Author: housters

The 3.3 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.

The biggest new feature in this release is the ability to define the mortgage terms for your properties. It’s important to know how much of your mortgage payments are going into principal vs. going into interest, as principal builds up equity while interest obviously does not. Previously, it was up to you to use an amortization table and log in Housters how much each month went to principal and interest. However, now you can edit your property and set your mortgage terms, such as purchase price, down payment amount, length of mortgage, first payment date, and pmi/escrow amounts. Housters then uses that information to calculate how much principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts go into each monthly payment. While editing the property you can also enable Housters to auto-generate these transactions for you each month. Alternatively, if you want to manually add the transactions, Housters will input the correct principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amount values for you.

Another cool feature is the ability to generate late fee charges for your tenants. When adding a tenant or lease, you can say for example that rent is due on the 1st, a $25 late fee charge should be generated 5 days after, and a $75 late fee charge should be generated 10 days after. If the tenant owes rent 5 and 10 days after the 1st of the month, Housters will generate late fee charge tenant adjustments, increasing their expected and unpaid rent amounts. This means that it’s up to you to make sure you log their paid rent promptly so that it doesn’t incorrectly generate late fee charges.

The last new feature I’ll point out is the new Rent History Report. This should be useful ammo when confronting a tenant or going to court, as it shows for each rent period how much rent was due, when it was due, how much was paid, and when it was paid. As with all reports, this is only available on housters.com, not the mobile apps.

See the full release notes below with all of the changes, enjoy!

**Website Release Notes:**

– Set mortgage terms for a property so that Housters can calculate principal / interest amounts for you
– Enable auto-generated monthly mortgage payment transactions for a property, split by principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts
– When adding mortgage payment transactions manually, split by principal, interest, pmi, and escrow amounts
– Define per tenant lease the late fees to be charged after rent is due
– New Rent History Report showing detailed rent roll
– Filter the Rent Status Report to only show tenants with unpaid rent
– Print transaction details from transaction list
– Define a custom sort order for the property list
– Define a custom sort order for the transaction type list
– Show vacancies and the vacancy rate on the property summary
– Improve navigation to Applicants section
– New dismissable help tips
– Unsubscribe link in all mailing list emails
– Resolve time zone issues
– Bug fixes

The 3.2 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.

We have spent a lot on a new feature called “Subusers”, which allows you to invite other people to use Housters and interact with you. Previously you could already invite tenants to Housters, which would allow them to pay their rent and submit service/repair requests. You could also invite assign to-do list tasks to contacts and then invite them to Housters to view and update those tasks. Now you can also invite other landlords or property managers and pick which properties they can manage. They will have full rights to view, update, and delete the data for these properties, just like you can. We’ve also created a new Subusers screen where you can view the list of everyone you’ve invited to Housters and revoke access.

**Release Notes:**

– Ability to invite other landlords or property managers to use Housters and have access to your data
– Manage list of subusers (landlords, property managers, tenants, and contacts)
– Can now choose whether you’re a landlord or property manager
– Specify multiple days of the month that rent is due
– Enter negative amounts for transactions
– Customize which email addresses alerts should be sent to
– Bug fixes

The 3.1 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.

One of the major changes is that we’ve upgraded alert notifications to be fully customizable. Go to the Preferences screen to toggle specific alerts on/off, as well as how you’d like the alerts to be delivered (on Housters and/or email), and how far in advance you’d like to be alerted.

Another major change, previously we included tenant rent and security deposit adjustments as transactions, even though they weren’t really transactions. Now these tenant adjustments have been broken out into their own section, simply select a tenant then go to Adjustments.

Lastly, the financial summaries and reports have been updated to support the double-entry accounting mode.

**Website Release Notes:**

– Fully-customizable alerts and reminder dates
– Tenant rent / security deposit adjustments are now managed on a separate page and are no longer transactions
– More intuitive process for adding a tenant and their initial lease agreement
– Double-entry accounting improvements to summaries, reports, and reconciliations
– Brand new report that shows networth gain / loss
– More flexible lease term options
– Updated gross income and operating costs reports to break down by type
– New preference for default transaction list date range
– Support for rent payments in arrears
– Show asset account balances on Dashboard (only if double-entry accounting enabled)
– Improved transaction import from mint
– Improved rent deposit calculations
– Bug fixes

**Mobile App Release Notes:**

– Fully-customizable alerts and reminder dates
– Tenant rent / security deposit adjustments are now managed on a separate screen and are no longer transactions
– More intuitive process for adding a tenant and their initial lease agreement
– Double-entry accounting improvements to summaries and reconciliations
– More flexible lease term options
– Support for rent payments in arrears
– Show asset account balances on Summary (only if double-entry accounting enabled)
– Improved rent deposit calculations
– Bug fixes

The 3.0 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.

I’m excited to announce that the ability to collect rent from tenants is back in Housters! We’ve teamed up with Dwolla to provide a safe and secure way for tenants to pay rent to their landlords while still keeping the transfer fees low.

Simply go to the Collect Rent screen, follow the prompts to setup a Dwolla account, pick a tenant, and send them an invite. A new account will be setup for your tenant and an email sent to them with instructions. They then will be able to login to the website or mobile apps, follow the prompts to setup their Dwolla account and send their rent payment. The rent payment will be transferred into your Dwolla account, which you can then transfer on to your bank account. The cool thing is that a transaction for the rent payment will automatically be added into your Housters account, updating the tenant’s unpaid rent status.

