Landlord Vision Software Release Notes

Enhancements: - 

• Balance Sheet Report
  The Balance Sheet report now shows accounts with zero balances provided that there has been accounting transactions recorded against it in the current tax year giving you a clearer picture of your income and expenditure over the year.
• Tenants’ Payment Schedule Area
  An 'Add Invoice' option has now also been added to the Payment Schedule area so that you do not need to navigate away from a tenant's schedule to continue working on their account.

Fixes:

• Cash Flow Report
  Duplicate entries appearing on the Cash Flow report. This has been fixed.
• Tenant Invoices
  The 'Payable to' field on tenant invoices was being left blank. This has now been fixed.
• Balance Sheet Report
  The 'Current Year Profit' date on the Balance Sheet report was displaying incorrectly. This has been fixed.

Enhancements: - 

• New! Aged Payables 
  We have added a new Aged Payables report to show how much you owed on a given date and to whom.  If you didn't have everything up to date at your year end, you can use this report to track back and find the information. 
• Safety Certificates 
  Safety certificates can now be filtered by certificate type. This means that you can break your search down even further for quicker results.
• Mail Merge 
  In the Mail Merge function all names on the tenant list now appear in alphabetical order regardless of when they were added to Landlord Vision, making it easier to find and email a tenant. 

Fixes:

• Editing an Agent Statement 
  When editing a payment recorded against an agent statement, the payment types were not matching those that were available when adding the payment. This has been fixed. 
• Importing Bank Statements 
  A problem with importing bank statements was due to an issue with Safari under iOS. We have issued a fix to Landlord Vision to account for this. 

Enhancements: - 

New! Aged Receivables
We have added a new Aged Receivables report to show who owed you how much on a given date.  If you didn't have everything up to date at your year end, you can use this report to track back and find the information. 

Enhancements: - 

• New! Making Tax Digital Integration
  Landlord Vision is now MTD ready! You can use the integration if you meet the current HMRC criteria. As HMRC adds support for tax payers with income from other sources, more landlords will be able to sign up for Making Tax Digital and submit data to HMRC through Landlord Vision. To learn more about Making Tax Digital, please visit our MTD resource centre.
• Dropbox Integration 
  We have now integrated with Dropbox to enable users to save and upload their receipts and expenses to Landlord Vision in half the time. You can also email scanned receipts to a dedicated email address and they will be automatically added and processed. 

Enhancements: - 

• Changes to GoCardless Rent Collection Fees Handling
  We have changed the way the GoCardless rent collection fees are handled and now the exact total fees against each Direct Debit rental payment will be available only when the GoCardless payout is ready.
  
  
• Tenant Module White Label
  In the Tenant Module we have altered the logic so that when a whitelabel 'From' address is defined, the 'Reply-to' address will always be the same as the whitelabel 'From' address.
  
  
• Payment References During Reconciliation
  When a bank statement line does not have a reference but has a description, Landlord Vision now enters the description as the payment reference. When an expense is created on the reconcile tab, the statement line reference (or description if reference is blank) will be set to both the expense and the payment.
  
  
• Importing Documents with .odt and .eml File Extensions
  Landlord Vision now allows .odt and .eml files to be uploaded to Document Manager and the Helpdesk.
  
  
• Tenant Module
  Where new tenants have been added to Landlord Vision, but as yet not allocated to any tenancies, they can now be granted access to the Tenant Module.
  
  
• Tenant Charge Invoices
  Payment instructions are now automatically added when a tenant charge invoice is created either manually or automatically (as a repeating tenant charge invoice).
  
  

Fixes:

• HTML Script
  In various places throughout Landlord Vision, HTML Script was appearing.
  
  
• Deposit Received Showing Incorrectly
  A refunded deposit credit note was being included in the Deposit Received amount.
  
  
• Changing Rent for a Letting Agent Tenancy
  Floating point number memory presentation was causing a problem when changing rents.
  
  
• MS Edge
  A particular JS syntax was preventing the creation of rent schedules when using MS Edge.
  
  
• Cash Flow Audit Report
  When the Cash Flow Audit report was exported to PDF, the downloaded file was empty.
  
  
• Property Search Filter
  Under Properties the search filter was not performing properly.
  
  
• Broker Summary Report
  The column 'Outstanding Loans' on the Broker Summary report was not displaying the correct amount.
  
  
• Income Tax Report
  The Income Tax report for year 2020/21 now shows the Personal Allowance as £12,500.
  
  
• Repeating Invoices
  An issue with the 'Next Bill Date' recorded on repeating invoices has been fixed.
  
  
• Cancelling Direct Debit Rent Payments
  Pending Direct Debit rent payments will now only be cancelled if it is for a rental period which ends beyond the tenancy expiry date.
  
  
• Repeating Expenses
  An issue with the 'Next Bill Date' showing on repeating property expenses has been fixed.
  
  
• Scanned Receipts
  A bug was preventing the upload of all scanned receipts where they were part of a set of receipts being processed for a given user.

Enhancements: -

• New Column Heading
  In Property Manager => Expenses, we have removed the 'Start Date' column heading and replaced it with 'Next Bill Date' on the 'Repeating' tab.
  
  
• Scanned Receipts
  Error handling in the 'Scanned Receipts' section has been improved to provide an onscreen message so that you will be aware of any issues encountered when uploading your receipts.
  
  
• New ‘Info’ Help Tips
  On the Edit Tenancy screen, we have added 'Info' help tips against two of the options ('of the current month' and 'of the next month') that appear in the Due Date drop down list to assist with entering the correct rent due date.
  
  
• Letting Agent Statements
  Where rental and tenant charge payments are recorded on letting agent statements, the tenant name and room will now appear in the description to help identify payments where the property is an HMO.
  
  
• Custodial Deposits
  On the Deposit Scheme tab, for custodial deposits we now allow for the deposit amount to be forwarded from non-bank accounts which have the 'Allow payments to/from account' flag set, and the deposit claimed from custodian to be recorded to non-bank accounts which have the 'Allow payments to/from account' flag set.
  
  
• Insurance Based Deposits
  On the Deposit Scheme tab, for insurance based deposits we now allow deposits returned to tenants to be recorded to non-bank accounts which have the 'Allow payments to/from account' flag set. This change is useful when moving a deposit amount from one tenancy to another.
  
  

• New Mail Merge Tags
  The following mail merge tags have been added to the Mail Merge Tags document:

  $TENANT_ADDRESS$
  $TENANT_ADDRESS_MULTIPLE_LINES$
  $TENANT_DOB$
  $CONTACT_DOB$

Fixes:

• New Treatment of Duplications on Imported Bank Statements
  The reconciliation process has been changed so that imported bank statement duplicates are presented as separate transactions.
  
  
• Suggest New Features Form
  An issue with HTML code appearing in messages submitted through the 'Tell us what you think' form was reported and has now been rectified.
  
  
• Bank Reconciliation Report
  We have resolved an issue with PDF printing on the Bank Reconciliation report.
  
  
• Transferring Money Between Accounts
  Under 'User Access Control', when 'Settings' was disallowed in the user access permissions the 'Transfer Money' button under 'Account Manager' was not active. This has now been fixed.
  
  
• Mail Merge Error Message
  When sending an email via Mail Merge, an error message was appearing, caused by the recent addition of new mail merge tags. This is now fixed.
  
  
• Domestic Items Accounts
  The Domestic Items accounts and its sub-accounts had been incorrectly set as Asset accounts and were not appearing on the Profit & Loss report. They are now correctly set as Expense accounts and appear on the report.

Fixes:

• Sorting Issue with Expenses

An issue with sorting by property name in Property Manager => Expenses has been fixed.

• Error Message for New Users

An error was appearing for new users when serialising the onboarding scenario details. This is now fixed.

Fixes:

• Supplier Name Links 
  A bug in Overdue Payments > Property Expenses and Upcoming Payments > Property Expenses has been fixed. The supplier name links now lead to the expenses listing screen with the supplier contact pre-selected in the supplier dropdown filter. 

Enhancements:

• New Landlord Vision Approved Bookkeepers Service 
  We have now introduced a new bookkeeping service especially for Landlord Vision users. All bookkeepers have been screened by Landlord Vision and already have experience using the Landlord Vision software.
  Visit our Bookkeepers page for more information.

Fixes:

• Tenant Module
  A bug has been fixed in the Tenant Module so that tenants can now see their statements and tenancy information.
• Profit & Loss Reports by Individual Property
  A bug causing expenses for all properties to appear in the Profit and Loss report when run for an individual property has been fixed.

Enhancements

• Ability to Print from Tenant Service Desk
  We have added an option to print tickets from the Tenant Service Desk with the added option of including/excluding internal messages. This is perfect for where tickets are needed as proof or evidence for court cases, or if you simply need to provide someone with a hardcopy of the discussion.
• Reference Field on Repeating Expenses Reinstated
  We had previously removed the Reference field against repeating expenses but have now reinstated this field. This means that more information can be recorded against the repeating expense and in turn makes searching for specific expenses easier and quicker to do.
• Ability to Create Repeating Other Income Invoices
  We have now added the functionality to set up repeating Other Income invoices. So, for regular income other than rent you can set up the invoice just once and the system will create future invoices for you, saving you significant time and effort.
• New Invoice Number and Payment Instructions Fields
  On Other Income invoices, we have changed the ‘Reference’ field to ‘Invoice Number’ and added a Payment Instructions field. These enhancements create professional looking invoices with unique, sequential codes and makes it easier for the recipient to pay you.

