. This feature is primarily geared for clients using PropertyBoss for Corporate Housing where they need to pay an outside vendor on a monthly basis (e.g. Furniture Rental).
Define Transactions
- Added option to filter properties by the current propertylist in Define Transactions where you assign properties to a transaction.
- Added ability to limit transactions in Define Transactions to an accounting file or a list of accounting files instead of a list of properties.
Post Multiple Charges
- The Mass Post Charges window now supports a sort order on the review charges window.
- Added ability to post multiple charges from RentRoll for future leases.
- Added ability to allow Note transactions to be posted from Post Multiple Charges window.
- Added ability to post a recurring concession from Post Multiple Charges window.
Prospects
- If there are multiple accounting files in the database when a transaction is entered for a prospect, PropertyBoss will require that a property be selected for that prospect first.
Interface to US Postal Service Mail (NOTE: not in the initial release – coming soon!)
- Any letter/document can now be mail-merged within PropertyBoss and sent directly to be printed, inserted into an envelope and mailed without you having to touch the letter. The feature supports both one-off letters and mass mailings of thousands of letters. You can even send letters via certified mail and view the signed return receipt within PropertyBoss. Pay for the order via PayPal or via pre-authorized credit/debit transactions.
- Print individual or mass print payment coupon books directly from PropertyBoss. The coupon books can be sent with a mail merged cover letter and directly mailed by the service. Pay for the order via PayPal or via pre-authorized credit/debit transactions.
Email, Mail Merge, and Letters
Attach Mail-Merged Word Letters
- Added ability to also add Mail-merged Word letters as attachments to emails. PropertyBoss automatically does the mail merge and creates the PDF attachment for the email when you select the letter.
Email Setup, Format And Error Messages
- To help facilitate getting email settings, we have added a tool for testing email settings on the Setup Preferences/Email Communications/Settings for this User tab.
- PropertyBoss now validates the format of entered email addresses. Multiple email addresses can be entered on a single line by separating them with a semicolon. Following are all valid email formats:
[email protected] Bob Smith <[email protected]>
Note: PropertyBoss automatically sends emails out in the format Bob Smith [email protected] by appending the name (Owner, resident, vendor, etc.) to the email address if the name was not entered in the email field.
- The Email process now captures the error text if an email is refused by the server and displays the information on the log reports.
Sending E-mail To Contact
- All email addresses in PropertyBoss now have an icon to open up the user's local email client and start an email. NOTE: Emails sent via this method are not captured in PropertyBoss media.
Merge Field Translation By Industry Segment
- To simplify setting up mail merge letters for different industry segments, PropertyBoss now translates the labels for mail merge fields in both Word and the internal word processor.
In addition, only fields that are applicable to that industry segment and current settings are shown. For example, if the database does not use deposits, no deposit related merge fields are shown.
Detail Fields in Prospect Letters
- Prospect Letters now support using Detail custom fields as merge fields.
Electronic Transaction Processing and PCI Compliance
PCI Compliance: PropertyBoss has undertaken a major initiative to facilitate compliance with the PCI standards for the handling of credit card and other secure data. PropertyBoss has always encrypted credit card and other security data. This enhancement further limits the exposure of PropertyBoss clients to potential stealing of credit card data by implementing PayPros’ (formerly PPI) PayMover’s vault technology. This helps to protect our users who process credit cards to maintain a secure environment. Maintenance of a secure environment remains the responsibility of the client. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/
- If you choose to implement the PCI strategy, PropertyBoss will no longer store encrypted credit card data in the PropertyBoss database. Instead, PropertyBoss will submit the credit card number to PayPros’s PayMover vault and store a token representing the credit card. PropertyBoss also stores the last 4 characters of the credit card. Once sent to the vault, there is no way for the credit card number to be viewed by your employees.
EFT Reversal Guidance
- Improved the layout and wording on the EFT Reversal to clarify when a credit should be sent and when it should not.
NACHA Enhancements
- PropertyBoss now automatically creates a correcting batch for a NACHA file if the transaction(s) on the file is a correcting entry.
- The Bank Gateway was modified to support banks that require separate account numbers for Credits vs. Debits.
Lockbox Matching To Unit
- The Lockbox functionality was enhanced to allow transactions to be matched just on the Unit Number. Now Lockbox can match on LeaseID, Unit, or Routing/Account Number. On Lockbox, transactions that come in via a flat file (i.e. not the SmartStreet interface) can now identify the lease by:
- identifying the property, unit, and (optionally) the lease start date, or
- using the Identifier field and importing the Lease ID from the file, or
- using the Identifier field and importing a field that matches to a custom field called Lockbox.
