Tutorial #7: RBO Processing

(0:10 - 13:53)Hi, today we're going to talk about RBO processing within the HomeWatch IT application for Method. RBO processing would be used if you have vacation rentals that you manage for your clients, things such as Airbnb bookings, Evolve bookings, etc. If you don't do that, no reason to watch this tutorial. If you do, you'll be happy. So basically, let's talk about what it takes to move forward with the RBO process. There's basically two parts in the actual process. One is to set up the client information, which involves the customer maintenance screen and setting up a series. Then the second part would be handling the actual bookings that you get from Airbnb or Evolve or directly from your clients. Note that everything happens in the HomeWatch IT app for Method. Nothing happens within QuickBooks itself. Let's get started with setting up. Let's talk about the two steps to set up the RBO information. So the first has to do with the customer maintenance screen in the section for RBO entries, and the second has to do with setting up a series to walk through the actual property after a guest has left. Let's demonstrate those. All right, I'm going to go into the HomeWatch application, and what we're going to do is come in here, and we're going to say that the browers have now converted their property over to an RBO. So if I go into the customer maintenance screen, you'll see this is all of the standard screen here for the customer information, but if we scroll down, there is a section on the bottom that says RBO information. If we open that up, you'll see there are basically four pieces of info here. The first is the walk through series ID, which we will set in a moment. The next is who the housekeeper is for this property. When you take a bunch of bookings, you send the housekeeper a listing of the different bookings that are scheduled for that particular property. So we'll come in here, and we'll pick who our housekeeper is for this property. So let's just say we use Anthony's Handyman. So now what we've done is we've selected Anthony's as the housekeeper, so anytime we get booking information for the property, it will get emailed to Anthony. This drop down actually goes out and looks at your vendor files. So these are vendors that I have out in my system. So you'll need to have your housekeeper set up as a vendor within QuickBooks first, and that will sync over, and then it will pick it up here as part of the selections. Assigned to would be the person on your staff who normally handles the property. This allows you to easily send an email of all of the booking information to that person straight from the application. The last is the door program code. A lot of the RBO rental properties have a programmable door where you need to have some kind of six digit security code to put in. So I know that one that we did, which was a Schlage, you had to have some kind of code like this. You hit the Schlage button, then you put this code in, and then you press a one when it lights up, and then you can program your door code. If you need to store that here, you can put that in here, and then it's part of the actual RBO information that gets sent out to the housekeepers so they can reprogram, or to the assigned to person so that they can reprogram. If you don't have a programmable door and you just use a lock box, no need to set that. All right, once we've set this up here, now we can save this detail, and we're basically done except for the walkthrough ID. So let's set that up. What we're going to do is we're going to come back here to our main HomeWatch admin program, and we're going to create a new work order, basically a new series, to be used for the walkthroughs of the property after the tenants have left. So let's come in and pick the browers, and this will be a post-tenant walkthrough, or whatever you want to call it, so that it shows up on your work order list. Again, the dates here are not necessarily all that important, but let's put it in here just on January 1st, and we can set whatever time we want, which is going to then be the default time for the series. The assigned to here is fine. This will actually be what the work orders are assigned to. The other one is who the property is assigned to, the other, you know, the one we looked at in the customer information screen. So there, that's the person that will get the actual booking details. So these can be different. Most likely, they're going to be the same. If there's any specific instructions that need to appear on every work order, you can put that in here, and it will show up in addition to all of the notes that you may have on that customer screen. All right, now let's set up an item here for an RBO walkthrough, and I happen to have RBO inspection as one of my product codes. If you don't, you should set those up in QuickBooks prior so that they're available here, and then you can pick that out. So post-tenant RBO inspection, and for this property, we charge them $100 each time, which includes, you know, whatever you want to include, and you can change that in the description. It includes laundry, you know, some people put the housekeeping in there, and of course, the rate would be higher, but whatever you need to do, you can do it here. So let's save this work order. Now, it automatically gets saved as a one-time, but that's not what we want. We want this to be a series because we want this to be duplicated every time that we have a booking. So what we'll do is we'll convert this to a series by pressing the convert button. It'll give us our little disclaimer there, and you'll see now it is a series. So we have the whole series section below, but we won't use this. The series items will actually get created automatically when you enter a booking. The important thing before we exit this screen is to note the work order number assigned, 863. This is the number we need to put back into the customer screen to identify what the series is. So I'm going to go back just so we're on the work order list, but let's go to the customer screen, and we'll go back to Mr. Brower, and we'll scroll down to the bottom to the RBO info, and right here where this walkthrough series is is where we want to put that activity or work order number that was assigned, 863. I'm going to save the information again. Now we're done. This is configured. It's ready to go. We're ready to start receiving bookings. Very easy to set up. Okay, so when you receive a booking, you're going to get an email from Airbnb, from Evolve, from the owner, from HomeAway, whatever company they're using that has all of the information of the booking. So when you enter the booking into the system, it's one quick entry, but you'll notice it actually does three different activities for each booking, and I really should say up to three because it doesn't do all of them unless you request it. You'll see that in a moment when we actually do it, but what it will do is it'll create an activity that contains the booking information itself, who the guest is, the coming, going date, etc. It'll also create a walkthrough work order for you, and this is going to be an occurrence of that series that we just set up, number 863 in this case, and it will also create a calendar entry or an activity for the housekeeper so that it will get that on the schedule, and you can then email the housekeeper easily based on the schedule for that particular property. So what we'll do is we will go in, look at the booking. We'll set it up. We'll look at the status of it. We'll send some emails, and you'll see how easy it is to actually manage all of your