March 2011 | Sometimes it's the little things

Sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference. You may not have noticed, but we recently added the ability to rename any account in your Chart of Accounts.

So if that pesky "Rent Income" account is the only one that doesn't fit nicely into your account naming or numbering scheme, now you can fix it! Go to Accounting > Chart of Accounts and rename to your heart's content.

March 2011 | Stay on top of bills with recurring bill due date rules

Now when you set up a recurring bill, you can tell Buildium to post it before it's due. That way, you'll have time to decide exactly when to pay it.

Go to Accounting > Recurring Expenses to add to or review your recurring bills.

January 2011 | Make your mark

You can now place your company logo at the top of all your reports. Go to Admin > Settings > Reports and upload a logo image.

Once you've uploaded an image, Buildium will place your logo in the top left corner of each report.

January 2011 | Record your fees with ease

We've added a new feature that should make recording your management fees a bit easier.

There's a new tab on the Record Management Fees page that tells Buildium to show only properties where a fee is due, based on your management fee settings.

January 2011 | Happy New Year! It's 1099-MISC time.

The Federal deadline for sending 1099-MISC to your rental owners and vendors is January 31, so don't delay! Go to Documents & Forms > 1099-MISC to get started.

It's quick and easy and we've managed to avoid raising our fees again this year, so it's still only $24.99 per batch plus between $1.60 and $2.50 per recipient, depending on the delivery options you choose.

You can also generate batches for free without eFiling if you prefer to fill out and mail the forms yourself.

For more general information about 1099-MISC and other "information forms" from the IRS, please visit IRS.gov.

December 2010 | Another way to serve your rental owners

You're able to accept online requests from prospects and residents, so why not rental owners? Now you can.

Your rental owners will now see a new Requests page when they log in to Buildium. From this page they can submit, update, and monitor requests. These requests show up in the Tasks area for you or your managers.

October 2010 | Sign in from Buildium.com

You've probably noticed our new sign in page by now, but what you may not have noticed is that you can now sign in to your account from Buildium.com

If you find it hard to remember your Buildium web address, just go to www.buildium.com and click the Sign in link in the top right corner of the page.

October 2010 | Tame your automated emails

Buildium takes care of a lot of things behind the scenes, like sending e-mails to residents letting them know that they're late with a rent payment or informing them that you received their maintenance request. That's helpful, but it's often difficult to keep track of exactly when Buildium sends out emails and what those emails look like.

With our new Automated Emails page, you can now see a list of emails that Buildium sends on your behalf, preview each one, and customize the content of many of them. You can also turn off some of the emails, if you prefer that Buildium not send them.

Go to Admin > Settings > Automated Emails to check it out.

October 2010 | Print or email a bill

You can now print or email a bill. Go to Accounting > Bills and click the print bill or email bill icon next to any bill.

Tip: You may be able to use a printed bill as an invoice for services you provide to your customers.

September 2010 | You need some help

No, really, you do...

...from Buildium's new help system, that is.

Haven't clicked that little Help link in the top right corner for a while? Now's the time to give it a try.

We've completely revamped our help menu, revised and expanded our help content, and added some new help features we think you'll appreciate.

You now can:

• Search or browse our revised and expanded help topics
• Watch tutorial videos
• Find out about new features
• Suggest a new feature in our Idea Exchange
• Submit and manage support tickets

September 2010 | Tokens of our appreciation

We have added a host of new tokens for use in Tenant and HOA Owner form letters.

For Tenants

• Tenant comments
• Tenant rent balance
• Tenant statement detail
• Property address line 1
• Property address line 2
• Property address line 3
• Unit address line 1
• Unit address line 2
• Unit address line 3
• Lease comments
• Lease account number
• Lease late fee policy

For HOA Owners:

• HOA Owner account number
• HOA Owner comments
• HOA Owner late fee policy
• HOA Owner statement detail
• Property address line 1
• Property address line 2
• Property address line 3
• Unit address line 1
• Unit address line 2
• Unit address line 3

September 2010 | Get your share of late fees

If you take a percentage of late fees as management fee income, then we have a great improvement for you.

You can now divide late fees between two different income accounts automatically. Just go to Admin > Settings > Late Fee Settings, specify the two income accounts, assign a percentage split, and voila!

September 2010 | You're on notice. We've made some notable new changes to notifications

Despite the amount of time you spend using Buildium each day, it can still be difficult to keep tabs on everything that goes on with your properties. That's why we've made some notable improvements to the way we handle email notifications.