- Added ability to change individual dates on the Lockbox import because some banks do not always send the correct entered date for transactions in the import file.
Work Orders
- Added ability to send an email to the vendor directly from the Vendor tab of the Work Order Notebook.
- Added Internal Comments field that does not show on the portal and is not printed on the work order.
- Added Tenant Email Address to Work Order Merlin.
- When printing an inspection, you are given three report options: Print Move-In Inspection, Print Move-Out Inspection, and Completed Inspection Report. The Move-In inspection is to capture the existing condition of the room. The Move-Out inspection reports allows capture of the condition of the room but shows the condition of the room at move-in. The Completed inspection report shows the reported condition at move-out.
General Changes
Support For Future Mobile Functionality
- To support upcoming mobile development and enhancements to the Inspection module, added ability to create a property and unit by passing information thru PropertyTransit.
- To support upcoming mobile development and enhancements to the Inspection module, added ability to download media files using PropertyTransit.
Merlin Reports
- RentRoll Merlin - Added Property Address, City, State, and Zip to the Merlin. This enhancement allows you to create reports of properties in specific cities, areas, etc.
- RentRoll Merlin - Added Last Date renewed and Lease MoveOut Comments.
- RentRoll Merlin - Changed All Tenants column to only show occupants. Added column called All Contacts to show all contacts. Both columns now put the contact type in front of the name.
- The Lease notebook was modified to show the status in colors like the Rent Roll Merlin.
- All Merlins - Fields not used in the current database industry (Residential, Association, Student Housing, etc) no longer show on Merlins.
Hide Security Deposit Features
- If you do not use security deposits in your database, PropertyBoss now hides security deposit labels on windows and reports and also hides reports related to Security Deposits.
Navigation Enhancements For Productivity
- Added new 'Jump' button on the register to jump directly to the Notebook or Register of any related entity. For example, if you are on the register for a lease, you can jump directly to the Property Notebook or Register, the Unit Notebook or Register, the Owner(s) Notebook or Register, or the Tenant Notebook.
Late Fee Explanations
- Added option in setup preferences to override the PropertyBoss Late Fee explanations. For Associations, Student Housing, Multifamily, and Senior Living properties, the late fee explanations can be overridden for each community. When overriding the standard PropertyBoss late fee explanations, you can choose to prepend/append wording to the standard explanation or completely replace the PropertyBoss explanation.
Log Changes To Payment Comments
- Added new log of changes to Payment Comments that show on the Delinquency report. In addition to typing in payment comments, users can now create a standard list of payment comments that can be applied. When viewing the payment comments, users can view the history of payment comments.
Non-North American Addresses
- Changed handling of non-North American addresses throughout PropertyBoss. If you select a country other than Canada, US, and Mexico (i.e. you choose Other), we only show the multiple line address block and clear out and hide the City, State, and Zip fields.
1099 Enhancements
- PropertyBoss now supports a new company (1099 Fire) for producing and electronically sending 1099s. Also PropertyBoss now supports creating 1099s by association since each is a separate legal entity. We now support producing 1099s for each vendor directly in PropertyBoss. Numerous other small improvements were made.
Publishing Media
- When adding media to a property/unit, the Publish on Website and Show on PropertyListing checkboxes now default to the last used values.
Included PDF Viewer
- PropertyBoss now delivers an internal PDF Viewer that is used for viewing media on the various media tabs. Previously, PropertyBoss used whatever PDF viewer was installed on the local machine which caused problems when users removed their PDF viewer or installed incompatible PDF Viewers.
Past Leases And Lease Deletion
- Added ability to mass email or print statements for past leases from Rent Roll, Lease Notebook, Lease Register and Statements.
- Added ability to delete a lease if there are only note transactions and no financial transactions.
Prospect Module
- The registration process has been changed. The Prospect module will not show on the Navigator any longer unless you have a valid registration number.
Specific to Residential Management
Vacant Fee
- To prevent charging a vacant fee on a newly entered property, we changed the Vacant Fee posting logic to not charge a Vacant Fee until the period after the Date Available.
Reports
- Added ability to not include Held bills for Budget Reports.
- A565 - Trust Account balances report was modified to include items from General Ledger accounts to make the report balance to the bank cash balance. Also, the reports now selects based on Accounting file.