Fixes:

• Setting Rent to 0.00 Using ‘Change Rent’ Button
  The ‘Change rent’ feature was not permitting rent to be set to 0.00.
• Imported Bank Statement Lines Not Appearing on the Reconcile Screen
  A bug was causing imported bank statement lines to be omitted from the Reconcile screen.
• Tenancy Journal Entries Not Appearing
  When entering Tenancy Journal entries against two different tenancies in separate tabs, the information entered into the first tab was being applied to the tenancy open in the second tab.
• Cash Basis Income Tax Report
  A bug in the Cash Basis Income Tax Report meant that retained deposit amounts allocated to invoices were not being included in the report.

Enhancements

• Invite Users – Extra Check Added
  We have added a check on the confirmation screen which opens after an invited user clicks on the confirmation link to accept the invitation to access an LV account. This will prevent duplicate email addresses from being used.

Fixes

• Creating Invoices from Within the Bank Reconciliation Area
  An issue with creating invoices via the Bank Reconciliation area has been fixed.
• Exporting ASTs in Docx. Format
  An error message was appearing in MS Word when ASTs were exported in docx. format. This has been fixed.
• Error Message When Deleting Reconciled Payments
  A problem due to a database limitation leading to an error has been fixed.

Enhancements

• Retrospectively Change Repeating Tenant Invoices
  We have made changes to repeating tenant invoices. It is now possible to set the 'Next Bill Date' to a date in the past and retrospectively extend the repeating charges. This gives users more flexibility when changing/updating payment schedules.
• Credit Card Transactions
  We have added the capability to reverse how transactions appear on Credit Card statements to allow for instances where outgoing amounts appear as positive and incoming amounts appear as negative. This means that regardless of how your Credit Card provider sets out their statements you will always be able to upload them to Landlord Vision.
• Rent Reference Removed from Invoices
  The rent reference has been removed from the tenancy description found on the invoices' view and edit screens. It has also been removed from the tenancy dropdown on the Statement of Account report.

Enhancements

• New Task Filter Option
  Under Tasks, a new filter option has been added. Now you can search for tasks that have not been assigned to a tenancy by selecting "-None-" from the dropdown. This will enable users to ensure all tasks have been correctly allocated to the relevant tenancies, where required.
• Property Reference Appearing on Worksheets
  Under Tasks, the Property Reference field will now also appear on any worksheets that are generated, providing yet more information about the task and the property that it relates to.

Fixes

• The download link for the Completed documents in E-signatures has been reinstated.
• In Expenses, an issue with the Due Date search filter field has been fixed.
• Exported Property Income reports now correctly display the Amount Paid where an income invoice contains more than one item line.
• The Bank Reconciliation report now correctly displays Credit Notes as a single entry.
• The Nominal Ledger report, when exported, now only shows one entry per expense for expenses that have been allocated to more than one property.

Enhancements

• Uploading Pictures
  When uploading photographs via the file browser in Gallery you can now select up to 10 photographs (or images up to 100MG) at the same time, speeding up the whole process. This is particularly useful when getting set up for the first time.

Fixes

• Tenant names now appear on exported tenant invoice reports.
• Credit Notes for mortgages are now excluded from the P&L report when the report is run per portfolio.
• When importing a statement into a credit card account, + amounts are treated as outgoing payments and - amounts are treated as incoming payments.
• Imported QIF files now load all transactions straight away.

Enhancements

• Tenant Direct Debits
  The BACS processing calendar for 2019 has been uploaded so that Landlord Vision can take into account any bank holidays when calculating the tenant charge dates for the Direct Debit rental payments.
• New Custom Option for Recurring Tasks
  Under the Tasks section for Property Manager, Tenant Manger and Calendar, we have now added a new repeat setting that allows you to completely customise how frequently a recurring task appears. Previously it only contained pre-set options i.e. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, etc.; now you can specify the number of days, months, weeks or years i.e. every 2 years. This flexibility means that repeating tasks can be accurately configured regardless of when they are due to happen.
• Suggested Address Feature Update
  When using the suggested address feature in Landlord Vision, the software previously used the Postal County in an address. However, the Postal County is no longer actively used or maintained by Royal Mail, so we have switched to the Administrative County option instead.
  
  This means that for addresses that do have a designated Administrative County we will be able to populate that field and leave it blank for those that do not.
• Property Address Used on Tenant Invoices
  There may be times when the property and tenant's addresses will be different, however, once a tenancy commences it is likely that these two addresses will be the same. You now have the option when setting up the tenancy to pull in the property address so that it automatically appears on the tenant invoices.
  
  This appears under Tenant Manager -> Tenancies -> Select Tenancy -> Scroll to Invoicing.

Fixes

• Landlord Vision was down for a brief period due to optimisations and server maintenance.
• A bug in Aikidesk prevented it from opening. This has been fixed.
• E-signed documents, when completed, were appearing several times. This has been fixed.
• A bug in the app prevented a white/brown goods description from being used against multiple rooms. This has been fixed.
• Daylight Saving Time (DST) caused an error in the calculation of the monthly rental income. This has been fixed.

Enhancements

• New Set Up Wizard
  New tutorials and checklists have been added to the software. These will help you enter key information quickly and learn which parts of the software you’ll use most depending on your needs. These pop up for all new customers, but existing customers can use them too.
• New Property Ownership Apportionment
  You can now assign property ownership in the software. That means if two or more landlords own a property at differing percentages these can all be accounted for correctly in your reports. Once you’ve entered the percentages you can choose to generate reports for each landlord’s share which will be based on the ownership percentage entered.
• Automatically Pay Off Expenses
  When you record an expense or income invoice under Property Manager, you can now also record the corresponding payment at the same time without having to complete a two-step process. This speeds up the process of entering expense and income invoices.
• New Insurances Report
  A brand new report has been introduced under Property Reports. You now have the ability to search for active, expiring and expired insurances at any time across the portfolio, giving you a complete overview of the insurances you had, have or need.

Fixes

• A bug under Safety Certificates and Insurances was causing a duplication when the name of an insurance company was altered. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• Landlord Vision App
  We have increased the support for iPhone X, XR, XS, and XS Max so the Landlord Vision app can now be used on all of these giving you more freedom to enter data on the go.
• White/Brown Goods Area Enhancement
  In December 2018 we added a new White/Brown Goods tab which allowed you to record the make, model, purchase details and warranty information of your white/brown goods so that should one of these items need fixing during the warranty period, the relevant information is quickly and easily accessible. Now you can also record white/brown goods records for items in non-habitable rooms, meaning that nothing will be missed.
• Direct Debit Rent Collection
  Users can now override the date of Direct Debit payments so that the Cash Flow and various other financial reports match up with the bank accounts, giving you even more control over the data that you capture in Landlord Vision.
• Mortgage Analyser Report
  A third column called 'Fees & Charges Paid' has been added to the payment breakdown on the Mortgage Analyser report. Having all this information in the one report makes quickly glancing over your figures even easier.

Fixes

• A visual problem was causing incorrect dates to appear in the weekly alerts email.
• Deleting an extra or regular mortgage payment was deleting previous payments.
• Mortgages were being written to incorrect bank accounts.

Enhancements

• New White/Brown Goods Area for App
  In December 2018 we added a new White/Brown Goods tab which allowed you to record the make, model, purchase details and warranty information of your white/brown goods so that should one of these items need fixing during the warranty period, the relevant information is quickly and easily accessible. We have now made this feature available on the app.
• Income Tax Report
  Following on from our changes to the Income Tax Report last month, we have now automated the calculation of transitional adjustments when leaving the cash basis method.
• Income Tax Bands
  The tax bands for 2018-2019 are now available in Landlord Vision so you will be able to spot-check what your liability is at various points throughout the year, meaning no surprises when you come to submit your returns.

Fixes

• Envelopes missing in Signable library.
• Secondary tenants not showing under Property Manager > Properties > Tenancy tab.
• The Target Rent report was showing inconsistent target rents when there were multiple rooms per tenant.

Enhancements

• Income Tax Report
  Prior to tax year 2017-18 the accruals basis accounting was used on the Income Tax Report. From tax year 2017-18 the default option became the cash basis accounting method.
  
  To deal with scenarios where the user needs to switch from accruals basis to cash basis and there is a transitional adjustment to account for, Landlord Vision now has the ability to automatically calculate this figure.
  
