Hi there!

Welcome to 2023 everyone! A new year and with that comes many new possibilities, especially over here at Re-Leased. We’ve got a few new, exciting features and product enhancements to share with you that we are sure will come in handy for many of you.

Without further ado, let’s review January's new improvements and announcements.

improvements

Document Subfolders are here!💥 

improvements

Get support within the in-app Customer Support 🤝

We are delighted to announce our improved in-app Customer Support functionality is now live for all Re-Leased customers! This convenient feature allows you to find answers to your questions, submit feedback, or open a support ticket quickly and easily without ever having to leave the system.

There is a lot to love: 

• More convenient - available at the click of a mouse.
• Faster solution – find answers to your questions quicker & easier.
• Even more support – find helpful articles, submit feedback, or open a ticket without leaving the app.
• Monitoring your activity - Submitting tickets via the in-app Customer Support functionally or Knowledge allows customers to track their tickets under ‘My Activity’

For our Premium and Premium Plus Support customers – access to live chat within the application

To learn more about the in-app Customer Support functionality, please click the Knowledge Base button below.

Knowledge Base

New feature 

Budgets by Area 💚 Multi-tenants💚Enhancements to the budget reconciliation process

Announcing a new Budget by Area functionality that our customers have been asking for some time - Budgets by Area now supports tenants who occupy more than one area!

And as part of this area improvement, we have also made enhancements to the budget reconciliation process by adding a new Income to Area step to give customers with properties that contain tenants across multiple areas an option to allocate all income raised against more than one area - something that could not be done easily before. 

To learn more about how to reconcile a Budget by Area, simply click the Knowlege Base article button below for a helpful step-by-step guide.

Knowledge Base

improvements 

Budget by Area 💚 Report Updates

Budget Summary Report 
Users of the Budget Summary Report can now choose to display Chart of Accounts Codes to ensure the summary report is better aligned with the current Budget summary screen.

Report Layout Changes 
Along with this update, we have also slightly improved the user interface for the following budgeting reports to better align the usability of the rest of the application.

The updated reports include:

• Budget Summary
• Budget vs Actual
• Budget Income

New feature 

Budget summary report - Variance reporting

The new Variance Reporting functionality in the Budget Summary Report function now allows customers to add up to two extra budgets to compare results against, as well as, an option to include a variance column in the report to reflect the percentage change against the anchor budget. This functionality is also available when the report is exported from the system.

improvements 

Re-Leased Pay - Additional ACH bank account support and Micro-deposits 

Re-Leased Pay US customers are now able to benefit from additional ACH bank account support as we replace our third-party payment provider, Plaid.

 Some of the immediate customer benefits include:

• Additional support for an extended network of 1,500+ banks, bringing the total number of supported banks up to 6,000+
• An enhanced user experience, US tenants will no longer have to leave the payment window to authenticate their bank account during the payment process.
• If the tenant's bank is, however, not supported, the tenant can still authenticate their ACH payment securely by manually entering a Micro-deposit code sent to your email.

To find more information about the process your tenant will go through once you have enabled Re-Leased Pay and they choose to pay with ACH in the Knowledge Base article below.

 Knowledge Base

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If you have any questions about how you can take full advantage of these new features, feel free to reach out to your customer support specialist or click the 'Contact Support' feature within the Re-Leased system.

We are delighted to announce our improved in-app Customer Support functionality. You can now access our Customer Support within the Re-Leased app, including our Knowledge Base, Product Roadmap, and contact our customer support team without leaving the app at all.

Some of the key in-app support benefits to you include:

• More convenient - available at the click of a mouse.
• Faster solution – find answers to your questions quicker & easier.
• Even more support – find helpful articles, submit feedback, or open a ticket without leaving the app.
• Monitor your activity - Submitting tickets via the in-app Customer Support functionally or Knowledge allows customers to track their tickets under ‘My Activity’.
• For our Premium and Premium Plus Support customers – access to live chat within the application

To learn more about our in-app Customer Support functionality, please click the Knowledge Base button below.