First, we've simplified the way you select the email notifications you wish to receive and have consolidated them with your other profile information. Simply click the My Settings link at the top right corner of any page to update your contact information, change your password, and set your email notification preferences.

Second, we've added some new notifications to help you stay on top of online payment activity.

Finally, we've freshened up the format of the email notifications themselves to make them easier to read and more pleasant to look at. We hope you'll notice!

July 2010 | Got ideas? We're listening

Do you have an idea that you think would make Buildium even better? With our new Idea Exchange, you can submit your ideas, add your two cents, and vote for your favorite ones. You're even able to see which ideas we're considering and which ones we're working on.

To get to the Idea Exchange, simply select Suggest a new feature from the Help menu in the top right corner of most Buildium pages.

July 2010 | Honey, I'm home!

We are excited to introduce our new home page. We think it's a big improvement over what we had before and hope you agree.

Here are the highlights:

• Dashboard: Key metrics related to properties.
• Shortcuts: Links to common actions.
• My Upcoming Tasks: Your next five tasks due and links to your entire task list.
• Recent Activity: Events and tasks from the past five days.

We hope this new home page helps make managing your properties a bit easier. We look forward to your feedback.

Thanks to those of you who participated in the design of this new home page. We could not have done it without you!

July 2010 | A new alternative

There's a new option on the Add Recipients dialog of the Compose Email feature.

You can now easily send emails to recipients using the primary email address, alternate email address, or both.

June 2010 | Optimists and pessimists agree:
receiving payments in full is a good thing

Whether you fall into the "glass half full" or "glass half empty" camp, one thing we can all agree on is that receiving payments in full from your tenants or HOA owners is a good thing.

And now it's even better. You can already receive payments in bulk from the Outstanding Balances page. Now you can also adjust the date, payment method, check number, and more for each payment you receive in full.

So next time those rent payments or association dues roll in, go to Tenants > Outstanding Balances or HOA Owners > Outstanding Balances and get your fill.

June 2010 | Taking the pain out of listings

We recently released a raft of enhancements to our Listings features aimed at making day-to-day tasks related to listings a bit easier:

• Easily see which units are listed and which are not with our handy "Listed" and "Not Listed" tabs on the Listings page.
• Make sure your vacant units are listed; search by occupancy on the Listings or Units page.
• Get rented units off the market easily with the new "delist" action for each Listing.

Even editing listing information has gotten easier with quick access to Unit and Property information like photos and features directly from the Listing edit page. No more bouncing around between the Units, Properties, and Listings pages just to get your listing looking the way you want!

June 2010 | Your vendors are important

We've added a new feature to help you keep up-to-date contact information for your vendors readily available to your residents.

You can now add a vendor's contact information as an "Important Number" for your residents. The Important Number changes any time you change the vendor's information without having to maintain the information in two places.

Just click the new link at the top of the Properties > Important Numbers page to get started.

May 2010 | Charge management fees by unit

Buildium has added even more flexibility to how you calculate your management fees. You can now apply a flat fee by property or by unit.

Go to Admin > Settings > Management Fees if you would like to adjust how your management fees are calculated.

May 2010 | Advanced feature | Make it easier for search engines to find your company online

You have an attractive, well organized website for your prospects and customers. The next step is to make sure people find your website online.

This is called "search engine optimization" or "SEO" for short. We recently rolled out two enhancements to your Public Website settings to aid your SEO efforts.

The first is that you can now set the title tag for your website. The title tag appears in the title bar of most browsers and also gives Google and other search engines clues about the content of your website.

The second SEO-related enhancement is the ability to set up meta tags on your website home page. Meta tags are additional "clues" that some search engines use to determine the content of your website. Meta tags are also key if you want to take advantage of Google's free Webmaster Tools.

May 2010 | Just for the record

It's probably happened to you. You have a payment from a resident and the resident's name is on the check, but to record the payment in Buildium, you needed the resident's unit information or account number.

Not any more. With our recent enhancements to the Receive Payment page, now you can just enter whatever information you have – the resident's name, property, unit, partial account number...whatever – and we'll filter the resident list for you.

May 2010 | Houston, we have contact

You can now associate different contact information with each of your listings.

Set up a listing contact for each of your staff members who lists units. Or maybe you have multiple offices and want to have particular listings have their contact information. Now you can.

From the Units > Listings page, click the "Maintain listing contacts" link and get started.

