Welcome to Rent Magic's July 2010 newsletter.

Who are we?

If you are new to our newsletter, you are probably wondering, "Who is this newsletter from?" Rent Magic is an Ontario-based company, specializing in property management software. We service all size companies managing residential, commercial, mobile homes, co-op, and student housing sectors. Our system is full featured, allows unlimited users at no extra cost, and is very competitively priced. Find us on the web at www.rentmagic.ca

About us...

New Update Released

As you may have noticed, we prepared a major ManageUDA Online update to coincide with the new HST rules that were put in place July 1st for Ontario and British Columbia. If you have not received the update yet, please contact support at support@rentmagic.ca. We call this a major update because there has been a lot of functionality added to the system that will certainly enhance your ManageUDA experience. Read on for more details.

Search Box Revealed!!

One of first things you will immediately notice with the new update is a new field sitting next to the Accounting Company drop-down at the top of the screen. While ManageUDA’s excellent search engine has been around for a long time, it has been hiding in the Edit Menu Bar the whole time. To allow for faster searching, we put the search bar in full view for easier access.

HST Functions

The much reviled (at least in Ontario) HST is here to stay. If your business or buildings are in Ontario, British Columbia or Nova Scotia, you will find the HST in the same areas as you would find GST or PST. So on the Invoice Screen, you will have the ability to track your HST payables. The default is set to the same GL you were previously tracking GST. If you need to change this (e.g. you now want to have a unique HST GL), you can simply change the setting in Company Defaults (Accounting | Company Settings | Company Defaults. See Rent Magic Help ).

Charging HST: If you are charging HST to your tenants, you probably already have a GST charge set up. To change it to 12, 13 or 15%, you can simply go to Building Management | Charges and select GST. You will now be able to select ‘Advanced Functions’, change the percent amount to your desired amount and voila! ManageUDA will now be set up to charge the new amount.

Notes

One of the more obvious enhancements we included on this update is a box for notes in the Transaction Screen (tenant ledger). Here you can use it for any information you think is relevant to the tenant. It can provide immediate detail as why certain transactions occurred or any reason for certain anomalies in your tenant’s ledger. The data in this box will not print on the ledger report. If you do require notes on specific transactions to show in the ledger report, you can always add note to individual transactions as you would normally do.

Report Enhancements

When accessing reports you will now find a lot of them updated with extra detail and sorting capabilities. The most notable of these are the GL and Income Statement reports. You can now get detailed reports for individual units (provided you recorded the income and expenses on the actual unit).

The Cheque Register report can now be sorted by cheque number, date, amount and payee.
And for all those managing commercial properties, you will be able to find in the Commercial Rent Roll a new column that will aggregate the total CAM/TMI charges and divide it by square feet of the unit for a $$ per sq foot figure.

Discount Rent – New Feature

In a previous article I describe a new addition to ManageUDA called Prompt Payment feature (see here for the article). It was designed to default to 2% of total rent charges. Since then, we have added the ability to edit the discounted rent to your requirements. When you check off the option to use the discounted rent, the system will calculate the 2% for you. If you want to change the amount you can simply change it inside the box. The system will automatically charge the rent with the discount as described in the Prompt Payment article, only it will be using your custom amounts.

Decommission a building

Due to popular demand, we have added a feature to decommission an entire building as opposed to deleting it. Essentially, it will remove it from your Building, Unit and Tenant lists so that it is not mistakenly included in Batch Mode Functions or accessed mistakenly. You will be able to access the individual tenants by using the Search function and you will be able to access history via reports. All you need to do is check off the “Show Deleted Building” box at the bottom of the Report Menu Screen.