Knowledge Base

improvements 

After so many customers asked for this, we couldn't ignore it any longer. We have implemented a document subfolder feature for a simpler way to organise, find and access your documents.

This allows you to:

• Create or delete multiple layers of folders and subfolders
• Rename and move your subfolders under any given folder
• Organise your documents under Properties and Tenancies/Leases
• Move documents from one folder location to another

Click the link below to find out more!

Knowledge Base

New feature 

Tenant's Insurance is now live for all customers!

This new functionality allows users to store insurance records against Tenancies/Lease; with associated dashboard reminders for policy expiries, and a reminder email workflow to enable easy follow ups to Tenants.

Knowledge Base

New feature 

Draft owner statements - BETA

APAC customers can now generate draft owner statements via a new report or during a disbursement when selecting owners. This will be available to EMEA customers on January 9th 2023.

Knowledge Base

New feature 

CREDIA Budgets vs Actuals reporting

The new Budgets vs Actual Overview  dashboard in CREDIA includes the Total, Amount consumed, and the Remaining Amount (under-expected/over-expected) of the Budget together with a split among the different budget cost classification types. 

This new dashboard also utilizes a new data model which makes the loading up to 10 times faster than other reports.

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improvements 

Re-Leased Pay - driving tenants to automated recurring payments by default

We have made changes to the Re-Leased Pay Checkout experience for tenants, which will drive the set-up of recurring Rent payments by default (instead of one off payments as was the previous default).

These changes will benefit our customers by

• Increase the certainty of timely rent payments
• Saving time chasing tenants for payments
• Drive a reduction in tenant arrears

If you're interested in setting up Re-Leased Pay to help automate your rent collection, please contact support@re-leased.com to get started, or check out the knowledge base article below.

Knowledge Base

improvements 

Edit reference on paid expense invoices & credit notes

If an expense invoice or credit note has a payment against it, many fields become un-editable.
Users can now edit the reference field on an expense after payment has been made. 

improvements 

Maintenance Contacts now pull through to Quote Requests

If you have a Maintenance Item with a Contractor selected, and then go to send a Quote Request, the selected Contractor name will now pull through automatically to the Send Quote Request Email template, saving users from manually adding this Contact. If needed, you can still add further Contacts to send the Quote Request to as well.

beta testing 

Tenant's Insurance tab in the Insurance Hub

We've recently enabled the new Tenant's Insurance tab in the Insurance Hub for our Beta testers. This will allow similar functionality for managing Tenant's Insurance at a portfolio level that users can currently get for Supplier's Insurance, including:

• Searching
• Filtering
• PDF downloads
• Adding new policies

We will look to enable this functionality for all users early in 2023!

announcements  🚀 💚 The new CREDIA IS HERE 💚🚀

beta testing  🚀 Draft owner statements - in Beta

There are now two ways to preview an owner statement without completing a disbursement.

1. Preview within disbursement: this option is good for checking individual owner statements within a disbursement.
   
   Start disbursement > Select owners to disburse > Expand owner > Generate draft statement 
   
   
2. The draft owner statement report allows you to check owner statements in bulk outside of a disbursement. It can generate draft statements across multiple bank accounts and allows filtering by property manager or owner.
   
   Reports > Client accounting reports > Draft owner statement 
   

Learn more

beta testing  Tenant's Insurance - Beta is live! 

Very excited to announce the beta launch of the new Tenant's Insurance feature!

Following on from our work developing Supplier's Insurance, we're extending the same concepts to apply to tracking Tenants' Insurance.

In the beta release, users have the ability to :

• Create policy records, with associated expiry dates creating Dashboard reminders for assigned users
• View audit trails of changes to policies
• Create correspondence templates and send reminder emails to Tenants

We're currently working on enabling reporting on Tenant's Insurance policies by adding them into the Insurance Hub; and we're aiming to have this feature available to all Re-Leased users by the end of December.

Learn more

improvements Show disabled invoices on the credit note allocation screen

For EMEA users only (APAC can still do cross ledger allocations).