  Previously, transitional adjustments could be manually calculated and entered into the software but now the software can save you time and make that calculation for you.
• Income Tax Report
  If you need to claim capital allowances under Annual Investment Allowance for tools, ladders, computer equipment etc. used to maintain residential rental property that are not furnished holiday lets and not kept in the property, we have now added Box 32 to the Income Tax Report. This could mean greater tax savings for your business if you have purchased any of these items.
• New White/Brown Goods Area
  In Property Manager => Properties, we have added a new tab which enables you to record any white and brown goods that you have purchased. This area allows you to record the make, model, purchase details and warranty information so that should one of these items need fixing during the warranty period, the relevant information is quickly and easily accessible.
• Tenant Manager => Tenancies
  You can now end a tenancy prior to a period for which a Direct Debit invoice has been paid. This means that you can record the correct end date which truly reflects what is happening in that property. This will give you a better view of occupancy across your portfolio.
• Tenant Manager => Target Rent
  Previously, when a target rent was entered for a property and a different target rent for each of the rooms, the property target rent was used in the Rent field on the Tenants page in the Create Tenancy wizard.
  
  We have altered this so that is now tracks a tenant's payment schedule for changes, and if it has not been manually changed already, upon selecting a room with a target rent, the schedule will now use the room rent instead. This will save you time when setting up your room rent targets.

Fixes

• Realignment of signatures and dates on e-signature documents.
• Inclusion of refunds of overpayments on the Cash Basis version of the Income Tax report.
• Correct ownership value used on the Income Tax report.
• Let-only fees for existing tenancies which have a deposit or charge invoices payable to the agent can now be successfully edited.

Enhancements

• When adding an expense, you are now able to specify a property against each expense item on the invoice/receipt.
• When claiming/retaining a deposit, this process now automatically creates a credit note for the appropriate amount which can be allocated to any rents or charges due from the tenant that are payable to the landlord. Previously, the credit note had to be manually created.
• We have added a worksheet printing feature under Tasks. These can either be printed or emailed.
• The ‘Survey fees’ expense item has been renamed to ‘Survey fees – mortgage' and assigned to the 'Finance Costs' expense account.
• We have added a 'Survey fees - property purchase' expense item and assign it to the 'Property Buying Costs' asset account.

Bug Fixes

• When adding tasks, an error occurred when the task had the 'Send email reminder' option selected.
• A bug in Bank Reconciliation was causing supplier refunds to be mis-allocated against multiple credit notes. This has been corrected.
• A bug in Agent Statements was preventing refunds from being issued and has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• It is now possible to change rent against tenancies with Direct Debit payments without cancelling the Direct Debit mandate and asking the tenant to authorise a new Direct Debit mandate.
• The latest version of the following RLA legal documents are now available:
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement – Completion Notes
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement for Renting Out Rooms Individually
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Room Only Agreement – Completion Notes
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement - DepositGuard
  • Completion Notes for Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement - DepositGuard
  • Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement for Renting Out Rooms Individually - DepositGuard
  • Completion Notes for Room Only Assured Shorthold Tenancy Agreement - DepositGuard
  • Completion Notes for DepositGuard Prescribed Information
  • Section 21(1) or 21(4) Completion notes
  • Section 8 Blank Completion notes
  • Tenancy Application Form

Fixes

• An error on the Bank Reconciliation report was causing loan fee payments and refunds to be excluded from the report but included in the calculation of the opening balance. This issue has now been fixed.
• On the Bank Reconciliation report, unallocated amounts were being recorded as a credit rather than a debit. This has been corrected.

Enhancements

• We have increased the maximum allowed document size to 100 MB.

Fixes

• When creating a tenancy, an issue with the Days/Weeks/Months/Years being cropped in the selection box was reported. This has now been fixed.
• When the Tenant Journal was exported, the report was only showing the first line and there was an error when selecting the data range. These two issues have now been corrected.
• An issue when exporting to PDF from the Tenant Journal listing screen was reported. This has now been fixed and applies to the Tenancy Journal and Property Journal listings also.
• A bug was preventing the default payment instructions for the portfolio from being assigned as defaults for newly created tenancies. This has now been fixed.
• An issue was reported regarding the collection date for the first Direct Debit payment where the mandate is ordered X number of days before the due date. Now, when a Direct Debit invitation is confirmed by the tenant, the next payment due date is re-calculated to make sure it is in line with the specified number of days.
• The Mortgage Arrangement and Mortgage Broker Fees were incorrectly assigned to the 'Property Buying Costs' asset account. These have now been re-assigned to the 'Finance Cost' expense account. We have also created an additional item called 'Incidental costs of obtaining finance' which is also assigned to the 'Finance Costs' account to cover all other possible finance costs.

Enhancements

• The Scottish legal documents have been updated to the latest versions.
• It is now possible to add payments against property expenses, property income, and tenant invoices using accounts that are not bank accounts or credit cards. This can also be used when adding a payment to a letting agent statement and also when using the Transfer Money form.
• There is now the ability to record meter readings at property level instead of just tenancy level under Property Manager => Properties => Meter Readings.

Enhancements

• We have updated the Tenant Module => Contact Landlord area to default to the first landlord as specified in Landlord Vision > Portfolios > {Portfolio} > Portfolio Owners. Previously, it was listed alphabetically.
• For Direct Debit mandates that have failed, Landlord Vision will now update the status with this information, not just when payments are received or cancelled.
• New Tasks sections with full featured task management have been added to Property Manager => Properties => Property details and to Tenant Manager => Tenancies => Tenancy details. In these areas you will now be able to:
  • add multiple contacts to tasks,
  • add multiple properties and rooms to tasks,
  • add multiple tenancies to tasks,
  • use the new and improved task search filters,
  • see user interface improvements to task management and better indication of open, overdue, and closed tasks,
  • give your tasks specific due times,
  • see new built-in task types for Property Viewing and Property Maintenance.
• New Android and iOS app updates have been published to support the new Task Management features.
• When using the Search box for expenses and invoices, previously we only allowed users to search by the header details. We have now extended the search facility to also include the item/item descriptions.

Fixes

• An error occurred when paying off expenses using a credit or debit card on the mobile app. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• Added 'CO Alarms' to Property Manager/Properties/Property/Main Information/Facilities.
• Added an 'Alarm Checks' section to Tenant Manager/Tenancies/Tenancy/Check-in List.
• We have introduced a "Failed" status for unsuccessful Direct Debit mandates.

Fixes

• An issue was causing the bank reconciliation section to suggest a match between an expense and an income payment. This has now been fixed.
• When using the Print option for reports, the total figure was being omitted from the bottom of the page. This has now been amended.
• In Mail Merge, the $CURRENT_DATE$ field was not working. This field is now performing properly.
• An issue caused by an update to Property Manager > Payments > Add Payment was preventing expense payments from being saved on the mobile app. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• E-signatures now allows for use of Word documents as well as PDFs.
• We have updated the Bank Reconciliation report and now the order of entries will match the order of the transactions on bank statements.

Fixes

• On the Expenses Screen, a bug was causing the main window to not reload properly when a Supplier Contact with a photo attached was edited. This has been corrected.
• An issue with the mail merge field ‘$TENANCY_PERIOD$’ was causing the incorrect date to appear on the tenancy agreement where the starting month contained 31 days and the expiry month contained 30. This has now been corrected.
• When Royal Mail verification was used for a London address, both the "Town/City" and "County/Region" were displaying the same information. This has now been rectified.
• A problem with PDF documents being used for E-signatures containing fillable forms was detected and is now fixed.
• In E-signatures, an issue with read-only (protected) files was causing files not to be sent. Now, such files will still be processed.
• An issue with using apostrophes in the Signable tag was identified. We have now stripped out all special characters.
• We have updated the income tax report and now mortgage fees are allocated to the relevant property instead of the portfolio.
• In Document Manager an issue was identified when using single quotes in the search string. This has now been fixed.
• An issue on the Cash Flow report was causing agent fees to be duplicated. This has now been rectified.
• A problem with one of the timestamps involved in partial rent calculation was preventing the user from ending a tenancy. This was detected and fixed.

Enhancements

• New E-signature module: Documents can now be sent from Landlord Vision to the recipient to be signed and returned electronically, with all documents fully tracked, secure and legally binding.