April 2010 | A spring cleaning for reports

In the spirit of spring, we thought we'd dust-off our reports. That's why you'll find a fresh new format for all Buildium reports.

We've standardized headers and footers, increased the font size, added a bit of shading here and there, and generally spruced things up. Hopefully you'll find our new reports to be more readable and more pleasant to look at.

In addition to updating the format, we've made some frequently requested enhancements:

• We've added two summary tables to the Rent Roll report, one by bed/bath and one by property that aggregate occupancy and rent information.
  
  
• Reports that include resident names, such as the Delinquent Tenants and Delinquent HOA Owners reports, now give you the option of including the residents' account numbers, names, or both.
  
  
• The Unpaid Bills by Property report now gives you the option to display ending cash balances for each property.
  
  
• Many reports have new summary tables to replace the old "Grand Total" lines, giving you a quick way to see totals for the entire report.

We're confident that you're going to like the changes we've made, but since this is a significant change, we're providing access to the old "legacy" report format for a limited time.

We're planning to leave the legacy formats in place for at least a month, but how soon we remove the legacy report format after that will depend on the feedback we get. So if you have an issue with a particular report, let us know.

Of course, we'd also be happy to hear from you if you like what we've done. Try running some reports and let us know what you think.

April 2010 | Good news about the budget

We've all gotten used to hearing bad news about federal, state, and local budgets. We thought budgets deserved some good news for a change.

You can now use Buildium to track monthly budget amounts. Enter different amounts for each month or enter one amount for the entire year and we'll spread it out for you. It couldn't be easier!

Go to Accounting > Budgets and give it a try.

April 2010 | Another day another dollar older

Our Delinquent Tenants and Delinquent HOA Owners reports just got a lot more useful. We now show aged balances on these two reports, allowing you to see at a glance how far behind your residents are on their payments.

April 2010 | Be warned! Buildium helps you avoid trust accounting problems

Keeping track of cash balances to make sure you don't violate trust accounting rules can be a real challenge. Let Buildium help you by warning you when the cash balance for a given rental owner or property is in danger of falling below zero.

Go to Admin > Settings > Accounting Settings and select the type of warning you'd like to receive. Buildium will then warn you if you try to pay bills for a rental owner or property without enough available cash.

March 2010 | Get smarter...pick lists, that is

You've seen them all over Buildium — those nifty little pick lists that let you choose from a list of things like a specific account, property, or vendor. Well, some of those pick lists just got a lot smarter.

Instead of having to scroll through dozens of items, you can now start typing in the pick list (where indicated) and the list will start filtering automatically. Of course, you can still scroll through the items like you used to, but if you know what you’re looking for, try typing the name instead.

So next time you're recording a check or entering a bill, give it a shot and get smart!

February 2010 | Set it and forget it...Rental Owner Statement periods

With apologies to Ron Popeil, when it comes to rental owner statement periods, now you can set it and forget it!

Go to Admin > Settings > Statements and tell Buildium which day of the month your Rental Owner Statement period ends. But, wait, there's more! Each time you run a Rental Owner Statement, Buildium will automatically default the start and end dates.

February 2010 | You gotta keep 'em separated

Keeping track of operating versus non-operating income just got easier.

We've enhanced the Income Statement and Budget vs. Actual Report to group and sub-total operating and non-operating accounts separately. Try it out; run an Income Statement or Budget vs. Actual report today.

February 2010 | Advanced feature | Upload images and assets for your public website

Here's a new capability for those of you who have spent time customizing your public website. Until now, if you wanted to add images or other assets to include in your custom pages or style sheets, you had to host those images on your own server. Because Buildium uses SSL, this resulted in some annoying security warnings from certain browsers. Well no more.

You can now upload images or other assets to Buildium's servers and then use those images for your public website. Upload a photo to display in the body of your public website home page, upload backgrounds or other images you'd like to use in your custom website skin, upload documents that you'd like to refer to within custom pages; the sky's the limit.

Go to Admin > Settings > Public Website and click the Images and assets link. Click the Upload button to start uploading assets.

February 2010 | Give your public site an instant makeover

Did you know you can instantly change the look of your public website? In addition to our classic Buildium skins, we have a library of alternate looks you can apply to your public site with the click of a mouse. Just go to Admin > Settings > Public Website > Global settings and choose from our selection of website skins.

Over the coming months, we're going to be adding even more website skins, so stay tuned!