The Official AppFolio Blog

Reports. I really find AppFolio’s reports useful. Why? Because they provide a user-interface to query data without having to know code. This means that even if you don’t know SQL, you can query your data at any time and for almost anything.

We often receive Support Requests from folks who are looking for customized reports. And, since you’ve asked, then you shall receive! We have provided you the most requested reports, but did you know that you could further customize them to suit your company’s needs? And, did you know that you can save these customized reports so that whenever you need the information, at a moment’s notice, all you have to do is click on your customized report?

Let’s go through a few examples.

Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary Report
What if an owner has decided to sell a property or manage it him or herself? You have gone through the process of wrapping up your books for the property, but there are still a couple of tenants who owe you for back rent. You would rather the hide the property, since you’ll no longer be managing it, but you still need to keep track of who owes you what. Allow me to introduce the Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary Report (Reporting > Reports > Tenant Reports)

When you open it, by default, it reflects any tenant unpaid charges for Current and Notice tenants, but you can customize it to include All tenants. To do so, look towards the upper-right portion of the report, to the Filters button.

Once you select the Filters button, you will be presented with a window displaying an array of filtering options. When you select a Tenant Status of “All”, past tenants (who might also be hidden) will be included in the report.

In addition to this, you can order the report by selecting the Group button to the right of the report. The Group button resembles a little, square window. When clicked, a drop-down will appear which provides you even more options for sorting your reports.

Saving a Customized Report
If you would like to avoid having to customizing a report each time, you can save a customized report as its very own report! Once you’ve filtered and customized the report to your needs, just click on the “Save” button which is located near the “Filter” button.

After you’ve renamed and saved your new report, it will appear at the bottom of the Reports screen (Reporting > Reports) under “Saved Reports”. Going forward, you can simply click on your new report to view it just as you’ve customized. If you want to delete the report, just click on the red, minus icon to the right of the report.

Tip: You can customize many of AppFolio’s reports just like this!

Tenant Directory Report
Another report you might find handy is the Tenant Directory (Reporting > Reports > Tenant Reports). The Tenant Directory Report functions very similar to a ‘roll call’. It lists all of your tenants, along with a variety of other information that you can also Filter and Group to suit your needs.

One question we are often asked is, “How do I tell which tenants have signed up for online rent payments (Tenant ACH) without going to each of their respective windows?” The Tenant Directory report offers the availability to group the report via Tenant Portal Login. You would activate this grouping by expanding the Group drop-down and checking the “Tenant Portal Login” box. The tenant portal column will then be added to the report.

Check Register Detail Report
The last report I’d like to discuss is the Check Register Detail (Reporting > Reports > Transaction Reports). The name is pretty self-explanatory, but did you know that you can filter the report to view only ACH-related transactions?

Click on the Filters button at the top of the window, and then select the drop-down for Payment Type. To narrow your report to reflect only ACH transactions, you would choose the “ACH Payments Only” option.

From there, you have the ability to further customize the report using Groups or Filters. And, just like the Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary report, you can save it as its own report so that you can come back to it at any time without having to re-filter or re-group.

Happy reporting!

Last week we participated in the 22nd Annual NARPM Convention and Trade Show in Seattle and it was a very busy week.

Wednesday, Oct. 13
We were sponsors of the First Annual NARPM Past President’s Charity Golf Tournament, supporting Creative Living Options (CLO), a non-profit agency that provides supported living services for adults managing developmental disabilities. I didn’t actually golf, but everyone who did had a great time – it was one of the most beautiful days in Seattle. More pictures here.

Thursday, Oct. 14
We spent the day on the tradeshow floor talking with customers and other attendees interested in learning more about property management software. And in the evening we hosted our 2nd Annual Appo-Tini Party at the beautiful Fairmont Olympic Hotel. Everyone enjoyed their blue Appo-Tinis! More pictures here.

Friday, Oct. 15
After a great night of Appo-Tini-ing (it’s a word!) Friday morning I presented on Social Networking 101 for Property Managers. Here are a few highlights of my presentation:

• We discussed the importance of listening for your brand/company on Google, Yelp and Yahoo Local – your customers are online and it is vital that you participate in the conversation.
• I shared some examples of property managers who are blogging and using Facebook to creatively connect with their customers.
• I talked about being interesting (please, don’t be boring!) – if you’re just posting new vacancy listings or announcements like “don’t forget rent is due!” on your Facebook page or blog, people won’t listen to you for long. Think of your audience, what do they care about…then write about that! (Hints…they care about their neighborhood, fixing up their homes, saving money, having fun, etc).
• We covered the nuts and bolts of Facebook – how to set up a business page, some ideas on how to get fans and what types of content is *not boring*.
• Finally I ended with a suggested 3 steps to get started: 1) Listen for your company name, set up Google Alerts, claim your local listing pages and unlock your Yelp company page. 2) Start blogging 1x/ week! 3) Use Facebook.

