Overview
This release guide documents the changes made to the iPro CRM Software during the first release of 2022
Reminder: All clients have the ability to view all software changes on their staging site (IPROSTAGE), prior to deployment on the live site.
i.e. clientdomain(com).iprostage.com
(com) is the extension of domain .co.uk, .net, .info, etc...
Deployment Process
Deployment of the updated software is by client request raising a ticket with the support desk or via an email to support@ipro-software.com.
Deployment will be scheduled within an agreed time window. If you wish to change the time which has been agreed, please contact the support desk to arrange a suitable alternative.
Enhancements
Website Checkout Pages
- It is now possible for a guest to create a booking without creating an account and setting a password. These guests will not be able to log into the guest portal [3982]
- Fix an issue where the guest contact preferences entered on the last step of the checkout process weren't being reflected in the guest contact record [4599]
- The number of dogs on a booking can now be specified in the same way as adults, children and infants. A control appears on the booking form and during the booking process allowing the number of dogs to be specified. This will add the dogs extra to the booking when selected. This feature is enabled using the new "Itemise Pet on booking form & checkout pages" switch on the Checkout Config of the Online Settings node in the CMS [5386]
- The number of pets can also be specified on the enquiry page [5655]
- There are now separate switches in the CMS to make the guest names and ages compulsory and these apply to all guests [5801]
Booking Form and Calendar
- Changeover days visible on the calendar, to improve user experience
- Minimum stay rules now applicable on the calendar, you can no longer select invalid dates
- Discounts will be visible on the calendar prior to clicking any dates
- Unavailable dates are grey out and not clickable
- Invalid Check in days are not clickable
Channel Manager
- There have been a number of enhancements to the layout of the Channel Manager pages to make it easier to use and to allow the page to be used for connections to other channels in the future [4317]
- The list of properties can now be filtered by the external ID (such as the Rentals United property ID) [4748]
- The cost of the OTA Markup extra is now configured as a user edited price so that it doesn't accidently reset if the booking financials are updated [5832]
Property Manager
- Bills and tasks can now be filtered based on the owner of the property [4740]
Extras
- The extras list now displays the extra ID and the maximum quantity [5025]
- Extras can now be itemised in the price summary during the booking process rather than appearing as part of a single generic "Extras" item. A new switch is available when setting extras to enable itemisation for that extra [4250]
- Additional pricing options are available so that extras can also be priced per adult and per adult & per week [4250]
- There have been a number of enhancements to the UI for adding and editing extras to make it easier to use and reduce the chances of entering incorrect or incomplete information [5544]
- It's no longer possible to edit the cost of a regular extra from within a booking. If you want an extra to have a non standard price you need to add it as a custom extra instead [5959]
API
- The Bookings API now includes additional details about any extras that are on the booking such as if it's payable to the owner, a compulsory charge, payable on order, included in the list price, visible to the guest and taxable [5312]
- In the Contacts API it is now possible to use the * wildcard at the beginning of the phone number [5356]
- The performance of the Property Rates API has been improved and a new version=2.0 parameter has been added which excludes short break pricing to give further performance improvements where this data isn't needed [5377]
- Issues with SagePay payment tokens on the Create Payment and Get Payments APIs have been fixed [5479]
- Issues with the rental notes fields on the Property Detail API have been fixed [5481]
- When using the Push Property Rates API, if the booking rules (length of day and changeover days) haven't been included then the rules specified in the Rental Rules tab of the property node in the CMS will be used by default [5449]
- The Property Day Availabilities API now supports the months parameter to specify how many months of data should be returned (default is 24 months) [5612]
- New APIs are available to retrieve details about bills and tasks [5798]
Tokens
- Financial tokens will now return a value of 0 rather than be blank when they have no value [5327]
- A number of additional tokens relating to properties are now available when sending emails from owner contacts [5121]
