Support

Have a question? Please check out the Frequently Asked Questions below, and the Knowledge Base on the left.

• Is RentMaxPro Right For Me?
  Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on which category you fit in:

  1. You are currently using spreadsheets to keep track of things - Definitely Yes, RentMaxPro will keep track of everything that your spreadsheet does, and more, and will do it all with less hassle in less time. And it will produce a lovely year-end Workbook that your accountant will love (and so will your wallet, when your fees go down!).
  2. You are just starting out as a Landlord and plan to grow your business - Definitely Yes, Set yourself up from the get-go with systems in place that will streamline your operations as you add more units and more tenants.
  3. You rent out your basement suite and have no plans to do more - Probably No. While RentMaxPro will certainly keep everything nice and tidy for you, it is probably overkill for such a simple operation. Having said that, if you expect a lot of expenses that you will want to deduct against your rental income, this might help keep track of them all. And for just one unit membership is free anyway, so maybe.
  4. You manage hundreds of units for yourself - Possibly No. RentMaxPro can certainly do all that for you but, at present, it might be a bit cumbersome for that many units,just in terms of navigating around so many properties and tenants. It is primarily intended for smaller businesses with under 100 units.
  5. You do your bookkeeping by throwing all your receipts into a box and giving them to a bookkeeper (or worse, your accountant) at year end - Probably Yes. Unless you really have very few expenses, and can remember what they are all for, you will almost certainly save yourself time and money by using RentMaxPro. The three big problems with your current strategy are:
     1. Some of the receipts will undoubtedly get lost or become illegible, which means less tax deductions.
     2. The details of some (many) of the transactions will have been forgotten, which means when the bookkeeper calls to ask you about that Home Depot expense from six months ago you won't have a clue. That makes it hard for her to claim it as a legitimate tax deduction.
     3. If she is trying to reconcile your bank statements with your receipts she may ask you to hunt down the missing receipts (again from months ago) so that she can properly enter them. That can be a huge time waster. Even if all the receipts are there, and are legible, the reconciliation process is a thankless time-consuming grind. And when you are being billed by the hour, that means money.
     There are three key ways that RentMaxPro can simplify the above:
     1. You can enter expenses, and upload a photo of the receipt, using your phone as you walk out of the hardware store. That means the receipt will never be lost, you will never forget what the expense was for, and the expense is there ready and waiting to be reconciled with two clicks of the mouse.
     2. You can have your utility bills automatically imported so you never have to manually look up and enter those.
     3. You can remember and automate commonly repeated expenses so that you don't have to manually enter those also.
     All these entries will then be sitting there ready for stress-free two-click reconiliation(take a look at the Auto Match video to see how) .Whether you the do the reconciliation yourself, or hand it over to a bookkeeper to do, you will be saving a lot of time, trouble and expense.
  6. You have tenants who are erratic with their rent - Definitely Yes. Keeping track of who has paid what and when can get confusing. Simply enter the rents as you receive them, and you will always know who is up to date and who is behind. And you can set it up to atuomatically add a Late Fee to their account when they are behind.
  7. You need an efficient way to store documents concerning tenants and properties - Definitely Yes. In addition to all the bookkeeping and financial tracking, RentMaxPro will also store digital copies of all your crucial documents, and will make them accessible to you wherever you have internet access. They will be attached to the appropriate property and/or tenant, so you will never lose them.
  8. You use other people to do maintenance tasks - Definitely Yes. Initiated either by your tenants or by yourself, you can set up maintenance requests that you can then send to your maintenance people. And as they present their bills and receips to you, you can link those to the service requests so you can know exactly how much each project has cost.
  9. You already have a property manager who also does your financial record keeping - Probably No. If the system is working well for you, then why change it? But if you find they are charging a lot of money for not a lot of work, then you might want to consider switching. There will be a bit of work to do the switch, but after that you will have much tighter control over things.
  10. You are a property manager and look after other Landlords' rentals - Possibly No. At the moment we do not have the facility to separate out properties by different owners or to produce reports for each owner. If this is a feature you would like, let us know and we will do our best to implement it. However, you could set up a separate membership for each owner, and you can give each one access to his own site. If you set them all up using the same email login (yours) for them all, you can easily switch between accounts whenever you are logged in.

