Updates to the Reports feature in Rentec Direct includes a visual overhaul, speed improvements, and new options to automatically send reports to owners and managers. Rentec Direct clients use reports to track their financials, review tenant data, and manage their property records. Improvements to the reporting interface allow clients to access the reports they want quickly and easily.
A new update is coming soon to your property management software, giving you enhanced reporting options from Rentec Direct. The Reports section of Rentec Direct is getting remodeled to provide you with an easy to use interface, advanced filtering and search functions, and the ability to automatically send reports to owners and managers.
“Our clients rely heavily on the reporting features in Rentec Direct and this update drastically enhances the data processing time and makes it easier to access saved reports and filters,” says Rentec Direct president, Nathan Miller. “The development team has been working tirelessly on this enhancement for our clients and we’re pleased to introduce it soon.”
The new reports feature is scheduled to go live in Q4 of 2023. The reports update will be introduced to Rentec Labs as a beta feature for clients to try out the new features. Be on the lookout for the product announcement on the Summary page of your software under System Updates when the feature goes live.
Enhancement to the Reports in Rentec Direct – Coming Soon
New updates to the reports in Rentec Direct include a visual remodel of the user interface (UI), changes to the reports to make them easier to read and universal, and options to automatically send reports with the Scheduled Reports feature.
Updates to the Reports User Interface (UI)
- All reports are now accessible and searchable from a single page.
- Your most frequently used reports can be favorited for quick access
- Each report now shows only the applicable form fields for a simpler and more intuitive UI.
- Every report configuration now has a unique URL. So you can use the browser back and forth buttons. You can bookmark reports to save yourself the trouble of reconfiguring the options the same way over and over. And you can share report URLs with your users.
- Each report in the menu is a link, so you can middle-click to open reports in new tabs
Updates to the Reports in Rentec Direct
- All reports have a consistent style
- Larger font sizes, increased spacing, and improved layouts for easier reading
- Links everywhere! Spend less time hunting down the same information in other parts of the software. Click a property, bank account, or category to go directly to its ledger. Click a transaction amount to view that transaction. And that’s just the beginning. Any information that makes sense as a link is now a link.
- More reports than ever are now sortable, and many reports can be sorted by multiple columns.
Scheduled Reports – New Feature
Save time manually running and emailing reports to every owner or manager. Instead, create a scheduled report that runs automatically on a monthly or weekly basis.
- Keeps you in compliance with contracts and regulations
- Keeps property owners and managers up to date with important information
- Stores a copy of reports that have been emailed in your file library
Want to know the moment the New Reports features goes live? Send us an email at success@rentecdirect.com and we’ll make sure to personally let you know. Otherwise keep an eye out on the System Updates on your Summary Page in your software and Product Updates on our website for this and other updates.
Note: The new reports feature will be released as a Rentec Labs product
Final Thoughts
Our goal is always to make landlords and property manager’s tasks simpler, quicker and more efficient. One of the ways we accomplish this is by listening to you and your feature requests. If there is anything you would like to see added to enhance your Rentec Direct experience, please send your ideas and suggestions to success@rentecdirect.com.
Rentec Direct is an award-winning property management software serving landlords and property managers across the United States. Features include online rent payments, tenant and owner portals, one of the industry’s largest vacancy listing syndication networks, full property, tenant, and owner accounting, 1099-MISC reporting and more. Rentec Direct was recognized as Real Estate Company of the Year in the 2023 American Business Awards®, and was named the Most Customer Friendly Companies of the Year in the 2022 Best in Biz Awards, has been named to the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest-Growing Private Companies for seven years in a row.
Would love to see a budget and budget comparison report included
Thanks for your input, Jeanne! I will let our developers know about your idea for future updates.
Very excited for scheduled send. Hope we will be able to send it as an attachment and in the file format of our choosing (extremely strong preference for CSV).
We are eager to use the automated reporting as a workaround to the lack of an API. We urgently need to extract data from the system on a scheduled basis in order to keep our business process automations flowing outside of Rentec. If this overhaul allows attachment-based distribution, we have the automation infrastructure to scrape our data from these and get it where it needs to go.
If you are also updating the reports themselves, then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do away with the “formatting” in the CSV exports and give us clean, tabular data with one data field per column and each field populated on each row. To give two specific examples:
1. The tenant contact CSV export concatenates mobile, home, and work phone numbers along with email address all in a single cell. This makes it *extremely* difficult for us to utilize the data, as it requires a series of fairly complex excel operations to accurately parse out each line.
2. The rent roll CSV reports only list the property/unit name *once*, for the first tenant, and then that field is *blank* for all co-tenants. This requires us to manually or programmatically infill the missing data points in order to perform pivot or lookup operations on the data, which we do on a regular basis. We would like the CSV data to contain blanks only if the data does not exist in the system.
It was probably more work for your developers to incorporate these formats into the CSV reports than it would have been to generate clean tabular data. While we appreciate the effort that was taken to make the CSV export “look pretty” — please take to heart that we will use the formatted PDF report when we need pretty data, and the CSV report when we need usable data.