If you’re ready to sit down and spend a little more time, I’ve uploaded the entire presentation here.

Then in the afternoon we learned that we were chosen as the 2010 NARPM Affiliate of the year for the second year in a row! This means that the NARPM members voted for us as the partner who has demonstrated their commitment to furthering the goals of our industry. We really enjoy providing education to the community and we are so proud to have won this award. Thank you NARPM and we’ll be there next year in Texas!

“Yes we can.”

Regardless of your view on politics you have probably heard this phrase and been inspired by the emotion of someone repeating it. It’s been adopted by everyone from professional sports teams to those seeking to pass school bond measures. Why is it so powerful? I think it is because of the simple word “we” and our belief in the power of that word. For several decades our society has chosen to de-emphasize “we”. On the surface, we talk a lot about “I” or “me” but deep down all of us acknowledge that some of our greatest achievements and our most rewarding moments come about when “we” work together to accomplish a goal that could not have been accomplished individually.

Recently, the engineering team at AppFolio went on a retreat. We gathered up the team and headed a few miles up the coast to stay together in cabins, listen to technical talks, roast s’mores around a campfire and challenge ourselves with a high ropes course. AppFolio has grown significantly over the last couple of years and so has the engineering team, so it took a few months just to plan. We had to coordinate a large group of people, planning transportation, food and activities. We had to carefully consider how we could continue to provide the kind of support we strive to give our customers while we were taking time away from the office.

Why make the effort? Sure it was educational and fun, but AppFolio is a company. We have a business to run, right? The reason we did it is because we believe our business is the people. Building the relationships between those people builds the business. We believe it so strongly that it is included in our company values.

Great People Make A Great Company
We know that great people make a great team and great teams can overcome huge obstacles. We work hard to find the best team members to join our company and work equally hard to provide a challenging and rewarding environment to motivate and bring out the best in them.

I see this same value expressed in your businesses. When I am visiting one of your offices or get a chance to meet you at a conference, the first thing I hear is something along the lines of “You need to meet Cindy. She handles all of our payables and loves AppFolio.” This is one of the things I love about the property management industry. I see that you know your business is the people too.

I also know how easy it is to forget this. We all get lost in the busyness of our work – whether that is managing properties or building software – so I have a challenge for you. Do something this month to build your team. It doesn’t have to be something big, and it doesn’t matter whether your team is two or two hundred. Try, for example, ending your next meeting by going around the table and having each team member share something they appreciate about another team member or something that team member did. Take a few people from your team out to lunch and ask them what their personal goals are. If you want, think big, and plan a team retreat for next year.

For those of you I have not yet met, I played basketball in college which is hard to avoid when you are 6’9”. I am sure that some of my appreciation for teams comes from the experience I had in college athletics. Not surprisingly, there are many great quotes about teams from the world of sports. Here are some words describing what you should be building for your team:

Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence
on one another and of strength to be derived by unity.
- Vince Lombardi

Vince Lombardi was so respected in his sport (football), that they renamed the Super Bowl trophy after him in 1971. Although he was a great individual player, almost no one remembers that today. He is remembered for being one of the greatest team builders in sports history as a coach with the Green Bay Packers over 40 years ago.

If you take up the challenge, tell me what you did to build your business into a team by posting in the comments below. Even better, tell me in person the next time you see me. If you haven’t met me, be on the lookout for the guy who hit his head on the door jamb coming into the room. Hopefully, it was because I was too busy listening to one of my teammates to remember to duck.

History is filled with failed products. New Coke, the Edsel, smokeless cigarettes, and WebVan are a few of the more famous flops. There are thousands of others that you have never heard about, but they all have one thing in common: Customers weren’t willing to buy them because they simply didn’t solve the right problem.

At AppFolio, we expend a great deal of effort making sure that we get it right the first time. Whether it’s a feature like integrated online rent payments or our pricing, we work hard to understand our customers’ real needs before we build our products.