Fixes

• An error saying ‘Invalid Tenancy Agreement Due Date Settings’ was preventing tenancies from saving. This has now been fixed.
• In Tenant Manager => Tenancies, when the search filter was used to search for an individual property a bug was causing the number in the tab headings to appear for the whole portfolio. This has now been corrected.
• A bug in Finance Manager was causing duplicate transactions in the Asset Account when mortgages were re-opened and then closed again. This is now fixed.
• A bug was detected when setting up an LHA schedule when the tenancy did not explicitly have LHA enabled. This has been fixed.
• When creating a tenant invoice which was not due until a later date, the "tenancy" dropdown menu was missing data and the invoice could not be saved. This has been fixed.
• In Tenant Manager, when editing an unpaid invoice, a bug was preventing the changes from being saved. This has been corrected.
• Using brackets in a document file name were making file names invalid when using the E-signature module. This has been fixed.
• The E-signature module did not accept PDF versions above 1.4. This has now been resolved.
• A bug in Tenant Manager meant that a new payment schedule rule could not be created and a tenancy with a 0 rent be saved without explicitly entering 0 for the amount. This has now been fixed.
• An issue with the way that the Tenant Module was reading agent managed data has now been resolved.
• Tenant charges were not being included in the email notification digests. This has now been fixed and the due and overdue tenant charges are now included in the daily and weekly email notifications.
• A bug was discovered in the rolling tenancy function which was causing Direct Debits to come to an end where a tenancy did not have at least one full rent period in the rent schedule. This has been fixed.
• Under Tenant Manager > Payments > Tenant to Landlord or Tenant to Letting Agent, when filtering the payments by an LHA the selected LHA was not showing under 'Payer' after clicking the 'Apply' button. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• We have added a 'Tenancy Documents' tab to the Tenancy Details so that landlords can properly organise their documents by tenancy and not just by contact or property.
• New Tenant Manager Improvements:
  • When creating a tenancy, you will now be taken through a set-up Wizard.
  • The tab 'Main Tenancy Details' has been renamed to ‘Tenancy’ with the layout and content improved.
  • The existing 'Rolling Tenancies' and 'Early Warning Settings' tabs have been replaced with:
    - Active Tenancies
    - Future Tenancies
    - Expired Tenancies
    - All Tenancies
  • Non-overlapping 'Future Tenancies' are now excluded from the 'Active Tenancies' limit check.
  • The columns and data shown on the tenancy listing has now been changed.
  • Ending a tenancy or switching to a Periodic has been made easier.
  • There is now an [Edit] button next to each section heading on the Tenancy screen which takes the user to the relevant step in the tenancy setup wizard.
  • New shortcut buttons have been added at the top of the 'Tenancy' tab.
  • New Tenancy Agreement Rent and Payment Period area on the ‘Create Tenancy’ step for where there are multiple tenants on the tenancy.
• A new ‘Knowledge Base’ site has replaced the User Guide under ‘Help’.

Fixes

• In Finance Manager, there was a bug when adding a payment with a capital or interest amount different to that calculated by the payment schedule which prevented the schedule from being updated. This has now been fixed.
• An issue with zero rent tenancies was identified and corrected.
• A bug was preventing users from getting past the Tenants page of the wizard. This has been fixed.
• The ‘Tenancy Type’ column in Tenancies and the ‘Tenancy Type’ search field in the advanced search option were removed. These have been reinstated.

Enhancements

• Finance Manager Improvements:
  • Added quarterly payments option in addition to monthly payments.
  • Added an option to change the payment account used to repay the mortgage (this is useful when the loan amount has been paid to a bank account and then another bank account is used to make the mortgage payments).
  • Loan Paid to Bank Account/Non-bank Account (new option) - allows the landlord to choose whether the loan amount has been paid to their bank account or directly to the seller/solicitor.
  • An option to enter a zero initial payment amount thus ignoring past payments and tracking future payments only.
  • Now it is possible to record multiple payments on the same day.
  • Re-open Mortgage (new option) - re-open a mortgage in case it has been closed by mistake or if further changes to the mortgage are required before closing it.
  • The Edit Mortgage/Loan option has been enhanced to allow the user to edit all the mortgage settings (saves the need to delete and re-add mortgages with errors in the initial settings).
• On the Capital Gains Tax Report, Credit Notes have been included and the costs now appear in chronological order.
• We have changed the Direct Debit logic to charge tenants later when the rent due date falls on a weekend or bank holiday.
• For letting agency tenancies, any service costs paid by the agent on behalf of the landlord will now be apportioned on the Income Tax report, as per the specified service cost period (Start/End Date).

Fixes

• In Finance Manager, a bug was discovered when adding partial regular mortgage payments. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• Under Calendar => Tasks, when you now add a task the email reminder can be sent up to 30 days in advance.

Fixes

• When adding a contact via expenses in the mobile app, a bug was causing the contact not to be labelled as a ‘supplier’. This has now been corrected.
• A bug in Finance Manager => Mortgage/Loans => ‘Search By…Reference’ filter option has been fixed.
• An error was appearing when trying to edit an expense. This is now working properly.
• Where a document was uploaded to the Document Manager where the file extension was using capital letters, it could not be selected from within the Mail Merge feature. This has now been allowed.

Enhancements

• Bank Reconciliation report enhancements - include Landlord Vision transactions from outside the selected period if reconciled with bank transactions from the selected period, an option to include outstanding income and expense invoices in the list of Landlord Vision transactions and an option to filter the Landlord Vision transactions by payment date or invoice date.
• Under Finance Manager => Mortgages/Loans we have added an option to filter the mortgages by status (i.e. open/closed).

Fixes

• Credit notes were being handled incorrectly in respect of letting agent tenancies. This has now been corrected.
• When the Rental Income Payments report was exported to PDF, the date range was being excluded from the header. This has now been corrected.
• Names containing the '&' sign were causing problems on the Section 8 document when opened in Docx format. This has now been fixed.
• When the Rental Income Payments report was printed, the font size was greatly reduced. We have now resolved this issue.
• On the ‘Allocate Payments’ screen, where a payment was being allocated to a multi-let, the primary tenant's name was appearing. This has been fixed (with the label changed to ‘Payer’) and the correct tenant name now appears.

Enhancements

• Under Account Manager => Bank Accounts => Account Transactions tab, we have added a filter to allow for searching on reconciled or unreconciled amounts.
• Under Account Manager => Bank Accounts => Account Transactions tab, the ‘Status’ column can now be sorted by clicking on the header.

Fixes

• An error when printing the pdf version of the Income Tax Report was reported. This has now been corrected.
• When the 'Due date' on the rental invoices was altered, a bug in the system was recreating the same invoice with the original due date. This has now been fixed.
• A bug in the Finance Manager was causing problems on the Re-finance/Re-mortgage screen by creating the new mortgage but not closing the old one. This is now working correctly.
• On the Rental Income Payments report, not all payments were being picked up and displayed for the previous tax year. This has now been fixed.
• A bug in rents was causing duplicate entries on the Cash Flow report. This has now been rectified.

Enhancements

• In Tenant Manager => Agent Fees => Statements, the ‘Carry Balance Forward’ dialogue box now includes a ‘Statement Date’ field.

Fixes

• An issue was discovered with how the Czech currency was being displayed when an amount was entered. This has now been resolved.
• When exporting invoices to PDF, changes to the headers were not being picked up and applied to the document. This has now been fixed.
• The ‘Town’ and ‘County’ fields on tenant invoices were not displaying correctly with the ‘County’ coming before the ‘Town’. This has now been corrected.
• Where a tenant email address contained a hyphen, it was not being fully displayed. This has been fixed and now when the email is too long, it is truncated and can be fully seen.
• A bug was found in the Retained Earnings sub-accounts causing them not to be included on the Trial Balance. This has now been rectified.
• An issue with editing a newly created tenant contact was reported but has now been fixed.
• Where the Profit & Loss report was run for an individual property, the GoCardless fees were incorrectly showing as the full amount of rent rather than just the fee. This has now been corrected.
• A bug was detected when editing an existing Credit Card payment. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• A new section has been added to the bottom of the Tenant Application Form to allow for recording Guarantor details.

Fixes

• There was an issue with the Room filter on the Profit & Loss report which has now been resolved.
• An issue with the download links within the Tenant Service Desk (Aikidesk platform) was preventing access to file attachments. This has now been fixed.
• An error was preventing the Change Rent link in Tenant Manager => Tenancies from performing correctly. The issue has been resolved.
• A bug was causing conflicting information to appear on the tenant invoices and the Payment Schedule screen regarding who the invoice was payable to. This has now been corrected and both the invoices and Payment Schedule now agree.
• When creating a new tenancy an error occurred at the point of adding a new contact. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• Under Reports => Accounting Reports we have enhanced the Bank/Card Transactions report to include a Payment Type column.
• Under Reports => Accounting Reports, we have changed all Profit & Loss accounts on the Trial Balance report to show the balance for the current financial year rather than all the transactions up to the selected date. For example, if the Financial Year End date is 5th April and Trial Balance is run as at 31st July 2017 then the report will show the P&L transactions from 6th April 2017 to 31st July 2017.
• Under Reports => Accounting Reports, we have added 'Retained Earnings' to the Trial Balance report with the balance being calculated in the same way as on the Balance Sheet report.
• Also on the Trial Balance Sheet report, we have added a drill-down option to see the individual transactions used to calculate each balance. For the P&L accounts it will show the transactions for the current financial year only. For the balance sheet accounts (Assets, Liabilities and Equity) it will show the opening balance of each account at the beginning of the current financial year and then the individual transactions for the current financial year.

Fixes

• Under the Chart of Accounts, a bug affecting inactive bank accounts was causing transactions for a different bank account to be displayed. This has now been rectified.

Fixes

• When a user switched between the ‘Tenant to Landlord’ tab and the ‘Tenant to Letting Agents’ tab in Tenant Manager -> Payments, the ‘Payer’ information was being carried over where the filter had been used. This has now been corrected and the ‘Payer’ field will reset when switching between the two tabs.
• On the Portfolio Dashboard, the colours for the ‘Actual Rents vs. Target Rents’ was displaying incorrectly. This has been corrected and now shows as green for at target and red for when the amount is lower.
• When the Profit & Loss report was run by portfolio, Credit Notes were appearing with no value allocated to either the Debit or Credit column. This has now been fixed.
• The ‘Actual Rents vs. Target Rents' chart on the Portfolio Dashboard was not tallying with the Target Rents report data due to a different code being used for each. This has now been fixed.
• A bug that crept in after the release of the new cash basis version of the Income Tax report was causing expenses to appear in both Box 24 and 29. This has now been corrected.
• There was a problem sending user invitations from free accounts. This has now been resolved.

