Those located in Asia-Pacific will use the term Trust Account, where customers located in Europe will use the term Client Account. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to it as a Trust Account. For more information on regional terminology, refer to this article or contact support.
We're pleased to now offer the ability to manage property funds under a single owner contact.
Re-Leased originally didn't support properties having more than one owner ledger, which resulted in a workaround by setting up a second Owner contact used for Operating Expenses.
If your current set-up involves multiple owner contacts, you'll need to follow the steps to use the new functionality.
Steps for each affected Owner contact
Locate the OpEx ledger for each property - review and adjust the ledger settings circled below.
The Owner Disbursable & Generate Statement settings will take precedence over the Disbursement Profile settings.
DO NOT change the ledger owner, the owner contacts will be merged at a later step.
Note: the 'Used for Owner Fees' toggle indicates which Ledger will be used for any Owner Fees Rules for the Property.
Open the main Property Owner contact and update disbursement profiles to include the profiles used for the OpEx owner contact.
Go to Trust Accounting Reports > Fee Rules.
Run the report for both owner contacts, add any required fee rules from the OpEx contact to the Property Owner contact.
Go to the contacts list > check the OpEx owner contact and select Merge.
Start typing the name of the main Property Owner contact, select the correct contact.
Important: Contact Details and Fee Rules will not be merged.
Tick the confirmation checkbox > select Merge.
Go to the Property > Ledgers tab. Add the Owners OpEx ledger to the property.
OPTIONAL
Select Edit next to the OPEX ledger and assign required accounts to the ledger.
If the Account used in a Fee Rule doesn't have a 'Default Ledger for Accounts' designated, the system will charge it to the 'Default Ledger for Property'.
Any Property or Tenancy Fee rules that are raised against an account assigned to a ledger on a property, that ledger will be used.
Edit Rent/Outgoings templates for the property’s tenancies and set “Use Default Ledgers” to YES
Note: This will update ledgers on the rent template based on the property’s ledger set up.
Fees
The new release of the Multiple Ledgers this gives the flexibility to control what Fees are pulled from which Ledger on a Property.
When a payment triggers a Fee Rule, the system will first read the Fee Rule to determine what the 'Record raised Fee' (Expense Code charged to the Owner) is.
Next, it will look to the Property > Ledger codes to determine if a Ledger has this Expense Code listed.
If yes, then it will charge this Ledger for the Fee. If no, then it will charge the Property Default Ledger for the Fee.
Some customers have updated their Fee Rules to better utilise this functionality by adding an Outgoings Management Fee expense code (501), then creating a new Fee Rule specifically for Outgoings Recovery Fees which uses the Outgoing Management Fee (501) for the 'Record raised Fee' which is also designated on the Property > Ledgers > Outgoings Ledger as 501.
NOTE: You may also wish to use a different chart of account number based on your current chart of accounts list.