News – October 2021

Dear customers – hope you are all keeping well!

We wanted to share some of the latest updates we’ve made to SmartPropertyManager, including searching for attachments, improvements to detail reports, and performance improvements.

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Attachment Searching

One of the most used facilities in SmartPropertyManager is the ability to store attachments against records, for example, uploading invoices to expenditure records or tenancy contracts to tenancy records.

We have now added the ability to search for attachments – see the following screenshot to see the new search box on the attachment dialog:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

For those customers using the built-in attachment store, there are additional capabilities:

• Searching attachments will find any attachment file or folder in your account that has a name matching the search terms.
• You can type multiple words into the search box in which case it will match any attachment that contains any of the words. 
• You can use the + symbol to find attachments that contain all the words, for example war + peace will match only those attachments that  contain the word war and the word peace.
• You can use double quotes to find attachments that match an exact phrase, for example "war and peace" will match only those attachments that contain the exact phrase war and peace in its name.
• The search results will be ranked with the closest matching ones first.

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Improvements to the Transaction and Tenancy Detail reports

The detail reports are useful for seeing the full information stored in the system and also for extracting data – for example, into Excel for offline analysis. We have recently added some extra information to these reports:

Tenancy Detail Report

Added the tenancy Notes and the Open/Closed status as extra columns on the report.

Transaction Detail Report

Added transaction financial period information. This also has the added benefit of making it easier to find those transactions which fall outside the dates of a financial period.

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Performance fixes

With various additions that have been recently made and an increase in general traffic we had seen some pages slow down. So over the last month we have made a bunch of performance improvements to speed up pages. We aren’t done yet, so expect some more improvements over coming weeks.

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We’ll continue to keep you updated on new features we add to SmartPropertyManager. And as always, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions or if you have any suggestions on how we can make SmartPropertyManager work better for you.

Best regards

SPM Team

News – May 2021

Dear customers – hope you are all keeping well!

This update describes some recent improvements we have made to SmartPropertyManager.com as part of the ongoing efforts to make it easier for you to manage your property portfolios.

Hope you find the updates useful. As usual you can always contact us if you have any questions.

Improvements to the Tenancy Balance Statement page

The tenancy balance statement page is one of the most used parts of the product and is essential for keeping track of payments due versus payments made for tenancies. We have recently made a couple of improvements to the page to make it easier to customize what information is shown – in particular to make it easier to produce statements that can be more easily shared with the tenant.

Compact View

The first improvement is an option to switch to a compact view. By default, the system displays the full details of the tenancy balance, showing all historical payments due and payments made. The new compact view will display a shorter form of the statement, showing only those payments due or paid for each charge since the last zero balance entry.

The following screenshot shows how to select the Compact View and an example compacted statement:

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Note how the statement hides the payment entries between 01/April/20 and 30/Apr/21 where they have been all settled.

Default Display Options

The second improvement is the addition of further options to control what is displayed on the tenancy balance statement.

The following screenshot shows the new options:

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• Hide total paid/due: Whether or not to display the total paid and total due in the summary. It is sometimes useful to hide these when producing statements for tenants.
• Show latest first: By default the tenancy balance is displayed in order of payment due date, from earliest to latest. This option allows you to reverse the order so they are shown from latest to earliest.
• Show compact view: By default, the tenancy balance is shown with the full view. Setting this option changes the default display so it is shown in compact view by default.

These options are saved as defaults for your user account and will be remembered across logins.

 

News – October 2020

Dear customers – hope you are all keeping well!

This update describes some recent improvements we have made to SmartPropertyManager.com as part of the ongoing efforts to make it easier for you to manage your property portfolios.

Hope you find the updates useful. As usual you can always contact us if you have any questions.

Tax Worksheet updated with 2020 changes

The Tax Worksheet has been updated to reflect the HMRC Property Income form for the tax year ending April 2020 – mainly with changes to allowances and their impact on the detailed workings.

New report: Occupancy Report

The Occupancy Report has been in the works for a while with a select few early adopter customers. It lets you easily see the state of active tenancies and allows you to record management notes and track them over time, as shown in the following screenshot:

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By default the report shows the state of your tenancies for the current date, but it also allows you to select a date in the past so you can see where things stood at that point in time.

The Management Notes column on the right hand side allows you to annotate each row with any comments you may have about the tenancy or property unit.

New report: Financial Summary by Property Unit

This is a new report which shows a summary of income and expenditure for a specified set of property units, date criteria and charge types. See the following screenshot:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Additional Improvements

• The Management Item Report now supports the ability to export to Excel.
• The Properties page has been enhanced to make it easier to use:
  • You can now use the search boxes at the top of the table to easily search by properties or landlords.
  • The page now remembers its state when you return to it.
• Tenancy balances now support 6-month rent frequencies

SmartPropertyManager.com & Making Tax Digital

Introduction to Making Tax Digital (MTD)

Making Tax Digital is a key part of the UK government’s plans to make it easier for individuals and businesses to get their tax right and keep on top of their affairs. The aim of the initiative is to make tax administration more effective, more efficient and easier for taxpayers, through the implementation of a fully digital tax system.