When allocating a credit note, any invoices that contain a different ledger to the ledger(s) on the credit note will be shown in the list, but will be disabled.

✨ Side improvement: Invoice numbers now link off to the invoice so you can check the invoice details.

improvements Tax inclusive / exclusive option on outgoings templates 

Outgoings/service charge templates can now be set as GST inclusive OR exclusive. Helping to avoid those pesky rounding issues!

A new "Amounts are" drop down is available when editing or creating an outgoings/service charge template.

improvements Single Sign On for Property Manager Mobile App 🚀

Customers are now able to use their SSO provider to sign into the Property Manager Mobile App. This streamlines the log in experience and provides additional compliance & security benefits over a traditional username & password sign in.

This also addresses a major pain point for those that already use SSO for signing in to Re-Leased. Particularly when companies enforce SSO, these users were previously unable to use the Property Manager Mobile App.

announcements Edit restrictions on invoices & credit notes that have appeared on a "Balances" owner statement

To improve the generation speed of the "Balances" owner statement, new document editing rules have been put in place.

If an invoice has appeared on a balances owner statement, the following fields will be uneditable (unless the disbursement is reversed):

• Property
• Tenancy
• To/from
• Issue date
• Due date
• Reference
• Description (can still be edited on expenses)
• Quantity/unit price
• Tax type
• Ledger
• Adding/removing lines

If a credit note has appeared on a balances owner statement, the following fields will be uneditable (unless the disbursement is reversed):

• Property
• Tenancy
• To/from
• Issue date
• Reference
• Description (can still be edited on expenses)
• Quantity/unit price
• Tax type
• Ledger
• Adding/removing lines

improvements 💸 Re-Leased Pay updated Invoice list screen 💸

As part of our work to promote tenants setting up recurring payments, we have updated the Invoice list screen, which will be the first screen in the updated payment flow.
Key changes are refreshing and aligning the UI and putting more emphasis on the arrears status with colour-coded indicators.

 

improvements Visual updates to buttons in Income and Expenses

We're consolidating our button styles to make the primary action on the pages in Income and Expenses clearer and to simplify our overall UI. 

Before:

After:

This update is part of how we continually improve how well our product works, looks, and feels. This has been a massive effort updating a large number of pages and modals, and look out for more!

improvements Merge fields in Forms & Agreements

We're continuing to build out more merge fields in our Forms & Agreements area - with the goal of enabling easily created Tenancy/Lease agreements.

Recently added merge fields are:

• Tenant Mobile Number (comma separates mobile numbers of all listed Tenant Contacts)
• Tenancy/Lease Custom Reference Field
• Property Custom Reference Field
• Tenancy/Lease Type
• Tenancy/Lease Form
• Car Park Area Title
• Rent Amount on first rent invoice (pro-rated)

improvements Run Ledgers report for multiple bank accounts

When running the Ledgers report, users can now select multiple bank accounts. No more running the report over and over for every bank account!

improvements  Insurance Hub upgrades

With these improvements users can now: 

• Create a new Suppliers Insurance policy from the Hub
• Download reports in PDF and CSV
• Perform bulk actions on many policies together (Archive and Send email reminders)

We're planning on adding further to this area in the near future by pulling in the newly created Tenant's Insurance records.

improvements Create outgoings/service charge templates on Budget Approval 

Customers can now create new Outgoings/Service Charge templates when approving a Budget by Area. This save heaps of time from having to constantly navigate away and create the template from the tenancy area itself.  

New feature Tenancy Schedule Excel exports are in beta! 📣

The new tenancy schedule report can now be exported to excel. This will include all on-screen data, totals and formulas for cells such as totals. This is available to all beta customers.

New feature CREDIA 2.0 Arrears Drill 

Arrears is now aggregated on the first drill layer to provide a neat tenancy schedule rather than break out by invoice. By then selecting the tenants arrears total or a count you will navigate to a more detailed invoice schedule for that particular tenant.  