Enhancements

• A cash basis version of the Income Tax report has been introduced to allow users following the cash basis accounting practice (rather than accruals basis) to utilise the Income Tax report.
• From tax year 2016-17, box 36 on SA105 changes from “10% wear and tear allowance” to “Costs of replacing domestic items”. Box 36 in the Income Tax report has also now been updated to “Costs of replacing domestic items” to reflect this change.
• In the Chart of Accounts, we have added a new expense category called ‘Domestic Items’ and under this we have added the following expense accounts:
  • Furniture - Replacement Cost
  • Furnishings - Replacement Cost
  • Household Appliances - Replacement Cost
  • Kitchenware - Replacement Cost
  In addition, we have also added the following expense items:
  • Furniture Replacement (assigned to account Furniture - Replacement Cost)
  • Furnishings Replacement (assigned to account Furnishings - Replacement Cost)
  • Household Appliances Replacement (assigned to account Household Appliances - Replacement Cost)
  • Kitchenware Replacement (assigned to account Kitchenware - Replacement Cost)
• On the Income Tax report, we have changed the title of box 25 from 6th April 2013 from 'Property repairs, maintenance and renewals' to 'Property repairs and maintenance'.
• The Section 21 notice has been updated and is now available as two documents: one for England and one for Wales.
• The Section 8 notice has been updated and is now available as two documents: one for England and one for Wales.
• The Tenancy Agreement for England and Wales has been updated.
• On the Tenant Manager => Payments screen, you can now sort by the 'Unallocated Amount' column.
• We have enhanced the option to export properties to Excel and CSV to include the full property and room details.

Fixes

• A bug affecting the Cash Flow Audit report was causing unallocated amounts of 0.00 to appear for where single payments had been allocated to several invoices. This has been corrected.
• A bug was detected under Property Manager => Repeating expenses where the 'Next Bill Date' was changing to the month after. This has now been corrected.
• A bug in the Journal was rounding up pence when a journal entry contained more than one item. This has now been fixed.
• When a user was trying to add a tenancy which would take them over their plan's tenancy threshold, the error message was not staying on screen long enough to be fully read. This has now been fixed.
• If a deposit invoice is loaded by clicking on the View Invoice Details button on the Deposit Scheme tab then the Back button will now return the user to the Deposit Scheme tab.

Enhancements

• Previously, when setting up an agent contact, the ‘Website’ field did not accept non-standard domain names. We have now updated the domain name validation function to allow for up to 63 characters, dashes and numbers.
• You can now enter an opening balance for your tenant when you set up their tenancy in Landlord Vision. This is helpful for where there are arrears being carried forward.
• On the Income Tax report filter, the ‘Salary’ field has been renamed to ‘Other Income’.
• One the Income Tax report filter, the ‘Loss’ field has been renamed and now we have ‘Loss Brought Forward’ and ‘Other Losses and Reliefs’.
• On the Income Tax report filter, a new field ‘Finance Costs Brought Forward’ has been added and will only appear for tax years from 2018-2019 onwards.
• From 6^th April 2017, landlords will no longer be able to claim 100% tax relief on their mortgage interest. These new interest rate restrictions have been applied to the Income Tax report.

Fixes

• An issue with the RLA Section 21 Form 6A (effective 1st October 2015) was causing the property address to not appear and has now been fixed.
• A bug in the Nominal Ledger Report was causing duplicate entries to appear. This has now been corrected.
• On the Income Tax Report’s ‘Loan interest and other financial costs’ section, finance costs entered via Property Manager/Expenses were not appearing. This has now been fixed.
• A bug was introduced after recent opening balance changes and was affecting creating Tenant Charge invoices. This was promptly rectified.

Enhancements

• Added an option to export properties to Excel and CSV. The export option allows the user to choose what property information they would like to export.
• Added an option to export tenancies to Excel and CSV. The export option allows the user to choose what tenancy information they would like to export.

Fixes

• A bug was detected with the Income Tax Report whereby credit notes issued in Property Manager > Expenses and credited to liability accounts i.e. Mispostings, were appearing when they should not. This was corrected immediately.
• A recent update was causing Credit Notes to disappear from the Tenant Manager => Invoices area. This has now been fixed and Credit Notes appear correctly.
• A bug was detected with the Income Tax report whereby the ‘Other Property Costs’ section was appearing twice. This has now been fixed.
• People signing up to the free account were getting an error message and the accounts not created. This was caused by a setting variable on our Database server following an outage and was quickly resolved.
• Corrected mistakes and omissions in the Tenancy Deposit Protection form.

Enhancements

• *New* Landlord Vision Referral program, giving all users the opportunity to earn up to £50 for each customer referral.
• On the mobile app, expense invoices now offer both invoice date and due date fields, and can now be freely edited even after payments have been allocated against them.
• Under Tenant Manager => Tenancies => Tenant Journal, the entries now appear in chronological order, with the additional option to sort by type or tenant.
• In Tenant Manager => Invoices we have added an option to search for an invoice by its invoice number with partial search also supported.

Fixes

• A bug on Rental Income Payments Report was preventing a tenant’s room from appearing. This has now been resolved.
• A new version of the mobile app (1.8.0) has been released on both the Android and the Apple app stores. The new version corrected bugs found in the Calendar and when creating an invoice from a rent schedule. It has also removed the 10% Wear & Tear option from the property editing screen.
• We have fixed an error which prevented email addresses from being updated in the Help Desk system.

Enhancements

• *New* Powerful Bank Reconciliation report has been added, showing both the bank statement transactions and the Landlord Vision payments that they have been allocated to.
• Under Property Manager => Expenses, we have added an 'Add Another Expense' shortcut button at the top of any expense that you have already created to make entering multiple expenses at the same time easier.
• In Property Manager => Expenses we have changed the 'Summary of payments' section at the bottom of the list of expenses to show only if requested by clicking on the 'View summary of payments' link at the bottom.

Fixes

• A problem with the Direct Debit link which is sent to the tenants was discovered but quickly resolved.
• An issue with the Statement tab in the Tenant Module was caused by recent changes to the format of the Statement of Account report. This has now been rectified.
• A problem in the Property Occupancy/Vacancy reports was identified and has now fixed.

Enhancements

• *New* Postcode look-up feature! When you now create/edit a property and start typing a property reference, Landlord Vision will find the full address for you and populate the address fields further down the screen. Linked and verified by Royal Mail, you can be sure the address you are entering is correct.
• We have updated the Overdue Rents & charges report to include any outstanding deposit amounts.
• We have applied sticky headers to all the reports except for the following:
  - Property Details
  - Welcome Pack
  - Income Tax Report
• We have made the Statement of Account report more detailed and now this report resembles a bank statement. There is also a running total showing the tenant's balance after each transaction.
• Any email now sent from within Landlord Vision will have the name and email address of the user who has triggered the email.
• Under Reports, it is now possible to run the Statement of Account report for LHAs as well as tenants.

Fixes

• The Outstanding Balance amount at the top of the Payment Schedule was not taking into consideration invoices that had been changed to non-Direct Debit invoices and paid off. The calculation of the outstanding balance is now correct.
• The Profit and Loss report, when exported as a PDF, was not displaying the property name. This has now been addressed and the selected property now appears on the printed/PDF version of the P&L report.
• A recent change that introduced a Financial Year End setting caused an error with the calculation of Retained Earnings and has been corrected.

Enhancements

• We have added four additional mortgage/loan interest computation methods in addition to the 30/360 method. This should allow more people to properly set up their mortgages in Landlord Vision and have a payment schedule as close as possible to their bank’s schedule.
• In Mail Merge we have added the following extra mail merge fields:
  $PROPERTY_TARGET_RENT$
  $ROOM_TARGET_RENT$
• An item description will now be included on the Overdue Rents & Charges report.
• On the Dashboard, the Property Occupancy Overview chart and the Room Occupancy report now link through to the Property Occupancy report, with the vacant properties and rooms appearing in red and the occupied properties and rooms in green.
• When creating or editing a tenancy, at the point of assigning the tenant to a room, the rooms now appear in alphabetical order.
• We have now made it possible for emails sent from the Mail Merge area to use the landlord’s name in the ‘From’ field. When a tenant replies to the email, it will also display and send to the landlord’s email address.
• We have added a 'Financial Year End' setting on the Profit and Loss report, and other locations throughout Landlord Vision, to enable reporting on tax years where the start and end dates differ from 6^th April – 5^th April.
• We have added a Capital Gains calculator under Reports -> Tax Reports.
• We have added an option to add/view comments on the Overdue Rents & Charges report.

