Version 9.9 has arrived

You can download this update by going to the help menu inside RentMaster and choose Download RentMaster Update. If you have any problems downloading the update automatically, you can also download it manually from http://www.rentmaster.co.nz/update.aspx

Whats New?

- On the cashbook screen, you can now choose to open the screen showing only a date limited number of transactions such as the current month or current financial year etc. This is set up by going to the maintenance menu and choose Options/Features

- A new Add Building function has been added to the property list screen. This creates a building and associated units automatically.

- The Rent Status screen and Overview screen are now a lot faster, particularly for people with a lot of tenants.

- The Monthly Arrears and Cumulative Arrears graphs now have a 6 month average line added.

- On the NZ T41 rent summary report, extra charge payments now show the name of the income group used to record the payment.

- A new version of the rent status report has been created. This one only prints closed tenants who are open for additional transactions.

- On the expense group screen, the management fee percentage has been changed from 2 decimal places to 3 decimal places.

- When using the print button on the tenant details screen, contact details were not all fitting on the page. The text now wraps around if it does not fit.

- On the owner details screen, the management fee percentage can now be entered either as a tax inclusive or tax exclusive percentage.

RentMaster has for a long time allowed you to create buildings which are a collection of units.  A building can be an apartment building or a block of flats or a retail shopping mall or an office building etc.  Any property which contains multiple rentable units.

In version 9.9 the process of creating buildings has been made easier.  It was made easy with the addition of the Quick Start wizard a few months ago, but this can only be run once.  The new Add Building button on the property select list screen will make the creation of buildings easy at any time.  The Add Building screen asks for the propertry address etc and the number of units in the building, and automatically creates all the properties required.

You can of course still manually create them all if you wish.

The management fee percent is the percentage of the rent receipts which is retained by the property manager in the forms of a fee.

Currently the fee is set as a tax inclusive percentage.  For example if you charge 8% plus tax, and tax is a nice round 10%, you would enter the value as 8.8%.  However in version 9.9 you can now enter the fee percent as a tax exclusive value (i.e. 8% in our example) and the system will calculate the tax inclusive value for you automatically.  You can choose either tax inclusive or exclusive as the entry option.

The cashbook screen contains all the transaction that have occurred since you started using RentMaster.  Well almost.  It automatically returns the last 5000 transactions, which for a lot of people is still all of them.

However in version 9.9, you will be able to automatically filter the screen when it opens based on a predefined date range.  This is set on the options screen, so there is no need to select the predefined range each time.  A shorter date range will make opening the screen faster for those with a lot of transactions.  And lets face it, most of the time when you open the screen it is because you want to add new transactions, not view old ones.  The options are...

All transactions - this is the default and maintains current functionality.

This financial year

Last 6 months

This month

Last 30 days

Last 7 days

Empty list - This means the screen will open empty by default.

Regardless of which option is chosen, you can press the Filter button, and change the date range to list transactions outside the defaulted date range.  If you have multiple bank accounts, each time you switch to a different bank account the predefined date range filter is reapplied.

A new version of the popular Rent Status report has been created.  

This report has the same format and same information as the existing report, except it only prints for tenants which are marked as closed, but also marked as Keep open for additional transactions.  This is a good way to find out the outstanding rent balance of your closed tenants who you are still trying to chase up for outstanding rent.

In a recent release of RentMaster we added a new Monthly Arrears and Cumulative Arrears graphs.

In this release we are adding an Averge line to both of these graph.  This calculates a 6 month rolling average.  The monthly values can vary quite a bit, so the 6 month average evens out the fluctuations and shows a better picture of the average overall standings.

The NZ T41 rent summary report prints extra charges at the end of the report below the rent payment section.

Previously any extra charge payent would just show as 'Payment'.  It has been changed so it now shows as 'Payment-XXXXXXX' where XXXXXXX is the income group code used to repay the extra charge.  For people who use multiple different income groups to record the payment of extra charges, this will help show what the extra charge payment relates to.

The rent status screen is a slow screen to open for anyone with a large number of tenants.  There is a lot of calculations going on to determine the total balance owing and last paid date and amount etc.

However a lot of effort has gone into making this screen open faster, and we have succeeded.  A client who has about 350 tenants used to take about 45 seconds to open this screen.  Now it will open in about 2 seconds.

The same goes for the Overview screen which also has the rent due tab.  This now also opens a lot faster.

The rent status report currently still uses the old method, so will run slowly.  But this will be looked as in a later release.