Release 4.0 was rolled out on May 9th, 2012. Below are the features & enhancements included in this seventeenth Bookerville release:

1) Automatic Scheduled Emails! - Bookerville can now be setup to automatically send emails to you, your guests, cleaning crews, or anyone else on a pre-defined schedule, based on booking dates, check-in dates, check-out dates, or even payment due dates. This is fantastic for payment reminders/past due notices, and much more. Learn more about this comprehensive new feature: Automatic Scheduled Emails

2) SmartMin™ - Automatically Adjusting Min/Max Settings! Bookerville now offers a new setting called SmartMin™ - your minimum stay requirements will be automatically reduced when there are not enough days in between bookings to satisfy them. No more worrying if your Minimum Stay settings are preventing more sales! This is selectable at the top of your Rates tab. The default setting for existing customers is "Strict", so be sure to change this if you want to use it. (Or just ask us - we're here to help!)

3) Expense Tracking! - A new tab is now in your Property Setup page - Expenses can be entered and reported on a per-property basis. What's more - transaction fees can be automatically recorded when guests make payments. Track dates incurred and paid, tax-deductible status, and categorize expenses. There's more: new reports are on the way to incorporate this new information.

4) Refundable Security Deposit Scheduled Payments - You can now include a refundable security deposit as one of your scheduled payments. Bookerville has also been updated to be much smarter about collecting these payments, and can even combine amounts if they are due the same day. So if you collect a refundable security deposit on the same day that another booking payment is due, Bookerville will present it as a single, combined amount that your customer can pay in one, convenient transaction. When Bookerville records these payments, it will split out the security deposit portion and list it separately, just as it has always been done.

5) Email From: Addresses - As you may or may not know, Bookerville used to send out emails from the Bookerville server that had a From: address that was yours. This caused a lot of emails to get caught in "spam" filters, and guests were often not getting these important emails. So Bookerville switched to making the From: address "service@bookerville.com", and then set the Reply-To: address to be yours. That way, when guests click the reply button, it goes to you, as it should. But recent information suggests that perhaps the Internet spam filters have relaxed some of these constraints, so we are now setting the From: address to be yours again. We'll see what happens. If you suspect that your emails are not getting through, are bouncing, or are getting marked or deleted as spam, please let us know. We may end up making this configurable in your Account Settings in the future.

6) Copy Rates Within Date Range - We've enhanced our popular "Copy Rates" tool to include from: and to: dates. You can now copy the rates from one property to any of your other properties, and specify a date range to copy from. See the "Copy Rates..." button at the top of your Rates tab.

7) Enhanced Public Booking & Availability Calendar - We have improved the user experience for the public calendars. Based on customer feedback, we have tweaked and refined the process the guests go through, and provided more visual cues to let them know what to do next and how. We believe Bookerville provides the easiest, most flexible, most intuitive public interface in the industry - and now it's even better!

8) Two New Reports - Look in your Dashboard ==> Reports tab, and you will see two new reports at the bottom: Taxable Receipts and Occupancy. The Taxable Receipts report is an attempt to show what amounts you need to pay taxes on in a given period. The Occupancy report shows occupancy for each pf your properties both as a literal count of days, and as a percent, in bar graph form. It also shows your occupancy average across all your properties. Both of these new reports can be filtered by date range and by properties. These reports are also marked as Beta, so if you see anything that needs improvement, please let us know.

 
Reply »