Fixes

• On the ASTDepositGuardRoomOnly document in RLA Landlord Vision, the room number was being record against the property and not the primary tenant. This has now been corrected.
• The Occupancy Status filter on the Property Occupancy report had stopped working but was fixed on the 11^th November.
• An issue when sending tenants a link to the Landlord Vision Tenant Module was being caused by database server connection problems. This has now been fixed.
• We have fixed a problem with the export option on the Profit & Loss report. It was caused by a recent change when we added 'Current Tax Year' and 'Previous Tax Year' filter options to the Profit & Loss report.

Enhancements

• On the ‘Home’ screen, we have added a total overdue and a total upcoming amount at the bottom of the "Overdue Payments" and the "Upcoming Payments" tables.
• We have updated the Property Occupancy Report to show 'All Rooms' for tenants who have not been assigned to a specific room. This way such tenants appear only once on the report.
• In Property Manager => Expenses a 'Property' column showing the property associated with each expense payment has been added.
• The mortgage analyser has been enhanced to only report mortgages which are open for the full duration or at least partly within the selected date range that the report is run for. Previously, closed mortgages also appeared. The report also now includes only mortgage fees and charges added/paid within the selected date range.
• The Finance Manager in Landlord Vision now permits loans with 0% interest to be set up.
• Sticky headers have been added to most reports to make scrolling through a long list easier.
• In the bank reconciliation area, we have added an option to filter matching transactions by date so that it is easier to reconcile bulk payments.
• Additional mail merger fields have been added:
  $TENANT_FIRST_NAME$
  $TENANCY_FIRST_RENT$
• We have implemented a change to the Income Tax Report regarding the agent's commissions and fees. The agent's commissions and fees are now reported per transaction date instead of statement date.
• NEW: Tenant/Landlord Email Notifications feature. You can now send daily or weekly summary emails to landlords, and invoices, payment receipts and documents to tenants. You can also create your own personalised emails and have task reminders sent out to landlord.

Fixes

• Unallocated payments were not showing the correct values when there were multiple expenses allocated to one payment. This has now been fixed.
• We have fixed an issue with the currency symbol changing to US dollars when pressing the "View All Overdue Payments" and "View All Upcoming Payments" buttons on the home page.
• We have fixed a problem with the orientation of uploaded pictures. When pictures were uploaded in portrait layout, the software was rotating them 90 degrees to become landscape.
• Rental income was being doubled up on the Cash Flow report but is now working correctly.
• Future tenancies were appearing as expired on the Tenant History report. This has been corrected.
• An issue found when converting tenants’ Direct Debit payments to non-Direct Debit payments has been fixed.
• We have corrected a problem with where the 'Total Amount Due at' date in the exported version of the Statement of Account report was appearing.
• Where a document was renamed within Landlord Vision, the document was then no longer accessible. This has now been corrected.
• When exporting the 'Property Vacancy' report, the name inside the spreadsheet was being changed to 'Property Occupancy'. This was corrected and now appears as 'Property Vacancy'.
• We have fixed a ‘Property Not Selected’ error that was occurring when a reference was added to an expense payment.
• We have resolved an issue with downloading documents in PDF format to Android tablets.
• A bug introduced with one of the updates in May was preventing the repeating expenses from being created. This was resolved very quickly once it became known.
• We identified an inefficient function which was causing a huge delay in the execution of the update tenancy function. This is now fixed and tenancies can be successfully edited with changes saved.
• The 'Tenancy Agreement' button on the 'Main Tenancy Details' tab used to load only the England & Wales version of the tenancy agreement. We have corrected this and now this button gives the choice of whether to generate a tenancy agreement for England & Wales or Scotland.
• We have fixed a problem with the Profit & Loss report caused by a zero amount expense item appearing on statements.
• Where a mortgage end date was extended mid-term, and the original Early Warning period had been reached, the due mortgage end date was not being picked up but has now been fixed.
• An issue found when changing a tenancy’s first payment start date has been corrected.
• The ability to have overlapping tenancies caused anomalies to the Occupancy Overview report. We have corrected the report and now there is either a pink (occupied) or green (vacant) box for each date for each property/room.
• An issue was identified within the service centre part of the Tenant Module which was locking users out. This was swiftly resolved once reported.
• We corrected an issue with the ‘Not habitable’ rooms still appearing on the property vacancy report.
• In Mail Merge, the field $TENANT_MOBILE$ was not printing any information onto the document. This has now been fixed.
• In Account Manager, a bug was discovered when trying to transfer money between accounts. This has now been corrected.
• A system issue was causing a minority of databases to not be updated with recent changes which was preventing payments from being recorded and the Rental Income Payments report to not open. Both issues have now been fixed.
• We have resolved a problem that occurred in the Mail Merge feature, with the property address not being parsed in the subject line. Both the preview function and the resultant email now display the correct information.
• In Tenancy Settings, when the ‘Automatically Email Invoices to Tenants’ flag was not selected, invoices were still being sent. This has been rectified.

Enhancements

• NEW: Tenant Module

  We have implemented a new 'Tenant Module' area that will help to speed up and improve communication between landlords and their tenants.

  Your tenants can log into their own private area and:

  - Check their rent payments and statements
  - Download important documents that you have shared
  - Communicate with you via an interactive help desk

  You can see a short video demonstration right here:

  New Tenant Module Overview

  You can also download the user guide here:

  Tenant Module User Guide

• Properties not available for letting were previously excluded from the Mortgage Broker Summary report. We have now removed the filter and any properties marked as 'Not Available for Letting' will also appear on the Mortgage Broker Summary report.
• The Cash Flow report was not showing the forecast mortgage loan repayments based on current mortgage end date for interest only mortgages. Now, for the last payment from the mortgage payment schedule, Landlord Vision will record the full outstanding loan amount as a capital amount payment, in the same way that it does this for the repayment mortgages.
• Under Finance Manager we have added one more option to Mortgages and Loans/Fees & Charges/Add Loan Fee called 'Charge deducted from loan amount'.
• On the Key Check-in/Check-out form, under Key Location we have added a fourth option called 'Lost'.

Bug Fixes

• Unallocated payments were not showing the correct values when there are multiple expenses allocated to one payment. The unallocated payments now show the correct amounts.
• An issue with being unable to enter new items in ‘Income & Expense Items’ has been fixed.
• When adding keys assigned to a room it was not possible to assign them to a tenant. Now if a key is assigned to a room the tenant list is properly populated with all the tenants with active/expired tenancies assigned to that room.
• Converting tenants’ payments from Direct Debit to non-Direct Debit payments was causing an error. Now all invoices which are no longer related to Direct Debit payments can be converted to non-Direct Debit invoices.
• Resolved a problem with future tenancies appearing as expired on the tenant history report.

Enhancements

• New! The mobile versions for iPhone and Android devices are now available for downloading.
• Removed the functional restrictions from the Starter and Standard plans to make them equal in functionality to the Premium package.
• Improved the change rent process and made it more intuitive and straightforward.
• It is now possible to reconcile bank statement transactions with rent schedule entries even if an invoice has not been created yet. This applies to both the automatic matches and the 'Find a match manually' option.
• Added an option to create expenses from the bank reconciliation process. Added a similar option called 'create income' for non-rental income transactions.
• Properties that had the 'Not available for letting' flag ticked under the main property information were being (intentionally) excluded from the Mortgage Broker Summary report. The filter has been removed and any properties marked as 'Not Available for Letting' will appear on the Mortgage Broker Summary report along with all other properties in the portfolio.

Bug Fixes

• The Property Occupancy report was not showing the full tenancy details for all rooms assigned to a tenant. This has now been rectified.
• When closing a mortgage, the outstanding amount was not taking into account any fees or charges against the loan. Now when closing a mortgage, the outstanding amount is correctly calculated.
• The Bank Reconciliation feature did not recognise two-digit years and negative amounts in brackets on imported bank statements. This has now been fixed.

Enhancements

• Implemented a solution for quick recording of multiple payments for outstanding tenant invoices - a 'Bulk Payment' button appears when viewing the Payment Schedule, Tenant Manager/Invoices and Early Warnings/Overdue Payments/Rents and Charges.
• Added a 'Charge deducted from loan amount' option for the mortgage fees and charges allowing to record mortgages where certain fees have been deducted from the loan amount prior to transferring the remainder to the borrower.
• A 'Cost Type' has been added to the mortgage fees and charges in Finance Manager/Mortgages and Loans/Fees & Charges. This allows to properly categorise any capital costs or property buying and selling costs.
• Added a 'To Date' option to the Balance Sheet report. You can now choose a specific date and not just the end of month.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a problem with the 'Back to Portfolio' button after deleting an account in Chart of Accounts.
• Fixed a problem with the tenant drop-down menu changing to a regular select box after recording a payment in Tenant Manager -> Payments.
• Corrected the 'Previous Month' filter in the Expense Payments report.

Enhancements

• The Profit and Loss report now allows the user to choose the exact From/To dates for which to run the report for.
• A room is no longer assigned to a tenancy. Instead, each tenant can be assigned to one or multiple rooms.
• It is now possible to create overlapping tenancies.
• A user can now search for a tenant by property and room in Tenant Manager => Payment Schedule.
• The Statement of Account report now includes a 'Total Unallocated Payments' line.
• New Cash Flow and Cash Flow Audit reports.
• The Section 13 (Rent Increase Document) has been updated.