The rent payment transfer is free to the landlord, a small transfer fee of $2 is paid by the tenant.

**Website Release Notes:**

– Ability for landlord to request rent from tenants
– Tenants can now pay rent through Housters
– Added new tenant notes field
– Added both title and description of transactions to reports
– Bug fixes

**Mobile App Release Notes:**

– Ability for landlord to request rent from tenants
– Tenants can now pay rent through Housters
– Added new tenant notes field
– Bug fixes

The 2.9 release of Housters is now up on http://housters.com and will make it to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store in the upcoming days.

As always, this release was all about fulfilling customer requests. The double-entry accounting and bank statement reconciliation features that were pushed to the website last release are now in the mobile apps. The ability to invite tenants to Housters so that they can login and view their rent status and submit service/repair requests has been added to the mobile apps as well.

Lastly, many users have been asking for the ability to manage their real estate contacts within Housters. This is now in both the website and mobile apps, as well as the ability to assign your to-do list tasks to contacts and invite them to login to Housters and view/update those tasks.

**Website Release Notes:**

– Manage real estate contacts
– Assign to-do list tasks to contacts
– Invite contacts to login to Housters and view/update to-do list tasks assigned to them
– Added rent due date for tenants
– Financial summaries for this month and last month added
– Display date range of transaction list
– Added report date range options such as this year, last year, etc…
– Support for non-repeating leases
– Improved international support
– Bug fixes

**Mobile App Release Notes:**

– Added double-entry accounting support
– Ability to perform bank account statement reconciliations
– Invite tenants to login to Housters to view rent status and add service/repair requests
– Manage real estate contacts
– Assign to-do list tasks to contacts
– Invite contacts to login to Housters and view/update to-do list tasks assigned to them
– Added rent due date for tenants
– Financial summaries for this month and last month added
– Support for non-repeating leases
– Bug fixes

Housters 2.8 has been released on http://housters.com and will make its way to the Android and iOS mobile apps in the upcoming week.

This release introduces big changes to how we do accounting. When adding transactions the old way, you would simply pick a type (rent payment, repairs, etc…), enter the amount, enter some other details and then save. This approach is fine for many and is still the default way to add transactions in Housters, however it’s lacking in that it doesn’t allow the user to input where the money is coming from or going to.

On the Account > Preferences page we’ve now added a new option called “Double-Entry Accounting”. After enabling this preference, adding transactions allows you to input all of the individual debit and credit lines that make up a transaction. For example, adding a rent payment would debit a certain bank account asset and credit the income – rent payment account. This means that ANY transaction can now be added into Housters, where it’s for receiving money (income), sending money (an expense), or transferring money from one account to another. On the transaction list we now display each debit and credit line, as each transaction really is a combination of debits and credits.

We’ve also added the ability to customize your transaction types. From the new Manage Transaction Types page you can add new types and categorize them as income, expenses, assets, liabilities, etc… For those who are going to leverage the double-entry mode, you can add your actual rental bank accounts as assets and your rental credit cards as liabilities.

This naturally leads us to bank statement reconciliations. Now that you can specify for each transaction which account the money came from or went to, we’ve added a new Reconciliation page that allows you to enter an account, date range, starting balance and ending balance (which you will copy from your bank statement). You can then go through and check off the boxes of each transaction and ensure that the ending balance in Housters matches the ending balance on your bank statement. If it doesn’t then you’ve missed adding at least one transaction into Housters. Once it does match, you can then post the reconciliation, which will save it. Next month, you can go back to the Reconciliation page, it’ll automatically set the date range to the month after the last post, and set the starting balance to the ending balance from the last post.

That’s about it, feel free to drop us an email if you have any questions on the new functionality. A big thanks goes out to one of our users, Chris, who is an accountant and guided us through how to implement these new features in a way that would adhere to accounting rules. This release wouldn’t have happened without Chris!

I’m excited to announce the release of version 2.5 of the Housters mobile app, property management for the next generation of landlords.

What’s new:
– Browse older transactions automatically as you move down the list
– View big photos by tapping on thumbnails
– Improve sizing of layouts and fonts for tablets
– New default images for transactions, to-do’s, properties, and tenants
– View to-do status updates
– Send text messages to tenants
– Be able to close your account (and reactivate it)
– Fixed – photos taken in portrait view save in landscape view
– Fixed – some documents don’t open in viewer
– Other bug fixes

Check it out and let us know what you think!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/housters-property-management/id697883452?fbclid=IwAR22d-qAz-fducDvl4ifoVNJ-OhK14kpDAq1gpRhK8EY_rYHqUki2bi_4kk

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tothsolutions.housters&fbclid=IwAR2Gb2ZVvyV5WrZ4aCqn6EX2VW27WsRT_Lc1V44PBUHmkvaUGByUpiq7IYE

The Housters website has been updated to release 2.4. With this release comes many features that users asked for, such as improved transaction imports, sending rent receipts back to tenants, and being able to associate documents to properties and tenants.

Just released v2.0.5 to Android and iOS! We enhanced tenants, transactions, and internationalized dates and currencies. Plus we fixed some bugs, and enhanced app performance!

Housters Mobile 2.0 released! Now you can create, edit, and delete everything, just like you can on the website! That means all your transactions, properties, tenants, and to-dos can be maintained from wherever you are. And just like the website, it’s completely free! Check out our blog to learn more, and get links to the app.