Hi Christopher – We are also very excited about the scheduled reports, it’s been a huge request and was a huge project.
This update is going to support PDF attachments, but we’ll consider CSV attachments in the future if the demand for that increases. Your use case is extremely specialized, but we would love to support it in the future if we can. We’re also considering opening up some API options as well.
I also concur with your comments about CSV. I would prefer to see them all in tabular data format and that’s the direction we’re heading with those.
I hope you enjoy the update. Rumor has it, it should be coming out very.. very soon!
Hi Nathan — thanks for the response. It’s always nice to be able to communicate directly with the owner. I appreciate all the hard work that went into the new reporting features. The new interface looks great, and the ability to bookmark reports will be useful.
However — and I hope you will take this constructively — the update provided less incremental value to us than what we had hoped for. I know that’s very direct, and I’ll elaborate here in the hopes of providing useful insight rather than just complaining:
First, a feature that we will definitely benefit from: I will be configuring the reports to automatically send the PDF version of the tenant contact list to my maintenance manager on a weekly basis. She is a 1099 worker who lives outside of our tech ecosystem and ensuring that she has updated info for our tenant base has been a bit of a pain. This makes that easier.
However, as an owner-operator, this is one of the few use case we have for the scheduled reports. We will not use them for anything else, as most other reporting we need in XLS or CSV format to perform subsequent operations in excel. I suspect that the scheduling capability will be more valuable to 3P operators than to owner-operators.
It’s great to hear that you open to the idea of adding CSV exports and/or fixing the formatting issues with the CSV data. I noted that these were changed in the update, but not improved as tabular data. For your awareness, this actually provided negative value to us because the formatting change (e.g. from “m: xxx-xxx-xxxx [Carriage Return]” to “Mobile Phone [Carriage Return] xxx-xxx-xxxx) actually broke a number of our business processes. And it did so without improving the usability of the data.
Regarding API access — we use Zapier for many of our operating procedures. Webhook capabilities would be a huge value add. DoorLoop offers functionality along these lines. To my knowledge, they are your only competitor who offers this currently. However, their feature stack is otherwise pretty far behind Rentec’s, and I think you have a good opportunity to compete with them for new customers by going after the automation aspect of their DVP. For what it’s worth, I personally know investors who have left or are considering leaving for DoorLoop — specifically investors who do their accounting in Quickbooks and only need the PMS for automating operations.
Regarding your feedback that “[our] use case is extremely specialized”… Is that true? I want to challenge you a bit on that:
1. Automating routine tasks is a common desire across many businesses. With Zapier’s integration into thousands of applications, there’s clearly a significant demand for automation.
2. There might be a generational aspect to consider. As a 33-year-old with a decently sized portfolio, I represent a growing segment of digitally savvy clients. Our reliance on tech solutions might seem unique now, but it’s likely indicative of future trends.
3. Millennials and Gen Z are rapidly becoming significant players in the market. Our current needs, shaped by our digital nativity and desire for efficiency, could be a precursor to the expectations of your future clientele.
We are hungry for an end-to-end solution that allows for complete operational management and a single source of truth for accessible data that can be mined for actionable business insights. Currently, there are some gaps in Rentec’s ability to meet this need. For example, you do an **amazing** job of getting our listings out into the marketplace, but then provide virtually no native CRM functionality for nurturing and managing the vast quantities of leads that your syndication partnerships bring in.
We have noticed over the past few years that Rentec has tried to fill some of these gaps with third party integrations. While I recognize that there is value in not recreating the wheel, I would suggest that the strategy of working toward specific rather than general integration has produced a product ecosystem that is excessively rigid. Basically, it’s a prespriptive approach that requires users to adjust their operating model to match the software rather than being able to adapt the software to match their operating model. This effect becomes more pronounced each time a new 3rd party integration is bolted onto the software.
What if, instead of investing development resources in specific integrations, it was put into improving data access? That would take Rentec from being a more-or-less siloed PMS to being an integrated operating platfrom. By creating a more open platform, you could remove many barriers to adoption, and improve client retention.
Just my thoughts and opinions. Hopefully they provide some degree of value.
Thank you Christopher for the detailed reply, and the constructive input! I really appreciate hearing from you, and all others, about what is going to make the software the most useful to everybody. We track every single request that comes to us, and every time somebody new requests the same, or similar, it gets another vote. Then we review from the most votes to the fewest and compare that to our development availability to determine our project queue. I believe that you are right in that those requests are going to become more frequent, especially as others in your demographic make more use of the system.
Some things (like Zapier integration options) are high on my wish list as well! I’ll be certain to save each of your requests here and make sure they get their votes. In the meantime, we’ll continue on making the software better with each and every release.
Regarding the value from the reports. I acknowledge this update wasn’t heavy on the CSV formatting, we’ll work on that separately in the future. This release focused on the interface and usability features such as adding sortable columns throughout, interconnectivity (links) between reports, and a cleaner UI. Scheduled reports has been in the top 10 most requested features for a very long time, so it was very important to most of our clients that that be included as well.
Thank you once again for the constructive feedback.