RMS Newsletter October 2011
Monthly Procedures
Each month you should be following a series of steps
to accomplish specific tasks in RMS. RMS Support recommends you do the following on a monthly basis:
Print Owner Statements. You may print owner statements as many times as you like but the important thing here is to review each one to make sure they are correct. Watch your cut off dates. If you need assistance in correcting an issue with an owner statement you can give us a call. Don't Finalize if something is amiss. You have options if you can't clear up the issue. You may leave out a reservation in dispute by using the Change Reservation Print Status found on the Reservation Maintenance Menu. You may leave out a Unit from a batch of owner statements by using the Units to Exclude option on the Print Owner Statements screen.
Finalize Owner Statements and Print Checks. This step is so important, yet so often a client calls us up and asks why are last months reservations on this months owner statements? Printing owner statements is not Finalizing. The Finalize Process is connected with the print process in RMS. Whatever is printed is what will be Finalized and RMS confirms this to you on the Finalize screen. You will see what you last printed at the top of the screen.
The Owner Statement Finalize process disburses the money to the General Ledger income and payable accounts. RMS also prints the checks, adds to the unit's year to date totals information and archives the reservations and owner transactions.
Print Tax Report. This report can be printed at any time.
Process Payables. Re-distributing funds should be done first if needed in Maintain Pending Payables. Examples of this would be holding back security deposit or pet deposit instead of refunding it. A "Ready to Print" status report may be printed of all payables set on "Ready". Then process any checks or payments using the Process Payables option under Payables on the Accounting menu.
RMS Offers Key Advantage with VRP
RMS is now offering another option for credit card processing within your system. Credit card processing can be done at the time of booking and at any time of payment entry. RMS recommends Advanced Accounting when using integrated credit card processing. VacationRentPayment (VRP) is an innovative and integrated online payment solution for the Vacation Rental industry. VRP provides a combination of total cost savings, easy accounting, and superior technology to RMS customers.
RMS customers should take note of the key advantage of using VRP for payment processing, PCI compliance. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. Essentially that means any merchant that has a Merchant ID (MID). In the constantly evolving world of merchant processing, PCI compliance is the standard for merchants that process credit cards. VRP helps mitigate this risk by achieving "Verified by Visa" status and by being part of the MasterCard SecureCode program. Furthermore, VRP also provides Tokenization as part of being a PCI compliant solution which allows for card numbers to be used again without storing the card number.