- A220 Property Manager Profit & Loss report was modified to include items from the General Ledger. Also, the report now selects based on Accounting File.
- O180 Owner Statement was modified to allow clients to give a name to the owner statement saved to Media to handle situations where they print two statements in the same month (e.g. annual and monthly).
- O187 Owner Statement now prints a statement for an owner even if there were no transactions.
Owner-Related
- Added new field to the Owner Notebook called the Portal Email Address. The upgrade sets this field's value to the current owner email address. This email address is used for authenticating a user to the Owner Portal. This new field allows you to use one email address for communicating to the owner and for the owner to use a different email address for logging into their owner portal.
- Multiple email addresses can now be entered in the owner email address field separated by semicolons.
- Added option to view inactive owners in Tools View Inactive Owners.
- Increased length of the email address field on the owner notebook.
- Added ability to specify a flat fee management amount on the Transaction Window - Edit Management Fee window. Previously you could only change the percentage and not specify a specific amount.
- Users can now view detail and attach media to held bills in the Owner Portal.
- Added option to transaction definition to not show specific transactions if there is an owner on the property. This feature enables clients to have different sets of transactions for properties that are self-managed vs. properties that are managed on behalf of 3rd party owners.
- Enhanced maintaining the accounting file on the owner notebook and the property notebook. If a new accounting file is set on a property and it conflicts with the accounting file set on the owner of that property, a warning message will show. If the accounting file on an owner is changed, the accounting file will be changed on all properties for that owner. All owners of a property must have the same accounting file.
Specific to Association Management
Past Members
- Clients who manage associations often need to enter past members and the membership period to track collections. Modified the membership entry windows to simplify entry of past memberships for an Association.
Lockbox
- The Lockbox functionality was modified to support importing multiple XML lockbox files at the same time. This new capability allows users to process multiple SmartStreet lockbox files for multiple associations in one pass. While the multiple files are processed simultaneously, each lockbox file still creates a separate deposit in PropertyBoss.
Board Member Identification
- Added a new tab to the Association Notebook to maintain the list of current board members and their position in the Association. You can also look at the history of board members over time. Options on the window enable you to email or print a letter for selected board members.
- The Contacts Merlin was modified to add a new field, Board Member that shows current and future board members. Field would show Board: Position, Board(Future):Position e.g. Architecture: President Violations(Future):Member
Inactive Unit Or Association
- Added ability to mark a unit or association as inactive. All ownerships must have a $0 balance to mark the Association as inactive. When marked as inactive, PropertyBoss closes each membership and the Association/Unit will no longer show on PropertyBoss windows and reports.
Association 1099s
- PropertyBoss supports creating 1099s by association since each is a separate legal entity.
Member Dues
- Member Dues are no longer be maintained on the Home. Instead, dues are maintained on the Membership notebook. When Membership is transferred, the current Member Dues amount transfers to the new Membership from the existing Membership.
New Association Accounting File
- PropertyBoss automatically creates a new accounting file when you create a new association.
Reports And Merlins
- Most reports were modified to automatically sort and create a page break by Association when printing.
- A430 Meeting Signup Report - Added a new report for taking to association meetings to track attendance. This report discreetly indicates which owners cannot vote based on their outstanding balance.
Specific to Affordable Housing/Tax Credit Compliance
- The Compliance window - Select Unit now only shows available units. It no longer shows units held for a prospect.
- Added support for tracking demographic data for the Florida Program report.
Specific to Student Housing
- PropertyBoss maintains a Permanent Address field for students.
Specific to Hosted Customers
- Hosted clients can mass upload files from their local computers to the Inbox on by clicking the Upload Files button on the Media window in PropertyBoss.
New Requisition Capability with optional link to HDSupply Catalog
This optional Requisition Module supports extensive integration with HDSupply for selecting and ordering material, but the interface is not a requirement to use the module. The module supports a full audit trail of activities and approvals and automatic sends an email message to Work Approvers and Corporate Management alerting them to requisitions to approve.
The Requisitioning module supports the following work flow:
- Site User creates requisition summary information in PropertyBoss.
- Site User selects items from the online HDSupply catalog which are automatically put onto the requisition.
- Site User submits the requisition for Regional Work Approval.
- The Regional office approves the work.
- Corporate Management approves the requisition which turns the Requisition into a Purchase Order.
- PropertyBoss electronically sends the Purchase Order to HDSupply.
- HDSupply delivers the ordered material. Site User enters quantities received for the Purchase Order into PropertyBoss.
- HDSupply sends Invoice to Corporate Accounting.
