1. Attach Invoices To Bills In Owner Packets
This new functionality allows your invoices and other files to be attached to your bills, to be included in owner report packets. This also gives you the ability to send this information directly to your owners. Some important items to note when attaching invoices to bills in owner packets:

• Bills are attached when partially or fully paid. The owner packet is then run for the period when the bill is paid.
• If an owner has multiple properties, they will receive all attachments to bills across all their properties.

2. Updated Owner Portal UI
The design of the UI is now updated! This will make it easier to distinguish new reports from older reports and to download attachments. This will also help you more easily understand which packet is the newest. Keep in mind this new UI is a redesign only, there is no change to the UI functionality. Here are some of the perks you get:

• The owner portal UI has been updated to clearly show which is the latest published packet.
• There is now a Download Full Packet button and a help tip for zip files.
• Attached files are listed in their own section, which can be expanded or collapsed.
• Older packets are shown in their own section, sorted by “to date.”
• The older packets section can be expanded or collapsed.

3. Credit Cards For Application Fees
With AppFolio Property Manager it is now possible to conduct credit card payment processing for online application fees. This function replaces the previous ACH method to provide a better experience for you and your applicants. While transitioning to this new method, keep in mind the following:

• Credit card users will not have the option to accept application fees using ACH.
• AppFolio charges a $5 transaction fee for each credit card receipt. The application fee must be adjusted to include this $5. It is not a separate charge reflected to the applicant.
• Application fees for units must be set between $6 and $200.
• There is an application fee validation process.
• Listings will accept credit card payments if the property has a CC-enabled application fees bank and an application fee between $6 and $200.
• AppFolio Property Manager users will see the credit card application receipt linked on the Rental Application.

Start taking advantage of these new AppFolio Property Manager updates today!

Can you walk us through the process to develop the screening reports?
The first thing that we did was research all of the various screening reports that were on the market. We looked at many sample credit and screening reports and realized that all of the reports are very difficult to read. I even pulled my own credit report and realized how the information is almost cryptic! Our goal was to not only provide a great screening report with accurate information but also make it easy to read.

Next we interviewed our customers to learn more about what they are looking for in a screening report. We were looking for commonalities across the group to determine the most important information that we could include in a summary at the top of the report.

Once we gathered all of the requirements and feedback, we created a wireframe. A wireframe is raw data laid out on a page in black and white with no design. Then we took this paper wireframe back out to our customers and asked them for their opinion on the content and layout of the information included in the report. We learned right away that there were some changes we needed to make. Then we took the wireframe and developed an actual clickable prototype and asked people to start using it. This is where the usability testing starts.

We had customers start using the report and our developers watched how they used it. I also gave our test group tasks to complete. For example, we presented them with a set of hypothetical online rental applications and asked them to go through the process that they would normally go through to approve an applicant. Then, we would watch and observe them as they used the software so we could learn what they were looking at and what they weren’t looking at, and how they were actually interacting with the report. Within 2 days, we were able to turn around the changes to that report based on what we observed – which is really fast!

After a couple more rounds of testing we brought in a really great graphic designer because we wanted to make the report “pretty” as well as usable. We continued to test until we saw that customers were zipping through the reports and finding information really quickly and easily.

What were some of the things that people were looking for in a good screening report?
In any credit report there are things called trade lines. These are the various accounts that an applicant has with any creditor like credit cards or a home loan. In most credit reports, you simply get a list of all of these trade lines and have to read through them. The important information about whether that person hasn’t paid on time and whether the account is open or closed, may be buried in that list.

We found that our customers really wanted to know if there are negative trade lines and if so, which ones. For example, property managers sometimes forgive a negative trade line if it is for medical debt but weigh credit card debt more heavily.

We wanted to keep all of the information (it’s all important) so we created a summary at the top of the report. We tried to summarize and then bold the information that people were most interested in so that they wouldn’t have to scroll up and down in the report searching for things. Our goal with the summary was to reduce the number of clicks and provide a brief snapshot of all the important data at the top. I think we hit it out of the park!

What types of trade lines are property managers looking to see?
One of our challenges during this project was that much of this information in the reports is highly sensitive. We could pull our own credit reports but it was hard to pull real data. What we did was experiment with “pretend data.” In my interviews with property managers, I learned how common it is for them to see some negative trade lines. When we did the usability testing, we tried out different credit and criminal record scenarios. People are used to seeing a lot of home loan and foreclosure data on their reports because unfortunately, that is more common today. The key information that property managers are looking for is how an applicant has dealt with utility bills or credit that is related to the property. They don’t want to bring people in who haven’t paid their cable bill for example, because to them, it was a reflection on whether or not they were going to pay their rent.

How do you find people to participate in the usability testing?
We recruit customers all the time! I post requests in our forums asking customers to participate, I also reached out to specific customers individually. In the usability tests, we like to get a wide variety of different types of customers and even non-customers so that we can get really strong feedback.

One thing that is really important is to have the actual person who will be using the software as the one who participates in the usability testing. Each feature is different and it is most valuable if we can get direct feedback, so if the on-site manager is the one that runs the screens, then we would want to do the usability testing with that person.

We are always looking for people to participate in usability tests for a variety of features and functionality within AppFolio, so please feel free to email me if you would like to participate: jj.kercher@appfolio.com. Thank you!

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.

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.