1st drill showing invoice count and total amount:

2nd drill showing a line-by-line breakdown of the tenant's arrears:

New feature CREDIA 2.0 Insurance & Anniversary

The events management dashboard now includes the properties insurance and anniversary to ensure asset events are visible in CREDIA to managers.

New feature improvements CREDIA 2.0 Standardised Filtering 

All dashboards have now a standardised set and order of filters as a bare minimum to improve consistency and ease of navigation 

Customers are now able to use their SSO provider to sign into the Property Manager Mobile App. This streamlines the log in experience and provides additional compliance & security benefits over a traditional username & password sign in.

This also addresses a major pain point for those that already use SSO for signing in to Re-Leased. Particularly when companies enforce SSO, these users were previously unable to use the Property Manager Mobile App.

SSO for iOS - is live now!

SSO for Android  - to be launched November 21, 2022

Customer Love Sprint

At the start of October, our Product & Engineering teams tried something new. We realised that although our customers get a lot of value from the big-ticket things we work on, the small things that appear trivial often cause the most friction. Solving these little pain points can sometimes be just as important to our customers as releasing the next game-changing feature. 

So what did we do? 

We dedicated our entire product and engineering departments to a two-week project we called the Customer Love Sprint, where we pushed pause on our bigger projects, and focused exclusively on the small stuff. Over these two weeks, our teams completed 86 individual enhancements related to removing friction and solving small pain points, as reported by you.

Which means there's a huge amount of things in this month's update! 

Some of the highlights include:

• Supporting payments with Journal Entries for our QuickBooks Online integration 
• Creating more useful filters in the Maintenance Hub
• Displaying the Rent per psqft / m2 in the main summary pages of Properties and Tenancies
• Displaying total amount overdue on Rent Invoices
• Including more information while performing Bulk Rent Reviews
• Including more information while processing disbursements
• Enabling more functionality in the Reminders Hub

And many many more!

For more details, read on below!

New feature Re-Leased Pay now caters for multiple Bank Accounts

In Re-Leased Pay, previously all payments received from tenants had to be received into the same single bank account. 

With this change, users will now be able to configure how their properties to map to their chosen bank accounts. All tenant invoices under these properties paid through Re-Leased Pay will reconcile to the specified bank account.

Users can also assign a "default bank account" so any properties not specifically mapped to a bank account will have funds deposited into the default bank account.

New feature Customizable Arrears/Delinquency Statuses are now available!

Specify on each tenancy how you need to classify their Arrears/Delinquency status, and have these classifications flow through to relevant Arrears/Delinquency reporting.

Create and manage the statuses for all companies in your Group in a new section under Settings; and specify the right status in the Tenancy/Lease Details page.

improvements Generate invoices for previously waived Late Fees

With this change, Late Fees that had previously been waived can now have invoices generated, in the event that the agreed payment arrangement falls through. 

improvements Invoices now show total overdue amount

We've added a new optional setting (activated on Invoice Templates) to add a new line of additional information to Income Invoices. Checking this box will allow your Tenants to see easily the total amount they owe across all invoices.

improvements Edit descriptions on paid expense invoices 

Now paid expense invoices can have the description field edited, if any information needs further updates.

improvements New column added to bulk invoice email screen

The bulk invoice email screen now includes an invoice/credit note column to show which invoices the contact will receive.

improvements Bulk email invoices to all tenancy/lease invoice contacts

In that same action of bulk emailing invoices to tenants, we've made a change now so these emails will be sent to all tenancy/lease contacts designated to receive invoices (previously only the Account specified tenancy/lease contact would receive these).

improvements QuickBooks Online journal entries now supported in Re-Leased

Journal Entries created in Quickbooks Online (typically to represent Prepaid or Overpaid invoices) previously were not recognised by Re-Leased, causing errors at integration sync time. 

With this change, Re-Leased will allow invoices with Journal Entries linked to sync as expected, resulting in less time time spent reviewing and solving integration errors. 

improvements Cross Ledger Credit Note allocations are now disabled

In Trust/Client Accounting, credit notes can no longer be allocated against an invoice if it has a different ledger to what's on the credit note.