- Before approving payment, Corporate Accounting uses Quick-Lookup feature to compare the Invoice to Requisition amounts
Other Changes to Reports
- Changed all the reports that mail to customers to include the country in the address if the country is not equal to the country of the site.
- A146/A148 – Tenant Statements. A number of modifications were made to these statements including:
- In addition to choosing to send these statements to all contacts who get statements, you can now individually choose a specific contact to receive a statement.
- Added report date to the Deposit Stub of the reports to prevent the use of old deposit tickets by residents.
- A148 Large Font Statement - Added Balance column.
- A148 Give option to show Charges Paid for each Payment.
- Show Physical Address of the Property on the statement.
- Changed Criteria to support selecting specific association and the balance criteria to both.
- On A146, comments section now allows an unlimited amount of comments to be displayed. On the A148, the comments must fit into a specific text block. You can now change the font size of this block to fit the text you want to display.
- Totals added to the Charge and Payments columns on the report.
- A165 - Property Income/Expense 12 Month Report - Added ability to view quarterly totals.
- A450 - Property Status Summary report enhanced to allow users to include/exclude Offline units (for instance Administrative Units) in the report.
- A489 – Certificate of Rent Paid. The Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) for Minnesota was modified to support current regulatory changes. Note: this form can be modified to be used in other jurisdictions by modifying the underlying Word document.
- A499 – Contact Mailing Labels – added sort by Mailing Address on the labels to sort in the same order as letters.
- A510 – Delinquents and Prepaids Report modified to add option to not include past leases on the report.
- A510 / A530 - A number of clients balance the A510 Delinquency Report to the A530 Collections and Security Deposits Report. The totals on these reports may differ if the advanced Late Fee capabilities are used. For example, if a transaction is defined as Due on Next Rent Due date, the transaction will show on the A530 report but may not show on the A510 report because the transaction is not yet delinquent.
To simplify this situation for clients, the A510 Delinquency report was modified to show a total line for A/R not yet due: so the reports will always balance. The line will not show if you do not have this situation. - A572 – Agent Referral Report - The Property Owner was added to report.
- B310/B320 -- Deposits Summary reports group and page break by Accounting File. You can also select to print for a specific accounting file.
- W310 Work Order Print report modified to only print work orders for your current propertylist.
- W310 Work Order Print modified to print Requested By.
Virtual Assistants
- PropertyBoss has partnered with Planet Synergy to offer Virtual Assistance services for entering of bills, linking of media to bills, printing statements, and closing work orders. For more information, see the Virtual Assistant tab on Setup Preferences in PropertyBoss.
PropertyBoss 2012 - Release Notes v9.07
Notes on Terminology used in these notes
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:
Industry | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Residential | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant or Resident | PropertyOwner |
Multifamily | Property or Community | Unit | Lease | Resident | N/A |
Association | Association | Home | Membership | Member | N/A |
Student Housing | Property or Community | Bed | Lease or Contract | Student | N/A |
Commercial | Property | Unit | Lease | Tenant | PropertyOwner |
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:
- PropertyBoss automatically creates a Chart of Accounts when you turn on the General Ledger for the Accounting File.
- 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.
- PropertyBoss automatically creates journal entries for all PropertyBoss transactions simultaneously for both Cash and Accrual reporting.
- 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.
- The Make Deposits function, EFT Submission, and NACHA file creation processes of PropertyBoss automatically create deposits in the correct Checking account.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Miscellaneous Journal - create manual journals for handling generic accounting activity.
- The complete Budget capability allows multiple budgets to be defined for an Accounting File. Simplified entry of budget amounts.
- Full Drill-down capability through General Ledger reports to account detail and then down to the source PropertyBoss Transaction.
- View Journal entries that PropertyBoss created for any transaction from the Actions button on the Transaction window.
- 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
- 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.
- General Ledger Journal Merlin - create customized reports of General Ledger activity.
- The rich set of security options enable control of who can do activities within the General Ledger.
There is no fee or license required to use the PropertyBoss General Ledger. Activation of the General Ledger system requires a code to assure that Clients are prepared for the transition. Switching from one accounting system to another requires careful planning and education in the differences between the systems. For more information or to schedule an implementation, please call your Account or Client Care specialist.
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 3rd 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. [email protected];[email protected]). 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) [email protected] .
- 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 2011 - Release Notes v9.06
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 2010 - Release Notes v9.04 & v9.05
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 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 12th 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. - Application files that are never
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.