From 2019, VAT-registered businesses with a taxable turnover above the VAT threshold of £85,000 are now required to keep records digitally and to use software to submit their VAT returns through the Making Tax Digital service.

Making Tax Digital for property income tax will come into effect once the VAT scheme has finished a successful rollout. See the following HMRC guide for more details:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-tax-digital/overview-of-making-tax-digital

Who is affected by MTD?

If your business is VAT registered and your annual turnover is at least £85,000, you will likely need to submit your VAT returns under the MTD rules. There are some exemptions – refer to the HMRC guide above.

Businesses that are VAT registered, but whose turnover is less than £85,000, aren’t required to be part of MTD at this stage, but they can join it on a voluntary basis.

What does MTD actually mean for your business?

Under MTD you must keep all your VAT records in a digital format and submit the VAT return through MTD-compliant software. This is because HMRC want to reduce the number of human errors that happen when people manually type VAT figures into the form.

Apart from this, VAT returns will be due within the same timelines as before – for example, for quarterly returns this is seven days after the end of the month that follows the end of the VAT quarter – and VAT is payable as before – by electronic transfer, BACS, by direct debit or at a bank. 

How can SmartPropertyManager.com help?

If you are an active SmartPropertyManager.com user then you are almost there:

• MTD requires all transactions to be recorded in a digital form. SmartPropertyManager.com has been helping its users do this since its inception.
• MTD requires VAT returns to be submitted through the HMRC’s Making Tax Digital online APIs. SmartPropertyManager.com now supports this.
• SmartPropertyManager.com has been reviewed by HMRC and is recognized as having met the requirements for MTD, so it can safely be used to submit VAT returns directly to HMRC.

If you are a VAT registered property management company in the UK, you can use SmartPropertyManager.com to keep digital records and then submit VAT returns directly to HMRC through the Making Tax Digital for VAT online gateway.

What next?

You can use SmartPropertyManager.com today to submit VAT returns through HMRC’s MTD gateway. Log into your account and go to the new UK VAT page under the Finances menu.

In addition, we are working on integrating with the Making Tax Digital gateway for Property Income Tax. We will be announcing more on this soon.

News – February 2019

Dear customers – this update describes some recent improvements we have made to the web site as part of the continuing effort to make it easier for you to manage your property portfolios.

Hope you find the information useful. As usual you can contact us if you have any questions.

Additional Improvements to Attachments

One of the most popular features of SmartPropertyManager.com is the ability to upload and save arbitrary files with your records as attachments, thereby allowing you to keep all your relevant information secure and always available online.

A number of improvements have been made in this area to make it more flexible and easier to use:

• We have increased the maximum size for uploaded files – to 20Mb for regular customers, further still for Enterprise Edition customers.
• The user interface for managing attachments has been tweaked to make it easier to see the size of attachments and the date and time they were uploaded.
• When viewing a list of attachments, you can now click on a column headings to sort the list by that column.

See the following screenshot:

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New Detail Reports

We have added two new detail reports:

1. Property Detail Report – will show the full details of all your properties.
2. Tenancy Detail Report – will show the full details of your tenancies.

Both reports support export to Excel and are accessible from the Reports menu.

Property Account page improvements

The Property Accounts page now has a new option to control which types of charge are reported in the income summary section. In particular, this makes it much easier to separate the reporting of deposit income versus rental income.

See the following screenshot:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

 

News – August 2018

Dear customers – this update describes some recent improvements we have made to the web site and also an update on new GDPR legislation which come into effect this month.

Hope you find the information useful. As usual you can contact us if you have any questions.

GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is set to take effect on May 25, 2018. We have recently completed a review of the website to ensure we meet it’s requirements. For more information on the legislation and what it means, read the following blog:

SmartPropertyManager.com & GDPR

Tax Worksheet updated with final 2017-2018 Section 24 changes

From April 2017, HMRC are restricting the finance cost relief for individual landlords on residential properties to the basic rate of income tax. The restriction will be introduced in stages from 2017 through to 2021 and will apply mostly to individual landlords (not companies) who manage residential properties and who pay higher rate tax.

In December we pre-emptively made changes to the tax worksheet in order to take into account the new rules for financial cost relief from 2017 onwards.

With the release of the final SA105 form in April 2018, we have now updated the tax worksheet to reflect the final published layout and guidelines.

