ICYMI: The Biggest Feature Enhancements of 2021

What a year. Despite the trials and tribulations, you forged ahead. The Rent Manager team was busy enhancing and crafting new features designed to grow your business and simplify your Rent Manager experience. In case you missed it, we released several game-changing features in 2021—get ready to level up in 2022 with workflows that work for you.

Major Feature Enhancements for Rent Manager Express

Rent Manager Express is the browser-based version of our software and serves as an online companion product to Rent Manager 12. The intuitive interface, coupled with the freedom to access your data from any web-enabled device, makes Express one of the best ways to manage your business.

Express received more than 30 powerful feature additions in 2021. Here are some of the most notable:

• Owner report batches
• User Defined Fields (UDF) register
• The Vendor 1099 Adjustment Tool
• Post Management Fees page
• Perform bank and credit card reconciliations

Lease Renewal Offers Enhancements

Gone are the days of manual data entry and reaching out to your residents one-by-one to check if they’re renewing their lease. Rent Manager’s new lease renewal workflow provides a seamless experience to manage expiring leases, publish renewals for your tenants, handle rent escalations, and more in just a few easy steps.

Keep Track of Events and Schedules with the Community Calendar & Reservable Amenities

If your property offers amenities that your tenants can reserve—such as a clubhouse or a meeting space—the Reservable Amenities feature in Rent Manager allows you to establish an internal calendar to conveniently keep track of those reservations. Amenity reservations appear on the Community Calendar within your Rent Manager database, keeping everything is in one central location.

Renters who use Tenant Web Access (TWA) can book their own times to use these property resources. Your team simply approves or declines the request from within Rent Manager. To avoid cluttered calendars and confusion for your residents, each amenity has its own calendar in TWA.

Take Polls for Resident Feedback

Digitally connect with your renters and gain insightful, firsthand feedback on what’s working within your communities and what’s not. Create custom online polls that can be completed by your residents in their TWA portal. Through polls, you can gather responses on virtually anything—whether that be the kind of community events tenants like best, or which equipment they’d like to see added to the community gym. You can format your questions to offer multiple choices, solicit write-in responses, and more. After your residents have completed the poll, you can view and save their responses.

This kind of approachable, no-pressure feedback is an invaluable communication tool for renters. Rent Manager’s polls feature enables you to better understand your tenants’ wants and needs. This can help increase resident retention.

Management Fee Calculation Enhancements

In 2021, calculating management fees in Rent Manager got a whole lot easier with the introduction of the Standard Method. This new approach allows you to post management fees as often as you like, with no monthly constraints.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works:

• You may collect 6% of any rent charge that gets paid or 100% of any paid late fee. When you post management fees, Rent Manager applies fees to any payment transaction allocated toward your designated charge types.
• Rather than examine GL activity over a date range, we instead look for allocated payments without management fees assessed to them. Someone backdates a payment? That’s no problem. If it was applied to a charge type that you collect fees on, Rent Manager collects that fee the next time you post.
• The Standard Method allows for more transparency when it comes to collection. You can click the details of a charge or payment and see if a management fee was assessed. It will also tell you how much was collected for that tenant’s payment as well as whether that fee was a pass thru CPT.

Rent Manager will never require you to change management fee methods. However, we will provide you with the tools to do so if you choose. The former setup is not going anywhere, though, and is now referred to as the Advanced Method.

rmAppSuite Pro Enhancements

The rmAppSuite Pro mobile app enables you to access your data from anywhere in the field. Now, you can accomplish even more with the addition of Violations and Meter Readings to the app.

Add new violations, access existing ones, and update the status from your Android^™ or iOS^™ device. Users can even take and add images of the violation directly from their smartphones.

If you’re billing tenants for utility consumption, the new Meter Readings feature allows you to enter reading data in the field. Using your smartphone camera, scan the meter’s bar code and enter usage data and identify irregularities on the spot. 

Short-Term Rental Feature Enhancements

Short-term rental portfolios can contain multitudes of property types—campgrounds, RV parks, hotels, vacation rentals, and hostels. Rent Manager’s new Short Term Rentals feature allows you to set up properties to accommodate all types of amenities and guest experiences. Using this feature, you can track guest reservations, check in guests, process payments, and run operational reports.

Stay tuned for several feature additions to Short Term Rentals in 2022!  

This article is just a quick overview of our biggest 2021 feature additions. To take a deep dive into these exciting resources, be sure to look them up in the Rent Manager University course catalog, or in the Rent Manager Help File (by pressing the F1 key in your Rent Manager database).