Rentals United
- Small Party Discounts are no longer sent to Rentals United [5319]
- Several issues syncing Last Minute Discounts and Length of Stay Discounts have been fixed. The updated process means it may take up to 20 minutes for changes to these to appear in Rentals United after they have been make in iPro [5723]
Vouchers
- Vouchers can now be configured so that they are applied to a booking as either a payment or as a voucher. You can select this option when creating a new voucher or by editing an existing voucher. When a voucher is applied as a discount you can choose to deduct the cost of the voucher from the commission, owner amount or have the commission based on the net price [5306]
Agency Income Report
- Improvements have been made to the reliability and accuracy of the Agency Income report. If you believe that the data in the report is incorrect contact support and we will regenerate it for you [5304, 5476, 5487]
- The Agency Income detail report now includes the order date and income date and the report can be sorted by any column [5592]
Payments
- The Opayo (SagePay) integration has been updated to support version 4 of their API with full support for 3D Secure v2 [5202]
- The guest payment process has been updated so that when a 3D secure challenge is made a payment will appear in iPro as a pending payment before the 3D secure verification process starts. This means that if the guest fails to complete the 3D secure process a pending payment will show on the booking so that you can see that the guest attempted to pay but did not complete the process. [5577]
- The 10 minute timeout on the payment page at the end of the booking process now halts when a 3D secure verification is needed. If the guest takes too long to respond to 3D secure the iPro checkout process will no longer time out, although it is still possible for banks or payment providers to time out the transaction [5577]
- If a booking times out on the payment page the guest is redirected to a booking time out page. This contains a message telling them that the process timed out and gives them a button they can click to return to the property. There are two dictionary items that can be used to customise the message on this page. The main message is Checkout.CheckoutConfirm.BookingTimeOut with default text of "Booking Timeout. Please re-start the booking process", whilst the button is "Checkout.CheckoutConfirm.ReturnToProperty" with default text of "Return to Property"
- Any zero value payment schedules will be automatically marked as paid [5606]
- It's now possible to manually pay an owner damages payment schedule for those that don't use statements [5828]
Bookings
- It's now possible to change the dates of a booking that is more than three months [5451]
- Security deposits can be refunded in multiple instalments [5452]
- A Maximum Commission value can now be configured. This can be set either on an individual property in the CMS, or on an owner contact record if you want the limit to apply to all properties owned by the same person. When this is set the commission earnt on a booking will be capped at the amount specified [5428]
- The settings for the Initial Deposit Scheme have moved form the CMS to the Company Settings page [4622]
- When viewing the owner financials on the Booking Details and Summary tabs of a booking there is now a new figure called "Charges and Credits" which shows the total value of any bills or tasks that are associated with the booking. Also shown is "Net Amount Due" which shows the total amount due to the owner minus the cost of any bills and tasks. These values are also available as email tokens: {billDeductions} and {ownerAmountAfterDeductions} [5446]
- Zero value payment schedules for extras that have no price will now appear as paid rather than pending [5606]
- An additional check has been put in place to prevent users from removing the only property from a booking [5819]
- The Commission sections of the Booking Details and Summary tabs have been updated to include a clearer breakdown of the Net price, Tax and Total prices [5804, 5805]
- It's now possible to easily change the dates of longer bookings. When selecting the new dates, if not enough months are displayed you can click the "Load More Months" button to show additional months [5738]
- If a booking is extended or the quantity of an extra changes after the guest has paid and the linked owner schedules have been paid then any price adjustment will be made by adding additional schedules rather than updating the existing ones. This will ensure that the correct values are shown in the statement [5712]
Website Search Results [5515]
When using the iPro website search pages there are updated messages when the search doesn't return any properties.