Validating Customer Needs: Market Validation
We call this process “market validation,” which is a way of saying that we listen closely to discover customer problems and then validate that customers are willing to use our proposed solution before we code any software. In other words, we adhere to the principle of “Ready, Aim, Fire,” rather than “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

If you are an AppFolio customer, you may have participated in this process at some point – it might have been a phone call from us to get your opinion about a proposed idea. We may have asked you to look over preliminary mockups for a future feature. Or perhaps you responded to a few questions through our user forums.

In today’s economy, companies rarely get a second chance. Which is why many of the newer, smarter companies are using similar ways of validating customer needs such as Customer Development (www.steveblank.com) or Lean Startup, (www.startuplessonslearned.com). Whatever the name, all of these methods recognize that your insights as a customer are a lot better than our assumptions about what you need.

Solving Property Management Pains
In fact, we used our market validation process before we wrote a single line of computer code for the AppFolio Property Manager product. After talking with hundreds of property managers we were confident that if we built the right product to solve their problems they would readily switch to our Web-based solution.

Some examples of the pain we heard loud and clear from property managers (and subsequently solved): Stuffing and mailing hundreds of envelopes every month; Managing overflowing stacks of paper; Spending hours installing and managing software; Entering the same information twice into different systems; Handling hundreds or thousands of rent checks each month.

For each of these problems we also discovered the minimum feature set that gets the job done. This allows us to deliver the feature quickly, cost effectively, and in an easy to use way. It also avoids the feature bloat common in other software.

By engaging our current and future customers early in the process they help us create great software that works well the first time. The result is enthusiastic customers and a team at AppFolio is that is proud of the product they create. And to boot, there’s little chance you’ll hear about AppFolio hitting the bad product dustbin of history.

Did you know that we put out a new version of our software each and every month? Each update includes a number of improvements and fixes based on what we hear back from our customers. We have recently released some great new features that will improve your tenant ACH experience and help you increase adoption. In my role I spend quite a bit of time with customers who use our online payments feature, so I know these are very valuable!

ACH Receipt Editing
When a tenant makes a payment via tenant ACH, AppFolio automatically creates the receipt for you. This saves you even more time than you were already saving just by accepting payments online (no more opening envelopes, sorting or batching checks, making bank runs, etc.). Of course, you have to tell AppFolio how you want the funds applied to the charges on the tenant ledger for this to work properly. Even so, the funds won’t be applied to the charges on the ledger the exact way you want them applied every time. There are just too many “situation specific” or one time exceptions.

In order to make it easier for you to address these exceptions, we’ve given you the ability to “re-apply” a receipt. This means that you can now change how the funds the tenant submitted should be divvied up amongst the outstanding charges on their ledger. To use this function, go to the receipt details page and look to the “Tasks” section on the right side of your page. At the bottom of the list of tasks, you’ll notice a “Reapply Receipt” function:

Click on this link and you’ll be taken to a page where you can change how the funds will be applied to the charges on the ledger. You can even reserve a portion of the payment as a prepayment by just zeroing out the amount to be paid towards the other charges on the ledger and checking the “Make Prepayment?” checkbox.

Track ACH Sign-Up
This feature tells you when the tenant has actually activated their account. With this latest release, you can now see not only if they’ve activated their account, but also how many automatic (recurring) payments they’ve scheduled, and how much (in total) they’ve set up to transact automatically.

On the tenant page, this information is in the Tenant Status area:

On the “Tenant Directory” report, you can add these fields to the report by clicking on the columns icon in the top right corner of the report (just above the scrollbar). At the bottom of the list of columns that can be added, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Tenant Portal Activations Update
You’ll now notice that when you go to send out an activation email, you can not only exclude tenants that have already activated their portal from the search results (notice the “Include activated tenants” checkbox), but you also have the ability to see (in the search results) which tenants have already been invited (“Last Activation Sent”), but who have not yet activated their account:

Tenant Portal New Users
We’ve made it easier for new users (who haven’t yet activated their account) to get started with making online payments. If your tenants having trouble getting started, you can not only see whether or not they’ve successfully activated their account by taking a quick peek at their tenant page (the “Tenant Status” section of the page) but, you can rest assured that we’ve taken steps to minimize the amount of confusion your tenants could face by adding a quick note to the tenant login page.

As always, if you have any questions about how tenant ACH works or if you’d like to get started collecting payments online in an easy, pain free way, please let us know! Thank you for all of your valuable feedback – we are definitely listening.

Scott Young is the resident expert for tenant ACH over here at AppFolio. His responsibilities include setting up tenant ACH for our clients, guiding them through implementation and adoption, and helping them resolve any questions or issues once it’s turned on and in use.