Bug Fixes

• A bug in Calendar => Tasks has been fixed and you are again able to create tasks without assigning it to a property.
• Under the Bank Reconciliation feature, payments allocated to multiple invoices were being duplicated and is now fixed.
• We have fixed the issue with the unallocated payment amount in the summary section of the expenses. The problem occurred when the expenses were filtered by property.

Enhancements

• Added an 'Add Payment' option to the following tabs in Property Manager:
• Payments/Expense Payments
• Payments/Income Payments
• Now the date on the 'Add Payment' pop-up form in Property Manager/Expenses/View Expense defaults to the expense due date.
• Added an option to export expenses, including the expense items, corresponding chart of accounts fields and their tax deductible attributes. This allows you to calculate the total tax deductible expenses as well as the total expenses.
• Added an option to export the Other Income invoices from Property Manager/Income.
• Added an option to export the tenant invoices from Tenant Manager/Invoices.
• A Statement of Account report has been added under Tenant Reports, similar to the 'Payment History' report but with a tenant friendly format.
• A Retained Earnings equity account has now been added to the Chart of Accounts where users can post journal transactions. The Balance Sheet report has also been amended to include the Retained Earnings account.
• Added an option to include an addendum at the end of the ASTs. The option is available on the Edit Tenancy screen only.

Bug Fixes

• An error when renaming a Utility Type to include a forward slash.
• Changed the logic for the accounting transactions for tenancies managed by letting agents to fix an issue with the automatic calculation of letting agent fees.

Enhancements

• New Starter Plan now available for up to ten tenancies.
• Implemented the following enhancements in Landlord Vision -> Calendar -> Tasks:
• Added an option to export the tasks to Excel.
• Added an option to assign tags to tasks which allows you to categorise the tasks as necessary.
• The Mail Merge module is now available in the Standard plan.
• New Key Tracking report giving an overview of all keys across all properties, with options to filter by location and/or tenant/contact.
• Rents that have yet to be created as invoices have been added to the upcoming/overdue rents listings, and also added to the calendar.
• It is now possible to export all the reports to PDF format.
• Property Occupancy Report: The room type now appears in brackets after the room name on the Property Occupancy report. When it is exported to MS Excel the room type appears in a separate column.
• New Property Vacancy report.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a problem with the room thumbnails.

Enhancements

• A major time saving enhancement that allows the collection of rents via Direct Debits has been launched. We’ve teamed up with one of Europe’s leading Direct Debit providers, GoCardless to allow you to automatically set up Direct Debits with your tenants so that rental income:
  • comes directly into your bank account
  • automatically updates Landlord Vision
  Click here to see our series of videos on how to set up the Direct Debit collection service with your tenants. A helpful list of direct debit FAQs are here also.
• Renamed the field Name on Card to Account Name for credit cards. That means now we have an Account Name for both bank accounts and credit cards, and that field should be used as a reference.
• Now bank accounts display their sort code and/or account number in the accounts list in Account Manager, if either is available.
• Added a Finance Payments section to the Expense Payments report.
• Property Tasks
  • Added an option to assign tags to tasks which will allow the users to categorise the tasks as necessary. For example, if a task is related to repairs and also to bedrooms, the landlord can assign the following two tags to the task: repairs, bedrooms.
  • It is then possible to search for tasks using individual tags.
• Bank Reconciliation
  • When a bank statement line is reconciled with multiple invoices, a single payment is generated and allocated against the different invoices of the same payee.
  • In the listing of imported bank statement lines it is now possible to see against which invoices/payments they have been reconciled.
  • In the listing of account transactions it is now possible to see against which bank statement lines they have been reconciled.
• Upon creating a tenancy which does not span an exact number of payment terms, Landlord Vision now calculates and suggests the payment amount for the partial period.
• Implementation of an off-site backup solution based on Amazon Glacier.

Bug Fixes

• Pop-up dialogue boxes not visible on iPad.
• Amount fields not accepting 0's and 9's on AZERTY keyboards.
• Check-in List and Check-out List missing Document Header on printouts.

Enhancements

• Added the document header to the Check-in List and Check-out List printouts.
• Amended the Rental Income Payments report to exclude the deposit payments.
• Updated the section 8 Notice (legal document).
• When a payment is being made for a rental, tenant charge or deposit invoice the 'Payment Reference' from the tenancy is automatically copied to the 'Payment Reference' field of the payment.
• Split the 'Credit' column in the summary section of the Payment Schedule into 'Credit (Allocated)' and 'Credit (Unallocated)'.
• Implemented additional changes regarding sold and not for let properties; now any sold or not for let properties are omitted from the Dashboard -> Property Occupancy Overview and Dashboard -> Room Occupancy Overview reports.
• New report added ‘Expense Payments’ under ‘Property Reports’. This report now lists the dates when expense payments were actually made.
• Shortcuts have been added to all alerts/warnings, i.e. expiring certificates, overdue rents, etc. in the Early Warning Screens. Clicking these shortcuts take you the individual items/warnings so they can be updated.
• It is now possible to pay invoices directly from the payment schedule.
• A new 'Property' column added to Tenant Manager -> Payments screen.
• It is now possible to export and print the task list (Calendar -> Tasks).
• Once a property expense has been paid, it is still possible to change the 'Reference'.
• On the Property Manager -> Expenses screen it is now possible to search for expenses by supplier and property at the same time. Also a summary of spend per supplier has been added at the bottom of the screen.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the machine representation of floating point numbers.
• Corrected an error where the payment schedule showed a refunded credit note amount in the 'Paid (Unallocated)' column.

Enhancements

• A major enhancement that allows the importing of bank statements and bank reconciliation. Click here to see the short video demos showing these new time saving features.
• Ability to transfer funds between bank accounts including credit cards.
• An option to set a negative opening balance for a bank/credit card account.
• The 'Payment Reference' from the tenancy is automatically copied to the 'Payment Reference' field of the payment for rental, tenant charge and deposit invoice payments.
• An option to allocate a mortgage/loan to multiple properties.
• An option to change the 'Payment Account' when closing a mortgage.
• The 'Overdue Rents' report is now called 'Overdue Rents & Charges' and it shows both the overdue rents and charges.

Bug Fixes

• Duplicate invoices created for rental periods if an invoice had been manually created prior to the rent due day.
• Construction Date pre 1970 not appearing on the property list.
• Updating a utility supplier created a duplicate entry.
• Deposit payments appeared as rental income payments on the Rental Income Payments report.

Enhancements

• We've spent a considerable amount of time launching a new product RLA Landlord Vision, which is exclusively for RLA members. This solution includes all the features of our Free Version. It can be used for up to 5 tenancies and has the RLA legal documents included as well. You can learn more here.
  
• Users can also delete deposit invoices from the payment schedule or the invoices section.
• When allocating rent payments the screen now also displays the primary tenant and property details.
• Premium users with multiple portfolios can restrict access based on portfolios. The subscription owner can restrict which portfolios additional users have access to.
• You can now specify when a property has been sold and if it has come out of your lettings business, i.e. if you have started to live in.

Bug Fixes

• The invoices on the allocate rent payments screen are now sorted by invoice date.
• If there are multiple open tabs the login session will not expire in any of the open tabs as long as there's user activity in any of the open LV tabs.

Enhancements

• Added the primary tenant name and property name to the list of invoices on the rental payment tab. This particularly useful when you have multi-lets of LHA tenants.
• Paid (Unallocated) column added to the rental payment schedule. If you have payments that have been received and have not yet been allocated to invoices, these are clearly visible.
• Ability to create sub folders in the document management module. You can now arrange/store your uploaded documents in any way you want.
• You can now see the deposit payment movements in Tenant Manager/Payments. This enhancement allows you to reconcile all the transactions in the Letting Agent client account if you are using a letting agent to manage a tenancy.
• Mortgage Broker Summary report has been updated to hide closed mortgages and an option has been added to exclude properties without mortgages or loans.

Bug Fixes

• When entering the first two digits of the date, and moving to the next field unrecognisable date would be displayed. It now automatically assigns the date to the current month.
• Paid rental invoices would show in red text.
• Duplicate tenants in some instances would appear on the 'Tenant List Report'.

Enhancements

• User Access Control - it is now possible to give full or restricted access to other users. For example, you may have ‘Tenancy Manager’ and only want to give them access to the ‘Tenant Manager’ module and the tenant related reports. This is now possible and this feature is only available for ‘Premium’ plan users.
• Tenant Reports: Deposits - we’ve enhanced the tenancy deposits section and added a new report that gives details of all the deposits and what status they are at.
• Mortgage Broker Summary Report extended to include the 'Start Date' and 'Mortgage Term'
• New Trial Balance report added. It is available under Reports/Accounting Reports/Trial Balance.
• We have added more default settings for the tenancies - please see Settings/Tenancy Settings => 'Default Tenancy Settings for New Portfolios/Other Settings' and 'Tenancy Settings for Existing Portfolios/Portfolio/Other Settings'. For example, it is now possible to have all tenancies default to a 6 month AST, with the end date automatically calculated.
• When creating a tenancy, it is now possible to set the duration of a tenancy instead of defining a specific expiry date. For example, if you decide the tenancy is for 6 months, then the expiry date will automatically be calculated.
• Enhancement when entering letting agent statements. It is now possible to add a balance brought forward and a balance carried forward to a letting agent statement.