Allowing these allocations was previously causing balancing issues, as funds do not move between ledgers when allocating a credit note to an invoice with a different ledger.

improvements Improved access to and sorting of Property Areas

Area details can now be viewed and edited from within a Tenancy/Lease that is linked to that Area: 

improvements More information in Tenancy/Lease list pages

In the Current Tenancies/Leases list view, we're now displaying the Term Expiry of each Tenancy/Lease:

improvements Link from Overdue items on dashboard to Events Report

Now clicking on the Overdue title on the main Dashboard will take the user directly to the Events Report, with the report pre-filtered to show all Overdue events for that Property Manager

improvements Updates to Tenancy/Lease History  

The Tenancy/Lease History now contains currency symbols and +ve/-ve values. Debits are displayed as a positive value and credits as a negative value. The totals displayed considers these updates to display an overall position. The same changes pull through to the .pdf download.

improvements Sync the Xero integration from any page

We are excited to announce that we have added the ability to start a Xero sync from any page! This new feature will make it even easier for you to keep your accounting records up to date. Simply click the "Start Xero sync" button, accessed via the black menu bar on any page, and your records will be automatically updated.

improvements Changes to Property Valuations

We've added the Valuations to the Property List report - pulling in the latest dated Valuation. This report will give a sum total of all properties' valuations as well, giving a view of your total portfolio value.

improvements Custom heading text color for owner statements

Companies can now change the text color for section headings on owner statements. This allows them to use any brand color while maintaining contrast between the background color and text.

improvements Filter Maintenance Hub by recurring/one-off tasks

We've added a new filter to the Maintenance Hub, allowing users to filter between recurring, one-off, or all tasks

improvements Rent per unit now shows on the Tenancy/Lease Summary page, and the Tenancy/Lease Summary card on the Property Summary page

This will adapt to the unit of measurement selected for that company.

improvements Meter Invoices now pull through reading dates

Invoices generated from Utility Meter readings now pull through the dates of the previous and current reading on to the Description of the invoices, making it easier to see the time periods the invoice relates to! 

improvements Additional info when performing Bulk Rent Reviews

The Bulk Rent Review results table now features a new column that displays the Description of the review. 

In addition the Review Type column will now display a (%) symbol for review types that are percentage based. 

improvements More functionality in Reminders Hub

The Reminders Hub will now feature two new columns that show the related Property and Tenancy, making reminders easier to identify; and for one off reminders, a Mark as Complete button is now available to action direct from the Hub.

improvements Prepayments / overpayments in tenancy statements for Xero customers

Available prepayments and overpayments that are related to a tenancy/lease are now included in tenancy/lease statements for Xero customers.

improvements  Only show overdue invoices in tenancy/lease statement

improvements Trust/Client Accounting - clickable invoice numbers in the Unpresented Deposits report

An additional column has been added to the unpresented deposits report with a clickable link to the invoice number

improvements Trust/Client Accounting - Disburse Creditors improvements

The disburse creditors page has had the following updates to make disbursing creditors easier:

• Number column to easily see the invoice / credit note number
• "(Tenancy credit)" displays next to the payee name for income credit notes
• Banner error message listing payees that have invalid bank details

improvements Improvements to Tenancy/Lease Invoices list

You can now see the type of invoice (Rent, Outgoings, Other non-rent income) next to each invoice; as well as a new column to display the Rent Period for rent invoices.

improvements Trust/Client Accounting - Show active ledgers when archiving a contact

When attempting to archive a contact, any associated active ledger will be shown so users can go straight to the ledger and archive it, so the contact can then also be archived.

improvements Available credit notes are now displayed on invoices 

If credit notes are available to be allocated to an invoice, a banner will display with links to the outstanding credit notes when viewing the invoice.

New feature Manage all insurance across your portfolio in the Insurance Hub.