RBO bookings through the system. Okay, we're back here at the main admin screen. Selecting home watch admin as your application takes you to your work order list. I'm going to go into the RBO processing section here, and what this will do is bring up, really, there's two screens in one. So let's take a look first at the difference. Here in the middle, it says what do you want to display. Company-wide, this will show you all of the rentals for your company, or individual customer, which will allow you to pick a particular property and then look at the rentals only for that property. Defaults to company-wide to show you everything. Okay, it also has an as of date, which is the date that it's going to start displaying all of your rentals from. So think of it this way. This is from June 11th. These are all the rentals going forward we have scheduled from June 11th. If you ever need to look at anything historical, you can pop back to a particular date and it will refresh and show you all of the rentals from that date forward. If you take a look here, you have the name of the property, your client. You have the booking information that is set, who the guest is, when they're arriving, how long they're staying, when they're departing, and note that you can set times. So if you have any early arrivals or late departures, you can set those up in here. If you have a housekeeping or a cleaning schedule, it would illustrate that. If you've scheduled a walkthrough, if you need to reprogram the door code, and then you have other information here like who's in the party and notes. So we've just created Brower. So let's go and add a new booking for Brower that we just received from Evolve. I'm going to click on the add new booking button either here on the bottom or up on top and this will take you to your booking screen. So we've got a new booking from Brower. So we'll key that in here and the booking was from Evolve and the booking number was whatever it is. And we know these people are coming in for the 4th of July weekend. So it seems that they're going to be arriving on the 29th of June and we can set whatever their normal arrival is. So we'll say it's going to be at 3 p.m. Now we can put in how many nights they plan to stay and it will calculate the departure date or we can change the departure date and it will calculate the number of nights. In my case, I'm going to go and put in that they're staying for a week. So it will automatically calculate the departure date is July 6th at 11 a.m. If we've given them late departure, you can change the time here. All right, then we can put in who the guest name is, who's arriving. So we've got the Luber family arriving and we can put in their phone number and their email. Now when they leave, normally you will want to have a cleaning. So we'll click that button and say that we do need to have a cleaning and then we can pick what date we want to schedule the cleaning. Well they're checking out on Friday here at 11. So we can put that in and what we'll do is over here in the memo to the housekeeper, say guest departing by 11. This note that is here for the housekeeper will go out on the email to them so that whatever you put in here for them, they will then see. Then we assume that we do want to do a walkthrough of the property. It automatically assumes that you want to do a half hour, I'm sorry, a walkthrough about a half hour after the departure. You know it doesn't have to be, but that's just what it defaults to. Whatever this is is what the work order itself will get set to when we look at that here, how that's created from the series. Number and party to adults and if we need to program the door, we can put that in and then any other notes here. So if you know if they request that milk be in the fridge, you can put a note here so that you can assure you get that set up.(13:54 - 15:19)So once you've filled in this information about the booking, you have a save and create work orders button. So what we'll do is we'll hit that. That will then save this booking and then go out and create a work order for the property. It will then, similar to your in residence, show you if there's any conflicts out there. So it looks like because the Browers are also a normal weekly home visit customer for us, that we do have a few conflicts here. So we know that the guest is coming in the 29th and the 6th, so we definitely want to cancel this July 5th home visit and because we're going to do a walkthrough on July 6th, which you'll see this is our walkthrough because it has the guest name on it, you probably don't need to do a home visit on the 11th. So let's cancel those two. That now cleans up our schedule right here from within the booking. So what has this done for us? Let's close the booking and we'll look at that. So the first thing is here on the booking list, and let's go ahead and just move this date forward a little bit just to make it a little bit more visible. On our company-wide bookings, you see that now we have the Browers scheduled with that evolved booking that we just looked at. If we flip to the individual customer, this is where you are able to now manage the emails and the activity reports.(15:20 - 18:15)So you need to pick which property you want to look at, and it's only going to pick those that are RBO properties. Pick the Browers, it would bring up a list of all of the reservations. In this case we only have one, but it would bring up a list of all the reservations that we have for Brower. And now if we want to, we can send out an activity report which will print an activity report of all of the rentals that you have for the property. You can email a report to the owner, which is basically the same thing, the activity report, but clicking this will automatically send it to the property owner, which is the email address that you have on file for Mr. Brower. Email a report to the assigned person will send that same activity report to the person that we marked as that assigned to within the customer file. You remember that in the RBO section. And lastly, email a report to the housekeeper. So this will then send a report of only the housekeeping events with those housekeeping dates and notes that we put in to the company that we identified is the housekeeping company within the Customer Master. So very easy to manage that and manage your emails, manage your notifications right from the zoo. If you ever need to make a change, it's as simple as clicking on any of those items. And as normal, make your changes, add notes, hit the save, it will go out and basically regenerate the work orders appropriately and we can close. The last thing I want to look at is the walkthrough, which gets marked in the system right alongside your home visits. So I'm going to change my view here to all of my July active only. And if I look down here, you'll see that on July 6th, I do have that item set up here as a work order. So it will show up on my normal routes assigned to whoever it needs to be, ready to be invoiced. If I go into that particular item, you'll see it's been created here on July 6th. Remember, it did set it for 1130. So whatever time you had set up in there, it will then create that work order accordingly at that time. There are no line items on this yet because it hasn't been viewed in the route technician app or been invoiced. So we can copy and you'll see that we'll then copy the items. That is basically it for RBO management. You'll see how easy it is now to manage all of your items, put them on the calendar, set up work orders, and keep track of the different properties, schedules, all within a single screen. Thank you very much.