Fourth quarter recap

Another year is in the books! We wrapped up the final quarter of 2021 with a focus on the online payments section in the beta Admin Portal, which is why so many of the new features and improvements listed below are related to that section.

But that's certainly not all we worked on! We also made big upgrades to our internal tooling, plus our newest customer success champion wrote an informative blog article.

Continue reading on to discover the highlights from the past quarter.

💵 Online payments in beta Admin Portal

We finished rebuilding the online payments section in the beta Admin Portal (the future replacement to the Admin Control Panel). The newly built section really shows off how polished and performant our next gen front ends are; it contains a plethora of small—but meaningful—improvements that collectively result in an even more enjoyable experience. Plus, our engineering team developed a handful of larger new features and improvements, highlighted below...

⚡️ Streamlined online payments setup

The biggest improvement to the online payments section was the development of a completely overhauled and streamlined setup process! The new setup process can be completed without leaving the beta Admin Portal, and is heavily tailored to our customers and their specific situations/requirements. If you previously attempted to set up online payments, but didn't finish, we highly recommend walking through the new process.

⚙️ Expanded online payments settings

While we were at it, we expanded and improved the management of online payments related settings. If you've already completed the setup process, it’s now quick and easy to manage your community’s deposit account, the legal entity's details, and the designated representative's information. Plus, we added a number of helpful hints/descriptions throughout the settings and improved how verification issues are explained and presented.

❗️ Improved failed transfer warning

If a transfer to your community's online payments deposit account ever fails, the beta Admin Portal's warning is now more intelligent, descriptive, and helpful! The warning will appear whenever the most recent transfer to your community’s deposit account failed, but will disappear as soon as the deposit account is updated. Along with this new behavior, the warning’s verbiage has been updated to be more clear about what happened, the impact, and what to do to fix it.

🔗 Better payment transfer date connection

Our online payments platform will now do a better job of connecting transfer dates to payments in less-common situations, like if a transfer includes funds from more than 100 payments, or if the transfer includes funds from a previously-failed transfer.

💸 Legal name for statement descriptors

For clarity, we'll now use your community's legal entity name for payments' statement descriptors, rather than your community’s name from the website settings. Often these two names are very similar, but in the cases where they differ, the legal entity name should provide greater accuracy and clarity.

(The statement descriptor refers to what a person sees on their card/bank statement indicating where a charge was made.)

🌐 Set up domains in beta Admin Portal

It's now possible to set up a new or existing domain from the beta Admin Portal, which was the final piece of the domains section yet to be released!

🖋 Blog posts

The end of the year is always a busy time for our customer success team, but Jaden (our newest team member) was able to publish an informative blog post detailing actionable steps people can take to integrate into a new community. This post is part of our Community Tips topic, where we publish helpful content for managing and living in residential communities.

🛠 Internal tool upgrades

In the last recap post, we mentioned that a subset of our engineering team had been working on large improvements to one of our proprietary internal tools. As expected, we completed those improvements early last quarter and the upgrade (though quite large behind-the-scenes) went off exactly as planned! Our engineering team is already benefiting from the greater speed and efficiency the improvements afford.

Wrapping up

A lot happened last quarter; blink and you can miss it! Our team's focus will continue to be on completing the beta Admin Portal, with just the communications and billing sections remaining.

As always, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, watch our changelog, and read our blog for all the latest happenings here at HOA Express.

Until next time.