Housters 5.6 is live! This is the biggest release that we’ve had in a long time… When we first rolled out the invoicing feature as the means to track rent or security deposits owed by a tenant, it was easy for the invoices to get out of sync with the tenant’s lease terms and rent payment transactions.
In this release, we’ve remedied that by making invoices read-only rather than allowing you to create, update, or delete them. Every time you add or edit a tenant or their leases, we will regenerate their invoices on each day that rent was due, based on their lease terms. When rent is due in the future, Housters will auto-generate a new invoice, which will make the tenant show as owing new rent. When you save a rent payment transaction, we will automatically update the amount paid on their due invoices up to the rent payment amount. In this way, the invoices will always stay in sync with the lease terms and rent payment transactions. (The same applies to landlord invoices for property managers.)
We’ve also added the ability to create custom adjustments to invoices, for things such as giving a rent discount or charging a late fee. When you add or edit a tenant or their leases and Housters regenerates their invoices, we will preserve any adjustments that you had created and reapply them to the new invoices.
Lastly, for miscellaneous charges to a tenant, we now allow you to create “Other” invoices. These invoices can be created, updated, and deleted, unlike Rent and Security Deposit invoices.
With any update of this magnitude, there are going to be some ramifications. Even though going forward every tenant’s invoices is going to be in sync with their lease terms and rent payment transactions, we had to figure out what to do with the tenants that were out of sync. We decided that the best way to handle it was to keep their rent status the same as before the release, by creating a one-off Rent Payment transaction for the amount they were out of sync by. For example, let’s say that the tenant John Smith has three invoices: $500 due / $500 paid on 8/1/2018, $500 due / $500 paid on 9/1/2018, and $500 due / $500 paid on 10/1/2018. Now let’s say that they have rent payment transactions of $500 paid on 8/1/2018 and $500 paid of 9/1/2018 but they didn’t log a rent payment transaction for October. Housters will create a $500 rent payment transaction so that the tenant still shows as $0 owed, trusting that the rent status was correct.
We hope you enjoy this new release, I believe we’ve finally gotten the rent tracking feature right. For most users, the transition should be seamless. However, if you have any trouble, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at support@housters.com.
Release Notes:
– No more worrying about lease terms, rent payment transactions, and invoices being out of sync!! Rent and Security Deposit invoices are now read-only, as they will be auto-generated with the correct amount due based on the tenant lease terms. Their paid amounts will be auto-updated when payment transactions are saved, which will update the payment status of the tenant.
– Allow creating “Other” invoices for things like pet deposits or one-time charges.
– Add adjustments to invoices, e.g. late fees and discounts on rent.
– Improved Invoice List to be more readable.
– Customize the subject line of the Collect Rent email.
– New filters on recurring transactions list.
– Filter reports by only owned or only managed properties. (Property Managers only)
– Only auto-generate late fees for active leases.
– Various bug fixes.