On April 16, the release will be given to a group of early adopters — clients who have shown an interest in one or more of the new features. In May, the release will be given to all clients.

We added a number of new widgets that can be used with custom dashboards. The widgets are designed to give you quick, actionable insights into your portfolio as soon as you log into the system.

Each new widget is described below.

This widget shows which properties in your portfolio have been published to RentCafe. For the ones that are published, you can view RentCafe settings for each property: the listing title, the property manager's name and email address, and a number of advertising settings.

This widget displays the number of tenants whose autopay setup has expired in the last 30 days, and the number of tenants whose autopay will expire in the next 30 days. When you drill down on the totals, you can view the names of the tenants so you can let them know they need to update their payment setup.

We have added several new widgets for maintenance requests.

There are three new Renters Insurance widgets for insights into compliance and adoption. With these widgets, you can:

All the new widgets are available under Admin > ToolBox > Custom Dashboards and can be added to new or existing custom dashboards.

Previously, whenever a new notification was triggered—such as a payment failing or services being enabled for one of your properties—you would only see it by logging into the system and checking the Bell icon and the number next to it.

This hasn’t changed, but now you have the option of receiving an email every time a notification is sent.

To enable this feature for yourself, go to the My Profile screen and select the New Notification Email option.

To enable this feature for other people, go to the Company Settings screen > Users tab and select the New Notification Email checkbox for one or more users.

Note: The User tab includes many options and is very wide; you will probably have to scroll to the right to see the New Notification Email checkbox.

You can now publish completed inspections directly to the Owner Portal from the Unit screen. This change will help keep owners up to date on unit inspections.

When you mark an inspection as Completed, the Publish button appears on the screen. In this case, "publishing" the inspection means making it available to be downloaded on the Owner Portal.

If you navigate away from the inspection (without clicking the Publish button), you can return to it by going back to the Unit screen and opening the Inspections tab. On this tab, you can locate the inspection, re-open it, and publish it to the Owner Portal.

If a resident has a balance due and a payment account on file, when they log into RentCafe, the system displays the QuickPay page, where they pay their balance with one click (using the last payment method utilized). After they submit a payment, the system displays a confirmation screen where the resident can choose to set up AutoPay for future payments.

Flex is a flexible payments solution that provides residents with access to a credit line that lets them split their rent into two payments, while ensuring properties get paid in full at the time rent is due. Residents set up a payment schedule and make their payments in RentCafe, without impacting property managers or owners.

To start using Flex, residents can go to the Payments screen in RentCafe and click the Flex button.

A new Metrics section has been added to the Tenant screen.

This section gives you a snapshot of key details:

This allows you to view the most important tenant information without having to navigate multiple screens.

On the Update Maintenance Requests (in Bulk) page, more functionality has been added.

Almost any change that can be made to an individual MR can now be made to a group of them at once. You can update the Status, Priority and Category fields. You can assign a group of them to a maintenance user and/or a vendor, and you can add billing information and labor details.

You can now divide your vendors into categories and use the categories to find vendors and streamline vendor payments. To set up vendor categories, go to Admin > Toolbox > Custom List, and open the Vendor Categories tab.

Set up the appropriate categories for your business, then open each vendor record and assign it to a category. When vendor categories are in place, you can:

We introduced a permission that lets you restrict users from viewing the vendor ledger, allowing you to maintain security and compliance.

You can now temporarily pause payments to specific vendors and owners by selecting the new Hold Payments checkbox on their profile screen.

You can still create payables for these vendors and owners, but these payables cannot be processed on the Make Payments screen — each payable also has a Hold checkbox, and it is automatically selected if the owner's or vendor's Hold Payments checkbox is selected.

"On Hold" payables still appear on the Vendor and Owner ledgers and on all reports. For full visibility, they also appear on the Make Payments screen, but the Select checkbox for them is disabled, and a note appears explaining that they are on hold and cannot be processed. This ensures full visibility of pending payments while preventing accidental processing until the hold is removed.

When the hold is removed from the Owner or Vendor screen, all new payables are created without the hold; however, existing payables must be manually updated to clear the checkbox.

The Hold checkbox can also be used at the invoice or payable level, meaning that you don’t have to put an entire owner or vendor on hold if you don’t want to. Instead, you can put a hold on just one or a few payables. For example, if you’re disputing an invoice or a vendor is working on a project, and you don’t want to pay them until all the work is completed, you can simply mark those specific payables as on Hold. This prevents users from accidentally processing payments for them while keeping everything else moving as normal.

Because decisions about holding payments are important, we have also added a new permission to ensure that only specific users can place payables or invoices on hold or remove the hold.