  Still not sure? Why not sign up for a free account and test it out with just one of your units for a while, and see how it goes? Or get a month free for your entire property portfolio to really know. And if you have any questions, just ask. Our mission is to make life easier for Landlords. Let us help you.
• Can I Set Up Reminders?
  Of course. Reminders can be set for any future date, and can be either one-time or recurring. They will be displayed on your Dashboard, color-coded according to priority, and also if they are past-due. You can also specify if you want the reminder to show up X days before the reminder date - for example if you need a reminder to renew insurance on a specific date.
• Does this work with Quickbooks, Sage and Simply Accounting?
  RentMaxPro is not specifically designed to be used with Quickbooks or other accounting programs. For us personally, as Landlords, it does all the bookkeeping we need, including bank statement reconciliations, saving receipts and so on, so we don't need to use quickbooks or any other accounting software. In fact we even use it to keep track of non-rental income and expenses. Then at the end of the year we just download the year-end Excel Workbook from Manage -> Reports -> Accounting Reports and hand that to our accountant.  You can see a sample of the workbook here. You might want to send that to your accountant to make sure he is happy with it. Since all the reconciliations are included in that Workbook, there is not much extra that the accountant has to do to finish off the tax return.  
• What About Students and Rooming Houses?
  Setting these up in RentMaxPro is no harder than any other rental arrangement. Students can be accommodated in two ways:

  1. A bunch of friends jointly rent a single rental unit, in which case they are all named on the lease together. If one decides to leave, the others still have to pay the full rent. If they default, then you can go after them individually with each one of them be at risk for paying the entire amount if their friends don't.

     Make sure that you make this completely clear to the friends before they sign the lease. Also be clear that if they find a replacement for the one that moved out, you will need to approve them before they can move in.

     Set this up as one rental unit with one lease that has multiple named tenants.

  2. Each student (or couple) rents his own room and enjoys the use of the common areas. In this case if one of them moves out, then it will be the Landlord's job to find a replacement. This is then the same situation as a rooming house and has the same downsides in that you may end up with strangers sharing the common spaces.

     Set this up as multiple rental units with one tenant (or a couple) on each lease.

  A Rooming House is when you have multiple people that each rent a room (rental unit) in a house (building), and have access to a shared kitchen, bathroom etc. Each person (or couple) will have a separate lease. If they defualt or move out, that is the Landlord's concern and does not affect the other residents. The challenge with rooming houses is that you have many strangers living together who somehow have to get along with each other, keep the place clean, share a refrigerator etc. which can often lead to disputes that need the Landlord's intervention to resolve. On the other hand, the profit margins can be greater that in more normal rental arrangements. Set this up as one building with multiple rental units, each with its own lease. At present it is not possible to set this up as one building (e.g. apartment block) with multiple 'rooming houses' (apartments) which each have multiple rental units (rooms) that each have a separate lease. You would have to have cut out the middle layer. The only down side to this is that it does not separate the expense and income for each apartment and would just lump it all together as the one building.
• Can I send a receipt to the Tenants for their paid rent?
  Absolutely! When you mark a tenant's rent as paid, RentMaxPro will automatically send them, and you, a receipt. You can turn this off if you prefer. The receipts are all identified by paymentId and date. You can also view a receipt on any past payment at any time simply by going to their account (e.g. go to the Dashboard, click on a Tenant's name, which will take you to their account. Find their payment and over on the right there is a 'printer' icon to view the receipt, and also a 'pencil' icon which allows you to edit the payment, and also re-email the receipt to the Tenant. This will be sent to the Tenant's primary email address as entered into the system. The Tenant can also view the receipt at any time by logging into the Tenants' portal where they can see their account and all the payments they have made.
• Can I keep track of multiple tenants and their dependents?
  Typically you would have a couple or maybe two friends living together, with or without children. There are two ways you can record them. If you have a couple, you can either lump them together as 'one' tenant, (ie. John and Jane Smith) or you can put them in separately as two tenants  (John Smith and Jane Jones). The latter is perhaps more useful if you have mulitple phone numbers etc for them. When you create a lease for them, you can also list all the other people who are permitted to live there with them, but who are not signatories to the lease - children, grandparents, whatever. That would just be for your own records and reference, as they would not have their own access to the tenants' portal. See also the question about Students and Rooming Houses.  
• Can I add other Users/Staff and can I restrict their access levels?
  Yes, you can add as many users to your account as you wish without any charge, and you can fine tune the access permisions that you grant each on of them. If you go over to the demo site  you will be able to log in as a few different users with different permissions, e;g. CEO, Maintenance, Marketing Assitant, Tenant Relations Manager. If you login as Catalina (CEO), and then go over to Manage -> Admins you will see options to add new users, and also to set their authorizations. Feel free to play around with them on the Demo site.
• Can I enter notes and upload documents about tenants?
  You can add both notes ABOUT tenants (that are not seen by them) and also notes FOR tenants, that can be see by them. However, they will not be notified that there is a note about them. For every tenant you can input some notes not seen by them. Each time you create or renew a lease you can make notes, again for your own benefit. You can also add notes every time you enter a payment (e.g. John promises to get the remaining $500 to us by Tuesday) which WILL be seen by the tenant on their emailed receipt. You can also upload digital documents and have these linked either to the Tenant (to which the tenant will have access through their Tenants' Portal, e.g. a scanned copy of their lease) or to the Building or Rental Unit (to which the tenant will NOT have access) - e.g. warranties, maintenance contacts etc.    

Still have a question? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Just send us your question through the form below and we will be glad to help in whatever way we can.

Or you can write to us at:

Montego Ventures Ltd
2392 Selkirk Drive,
Kelowna, BC V1V 2R5
Canada