Delete that spreadsheet! You can now view, edit & manage insurance policies across your entire portfolio in our new Insurance Hub - A central page accessed from the Dashboard, allowing you to have complete visibility into your insurance risk across your portfolio.

This first release of the new Insurance Hub only includes Supplier Insurance policies. However, we are working hard on adding in Property Insurance and Tenant Insurance, so you see a complete picture of all your insurance compliance in one location.

Improvements Add multiple contacts to a single suppliers insurance record. 

Suppose your Group in Re-Leased has many Companies, with separate Contacts under each Company. Now all "copies" of that supplier contact can be associated with the same policy, making it easy to see whether they have up-to-date cover in place at a glance. 

Knowledge Base Article

improvements Automatically create credit notes for unpaid invoices

Quickly credit unpaid income or expense invoices using the new "Credit invoice" option. The new credit note will automatically be pre-populated with all the same information from the invoice you are crediting.

Improvements Our Xero integration now supports prepayments syncing.

For more information on how prepayments sync between Re-Leased and Xero, check out our knowledge base article. 

Knowledge Base Article

Improvements We now support four decimal places in line items from invoices created in QuickBooks Online

Previously, a line item with more than two decimal places would not sync to Re-Leased. Note that invoices with four decimal places of precision will only be able to be edited in QBO and not in Re-Leased. 

NEW FEATURE Re-Leased Pay: Flexible processing fees

You now have flexibility in your pocket on who and how Re-Leased Pay fees are charged. View the processing fees for Re-Leased Pay transactions and use percentages to determine how much of the fee you will consume or what percentage to pass on to your tenant. The processing fees can be configured either during the initial setup of Re-Leased Pay or after the fact via Settings.

IMPROVEMENTS  Eight decimal places on Rent Review calculations

Perform rent reviews with higher accuracy. For example, percentage-based increases such as CPI changes now support eight decimal point figures. This increase in decimal place applies to both individual and bulk rent reviews.

improvements  Insurance Types are now set at a Group level

You no longer need to replicate the same Insurance Types across all companies in a Group. Instead, we've merged these into one master list managed at the Group level, making it easier to keep records up to date and report on them.

 

improvements Overpayments syncing from Xero

For all our Xero customers, Overpayments created or edited in Xero on or after January 1st 2022, are now syncing to Re-Leased. Users don't need to do anything, and the overpayments automatically start coming across with their usual sync.

improvements  Showing Ledger Balances in Disbursements

See important information at a glance. All Trust Accounting/Client Accounting users can view owner ledgers and balances in a disbursement. Click the down arrow on the left-hand side of the owner name to reveal ledger balances.

Improvements  The increased character limit on Maintenance Comments

Don't leave any details with the increased character limit on comments. The old character limit (350) on comments was too small - so we've bumped this up to 1500 and added a dynamic counter to the interface to help you see when you're running out of characters.

improvements  Messaging on Budget Lock Dates

So you have more clarity at a glance, you will now see a more detailed message explaining the Budget Lock Date controls. This is to provide greater clarity & ensure customers understand what the Budget Lock does. 

beta testing Xero Prepayments syncing to Re-Leased

Following the work to enable Xero Overpayments to sync to Re-Leased, we've started a Beta testing programme to allow Xero Prepayments also to sync across.

beta testing  Custom Tenancy Schedule reports can now be saved & re-used

Save valuable business time by seeing the information you need when need it by building, editing and saving custom reports in the upgraded Tenancy Schedule report. 

We've been working hard to enhance the usability and legibility of Re-Leased, and as a first improvement, we have some minor but exciting visual updates coming soon.

improvements Button Update 

You will notice that the primary action on updated pages will stand out more visually, and your main actions have been re-positioned as we make every section consistent. Primary buttons will now be on the top right-hand side of your screen, as shown in the image below. We didn't do it all at once, so this will be ongoing in the short term, starting with the Property pages.

Improvements Text sizes tidy up

To improve the readability of content across the platform, we are tidying up text sizing. The text sizing changes will also be a careful ongoing rollout but do let us know if you spot anything untoward.