- If there are no properties because you are fully booked on the dates searched for the default message is 'Unfortunately we are fully booked for these dates, please try alternative dates', which can be configured using the Search.FullyBookedMessage dictionary item
- If there are properties available on the dates searched for but there are no matches because of other filter criteria (such as a property attribute) then the default message is 'Please adjust your criteria search as there are no available properties for that search', which can be configured using the Search.ByLocationAndAttributeMessage dictionary item
Members Area
- Improve the layout of the guest area. This included removing unnecessary sections from the page, tidying up the display of the extras, improving the display of the pricing summary of the booking and making it easier to make a payment. There are a number of new dictionary items in the membersArea section of the dictionary that can be used to customise the labels on the page [5529]
- Add the ability to show arrival information in the guest area on a booking once it's fully paid. The arrivals information is taken from the property details in the CMS and includes the check in and check out times, alarm code and instructions, heating instructions, WiFi details, key safe code, map, address and directions to the property [5615]
- Improvements and bug fixes to the booking list in the owners area [5530]
- Improve the layout of the "Guest Information" section in the guest area [5613]
- Fix issues with the email log in the Guest Area not displaying all emails [5614]
- Fix issues with the values for commission and extras on a booking including non owner extras [5581]
Contacts
There have been a number of enhancements to the search options on the contacts list. This includes
- Searching by property will now list all contacts associated with a property, not just the owners [5684]
- It's now possible to search based on the date that a contact was created, the date a contact created a booking and either the start or end date of a booking [5684]
- Emails sent to an owner from within a booking or enquiry will now be displayed in the activity tab of the owner contact record rather than the guest record [5774]
Alerts
- You now have more control over when an alert is sent with a new option available on the alert node. An individual alert can now be configured to send either within 10 minutes of the criteria being met, at the system default time (which is configured on the alerts folder node and can either be a specific time of day or every 10 minutes if left blank), or at a specific time every day that is unique to that alert. [5716]
- Filtering options are available to either include or exclude bookings from being triggered by an alert based on the Source of Booking [5347]
- A new alert criteria is available called "Booking Updated". This can be used to send an alert when a booking tag is added to a booking. The booking tag that should trigger the alert should be specified in the "Booking Tags To Trigger Alert" field [5347]
iCals
- A new version of the iCal is now available for each property that only contains bookings and blockouts created in iPro and excludes bookings imported from a OTA or blockouts created via an OTA or as a result of an iCal import. This is useful if you want to give someone details of any dates you have blocked that have come from direct bookings you have created and not include those imported from a third party. A link to the iCal for each property can be found on the Distribution tab for the property in the CMS, the new ical is called iPro iCal [5936]
Bugs Fixed
- The formatting of guest names is now correct on the calendar where the name is too long to be shown in the space available [5292]
- If a guest has paid by card previously and an offline card payment is added, the last four digits of the card used previously are shown against the offline payment [5314]
- Adding an overdue guest payment updated the due date on the linked owner schedule [5308]
- An attachment to a language version of an email uses the English version of the attachment rather than the correct language and has an incorrect file name [5315]
- Changeover day rules are not being created correctly when pushing new rates via the API [5376]
- An error is displayed when sorting extras [5462]
- The alert log contains entries for alerts that haven't been sent [5328]
- Property API returns null for Rental Notes 1 [5481]
- Some properties are in the wrong order when sorting website search results by price [5537]
- Some historical bookings are being included in statements [5546]
- Columns aren't aligned correctly when viewing the booking list in the back office [5509]
- The {BookingDepost} token in incorrect when used on bookings from RU that have an OTA Markup [5500]
- Payment schedules aren't created correctly when clicking the Calculate Rental Price button on a reactivated booking [5576]
- Creating a new user or editing an existing user can result in the users details being overwritten by the web browser trying to autocomplete the form [5779]
- Creating a booking via the AI during dates where there is a special offer may result in the discount being applied incorrectly and the owner amount being wrong [5842]
- Refunding the security deposit fails if the comment is too long [5523]
- Security Deposit Refund report doesn't include cancelled bookings [5470]
- Last minute bookings can pay just the deposit with a pay now link [5932]
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