Bug Fixes

• Closed mortgages showing as expiring
• Problem saving legal documents as PDF
• Tenant Manager/Payments/Add Payment - suppliers appearing under LHA's
• Problem attaching a document to a statement

Enhancements

• When editing/viewing a tenancy, it is now possible to the see exactly how much of a deposit has been withheld/returned.
• All the Landlord Vision plans come with free online storage. You can now see how much storage you have used by going to Document Manager > Documents.
• The demo portfolio is now automatically removed after 30 days, or when a user upgrades to a paid subscription plan.
• The function to import properties and tenancies from an existing CSV file has been enhanced to fit in with the improved tenancy payment feature.
• Portfolio Dashboard - Property and Room Occupancy Overview reports do not appear if there is no data.
• Added an option to sort the contacts by first/last name. The filter by first letter also takes into account whether the contacts are sorted by first or last name.
• The income and expense payment types have been updated to cater for more options.
• Occupancy Overview Report update – now excludes properties purchased prior to the month being viewed.
• The Property Occupancy and Room Occupancy reports have been merged into a single report.
• Mortgage/loan payments that are due can now also be seen in the calendar function. Once a mortgage/loan payment is paid it is automatically hidden from the calendar.
• Added a new tab Early Warnings/Upcoming Payments showing the upcoming payments for the Mortgages/Loans. The upcoming mortgage/loan payments now also appear on Portfolio Dashboard/Upcoming Payments.
• Added a new tab Early Warnings/Overdue Payments showing the overdue payments for the Mortgages/Loans. The overdue mortgage/loan payments now also appear on Portfolio Dashboard/Overdue Payments.
• 'Portfolio Income within Last Month' chart on the Portfolio Dashboard now also includes the tenant to letting agent payments.
• Payment History report enhanced:

• It is now possible to run the payment history report for all tenants, LHA's, properties or tenancies as necessary.
• Implemented pagination as the payment history report for the entire portfolio could be huge.
• The summary section shows a summary per tenant and LHA both when a particular tenant, LHA, property or tenancy is viewed and when the report is run for all the tenants, LHA's, properties or tenancies.

Bug Fixes

• When creating an expense, an attachment was not being assigned correctly.
• Future tenancies - for tenancies that have not started yet the status has been changed from "Active" to "Future". Likewise, for properties not occupied yet the status has been changed from "Occupied" to "Vacant until".
• Error adding a previous tenant address.
• Profit and Loss report - duplicate agent fee payments when adding payments for different tenancies to the same statement.
• Property Expenses - fully paid expenses showing as partially paid.

• A major enhancement to the way payment schedules are created when a tenancy is set-up. With this flexible solution it is now also possible to:

• have rental invoices created from any date after or including the tenancy start date
• record irregular mid-tenancy payment periods
• change the payment term and payment date mid-tenancy

• It is now possible to create rental invoices for ad-hoc rental periods (irregular payments).
• Added a free forever plan.
• Calendar => Tasks - an option to filter the tasks by task type.
• Reports => Room Occupancy - an option to filter the rooms by occupancy - Occupied, Vacant or Any.
• New report: Safety Certificates - shows all the safety certificates for a portfolio with an option to filter by active and expired certificates.
• Automatic Logout - automatically logs out the user after 60 minutes of inactivity.
• Contacts => Suppliers - an option to filter the suppliers by supplier type (e.g. utility, insurance, certificate, etc. suppliers).
• Contacts => Others - search by bespoke contact type (contact types not categorised in the other contact tabs), e.g. search by a contractor type, etc.
• Add Expense - the due date defaults to the billing date.
• Key Management - an option to edit the check-in/check-out stage of the keys.

Bug Fixes

• Corrected the format of the current date on the mail merge documents.
• Logout problem on iPad.
• Forgotten password not working for additional invited users.
• Insurance based deposit - landlord unable to retain the whole deposit amount.
• An error deleting contacts.
• Extra invoices created for automatically extended tenancies with midterm changes to the rent amount.
• Income Tax report - credit notes allocated to capital costs appearing on the income tax report; allocated credit notes appearing for all the tax years.

Enhancements

• Key management solution implemented for ‘Large’ subscription plan users only. It is now easy to keep a track of your keys. You can see the Managing Your Property Keys tutorial here.
• Mail merge solution implemented for ‘Large’ subscription plan users only. It is now possible to upload your own documents and templates and automatically populate and generate these from within Landlord Vision. You can see the Using the Mail Merge tutorial here.
• Enhancements to Mortgage/Loan Section

• New totals added to bottom of ‘Payment Schedule’ Screen.
• It is now possible to add costs to mortgages e.g. mortgage broker fees, as part of new ‘Fees and Charges’ tab.

• New report ‘Tenant List’ added. This report gives a list of all tenants who are occupying properties including their contact details.
• Added fields ‘Outstanding Amount’ and ‘Remaining Payments’ to Mortgage Analyser report.
• Enhanced the property expenses form, to cater for buying and selling costs and implemented a more flexible solution for reporting property expenses.
• When creating letting agency fees:

• It is now possible to record whether the agency has paid an expense e.g. repair, on behalf of the landlord.
• A solution has been implemented to cater for the scenario where the letting agency fees are more than the rent that has been collected.

• It is now possible to change a tenancy mid-term to be managed with/without a letting agent
• Enhancements for using Landlord Vision on tablets
• Additional user accounts can now be created to give access to people who manage your property business. It is also possible to invite your accountant/bookkeeper to access your Landlord Vision account.
• Added a 'Total Rental Income' figure to the Rental Income report.
• Ability to search for tenants by property.
• CSS and JavaScript auto-versioning - CSS and JavaScript changes are instantly reloaded by the web browser.

Bug Fixes

• Adding 'Property Safety Certificates', 'Insurances' or 'Tasks' - losing form details after adding a contact.
• Numerical fields not accepting the decimal point from the number pad.
• Error when deleting expenses.
• Error when importing properties and tenancies without choosing a portfolio.

Enhancements

• Changes to the Profit and Loss report

• added a filter by property and/or room
• ability to drill down to see individual transactions
• removal of capital costs from the report

• New Fees & Charges section in Finance Manager for recording mortgage/loan related costs
• Improved currency format of the amount figures so that commas are automatically inserted.
• NLA Rent Manager users can now export their tenancies straight into Landlord Vision
• Landlords Property Manager users can now export their tenancies straight into Landlord Vision
• All reports can now be exported to MS Excel and CSV
• All legal documents can now be exported to PDF and MS Word
• Letting agency fees enhancements

• Multiple letting agency fees
• Editing letting agency fees

• Drill down on balance sheet report
• Free trial demo database added. All new trial users are now able to activate a demo database that allows you to explore Landlord Vision and see its features
• Property name added to all forms

Bug Fixes

• Fixes with regards to the letting agent statements and fees:

• Deleting a payment from the letting agent statement deletes only that payment and not all the payments from the tenant to the letting agent.
• Agent Statement > Payment > Edit Payment > Cancel - now returns the user to the View Payment screen instead of View Statement.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the user from being able to delete all the commission payments from a statement.

1. Default Portfolio for New LV Users

   A default portfolio will be automatically created for any future free trial sign-up accounts. We've also made it simpler and faster to create a portfolio. See the new How to Create a Portfolio tutorial here.

2. Quick Create Tenancy Form

   Some of the non-essential tenancy settings have been removed from the Create Tenancy form to speed up the process of the tenancy setup. We've also created a new Create Tenancy tutorial to demonstrate how you can create a tenancy in less than 2 minutes!

3. Improved Create Portfolio Form

   Simplified the process of assigning landlords to a portfolio and specified default values for Ownership Type and Portfolio Currency.

4. Multiple Letting Agent Fees per Tenancy

   Added an option to specify multiple percentage and fixed amount fees against a tenancy managed by a letting agent.

5. Edit Agent Fees

   Allowed to edit both the automatically calculated and manually added fees to a letting agent statement.

6. Date Validation

   All the date fields throughout the software are now validated. A date mask is coming soon which will make adding dates even easier.

7. Finance Manager - Loan Payment Schedule

   Added a loan payment schedule (loan amortisation plan). The payment schedule tab allows you to see both the due date of each regular payment as well as the corresponding payment period. It also shows a breakdown of the principal (capital) and interest amount of each payment.

   On repayment mortgages an 'Irregular Initial Payment' section and 'Interest Computation' option are available.

1. Tenancy - Irregular Initial and Final Payment

   Added an option to specify partial initial and/or final payment if the initial and/or final payment does not cover a full rental period.

2. Finance Manager - Loan Payment Periods

   Added an option to specify the period covered by the first loan payment if the first period is not exactly a month.

The new all-in-one cloud based property management software is now available for landlords to help them get better organised! Enjoy!