18th February 2022 | New Bond Payment Workflow ....

Transactions - Payment Bond: Kicking off the first release of 2022 with a bang, we bring to you a new payment bond workflow. This new workflow, allows you to attach the bond lodgment form at the time of receipting the funds and automatically sends the bond form to the bond centre at the time of processing the payment.

For in-depth information on this workflow, be sure to check out these handy help articles:

Setting up to pay Bonds by Direct Credit

Receipt - Bond payment for Tenants

Payment Bond - To Bond Services (NZ Only)

Property - Inspections: We also bring in a couple of updates to our inspection reports that are covered in the below areas:

• Manual Inspection Creation: When creating a manual inspection from the property diary, we've had to make a slight adjustment to the workflow of this setup. From now on, you will need to 'save & close' the inspection before being able to add images to your inspection. This works in the same way as a newly added property, where the inspection being created doesn't technically exist in the database until 'saved'. 
• Changes to inspection notes: Have you found yourself typing up a storm in your inspection and then you find that they have disappeared? Well, do we have some good news for you!
  The good news is that those changes aren't actually lost, but there was a 'navigation' issue when you were taken back to the inspection diary screen where the system made it 'look' like that data was lost. We've made some changes to this workflow to ensure that every navigation back to the diary entry properly displays any recent changes made to your report and avoid any lost data.

System - User (Permissions): We found an issue with our Company Portfolio and administrator permissions for a user. If a user had these two settings (not necessarily both at the same time) and had the padlock or eye icons 'unlocked' before having them removed from their access, we found that the user would still have access to everything Company Portfolio & Administrator related.

From now on, if either of these permissions is removed from a user, we will ensure the access in the back end is also removed even if these permissions were unlocked at the time of removal.

System - Mail Merge: Ever merged a document template for a single tenant and found that you've somehow ended up with multiple copies of the merged template? Don't worry, this won't be happening again in the near future. We've managed to identify what was causing this issue in the background and have made the required changes to have the document merges work as expected.

System - Custom Field: A very odd error that had been lingering around for quite some time, we've fixed up the Tenant Custom Field 09. This means anything you have set up in this custom field slot will now show up in your Custom Views as well as merged documents as you would expect it to.

Property - Active/Inactive Reason: A minor visual change, we've removed the ''add new'' button for the active/inactive reasons. This did not work when clicked and after a number of discussions internally and externally, the consensus was to remove this altogether as the reasons should be controlled by a user who has access to the system defaults area. Below is a screenshot of where the button was for reference:

System - On-screen messages: A big visual change that you will see updated as the year continues, we now have the ability to send you pop-up messages within Palace. This is great on so many levels, as you don't have to worry about missing important service emails from the team, you'll also be able to easily access these release notes and be notified that a release has been deployed making life and communication with you all just a little bit easier. Below is a sample of a pop-up warning and how it will look:

System - Performance Updates: The year has been a very busy one for our development team as we continue to work on performance-related tasks to make Palace run better and smoother for you all.

With our 6 month roadmap in view, we've managed to tick off a couple of things from our list:

• Property Edit: We've made some adjustments to our property edit screen and Property List. These changes should show some improvement with loading times when accessing a property and loading up the property list. From here, we aim to copy and paste the same formula to other entity screens like Owners, Tenants & Suppliers and in the long run have all loading screens work smoother and faster.
• Property Inspection Reports: One of the biggest things we've picked up on, is that there are a large number of inspection reports that are generated on a daily basis. Whilst this isn't the biggest problem area, the size of some inspection reports can and has caused issues that have a ricochet effect on the rest of the system. To mitigate this, we've gone ahead and compressed the size of images within a property inspection. Don't worry though, this won't have any impact on the quality of the images as this remains the same and our team have worked quite hard to ensure that there aren't any notable client-facing changes with the report generations. Since the images are compressed, we should see a slow down in larger reports being generated causing a massive slow down within Palace.

Plenty of work is still required to complete our performance roadmap, with some already in progress and near completion, rest assured our team are working hard to get things running as smooth as possible for you all.