The following screenshot shows the lower part of the detailed calculations section of the tax worksheet which now matches exactly the format used by HMRC SA105 form:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

These fields are calculated as follows:

Field	Description
A. Non-residential loan interest and other financial costs	The total expenditure your business has incurred for financial costs such as loan interest on non-residential property. Specifically, this aggregates all transactions in the financial period with tax category Loan interest & finance costs (Non-residential property).
B. Residential loan interest and other financial costs	The total expenditure your business has incurred for financial costs such as loan interest on residential property. Specifically, this aggregates all transactions in the financial period with tax category Loan interest & finance costs (Residential property).
C. Residential finance costs that can be claimed as an expense	The proportion of the residential finance costs that can be claimed as an expense. The percentage used to calculate the proportion will reduce in stages between 2017 through to 2021.
D. Residential finance costs that cannot be claimed as an expense	The proportion of residential finance costs that cannot be claimed as an expense. These finance costs can be claimed as a reduction on your income tax liability at the basic rate of tax (currently 20%). Refer to the HMRC guidelines for further details.
E. Total finance costs that can be claimed as an expense	The full amount to be claimed as an expense, calculated as the sum of non-residential finance costs (box A) and the proportion of residential finance costs that can be claimed as an expense (box C).

For full details of the changes to finance cost relief see the following HMRC publications:

• SA105 UK Property Form Notes
• Changes to tax relief for residential landlords
• Restricting finance cost relief for individual landlords
• Property Income Manual: Deductions: Interest: Restriction of relief for income tax purposes from 2017-2018

 

SmartPropertyManager.com & GDPR

What Is GDPR?

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is set to take effect on May 25, 2018. This new regulation broadly affects all organizations, government agencies, and companies throughout the world that collect or use personal data tied to EU residents.

Roles Under GDPR

Under GDPR, there are stronger responsibilities for both data controllers and data processors. Cloud customers who collect and process personal data from individuals are data controllers. A cloud provider, such as smartpropertymanager.com, typically has the role of both a data controller – because we capture and manage information about our customers and also, a data processor – because we processes personal data on behalf of our customers.

Key GDPR Requirements for Our Customers

With the new GDPR requirements coming into effect, businesses using cloud applications such as smartpropertymanager.com should be aware of their data privacy and security needs relating to their collection and handling of personal information. Here are four key requirements we are highlighting:

1. Data Security

Businesses must implement an appropriate level of security, encompassing both technical and organizational security controls, to prevent data loss, information leaks, or other unauthorized data processing operations. GDPR encourages companies to incorporate and leverage encryption, incident management, network and system integrity, and availability and resilience requirements.

2. Extended Rights of Individuals

Individuals have greater control, and ultimately greater ownership of, their own data. They also have an extended set of data protection rights, including the right to data portability and the right to be forgotten.

3. Documentation and Security Audits

Businesses will be expected to document and maintain records of their security practices, audit the effectiveness of their security programs, and take corrective measures, where appropriate.

4. Data Breach Notification

The GDPR has specific requirements about when and how cloud customers have to announce a personal data breach to their regulators and/or impacted individuals.

To understand and learn more about the GDPR, visit the EU GDPR webpage.

How we can help with GDPR compliance

At smartpropertymanager.com, we have reviewed our services and practices to ensure we meet the requirements of the GDPR. In addition, our privacy policy and terms of use have been updated to more clearly articulate how we meet the new requirements.

If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

News – March 2018

Hello to all our valuable customers! This update describes some recent improvements we have made to the web site. Hope you find them useful.

Ability to record arbitrary types of transactions

Previously, SmartPropertyManager.com only supported two types of financial transactions – income and expenditure. This was fine for the bulk of financial information that needs to be recorded as part of a property business, but was a little unintuitive for certain types of financial transactions – for example, recording income from a third party that was not a tenant or a landlord, or distinguishing the beneficiary of income in context of a property unit that you manage for a client landlord (the beneficiary may be the landlord or it may be yourself as the property manager).

Hence, we recently added the ability to record arbitrary types of financial transactions. On many of the financial statement pages you will now see an additional link called ‘Record Other Transaction’ as shown in the following screenshot:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Clicking on the link shows a slightly modified version of the regular transaction dialog – the main difference being that you can explicitly control the source and target financial parties for the transaction. The ‘From’ field let’s you choose the financial party from which the transaction is paid. The ‘To’ field let’s you choose the financial party to which the transaction is paid. These two financial parties can be your business, a tenancy or any organization such as a supplier, an agent or a landlord.

See the following screenshot:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Refer to the help for more information and for examples of usage.

Simplified attachments user interface

We have made a couple of improvements to the attachments dialog to make it easier to use. It is now possible to add attachments directly from the attachments dialog and to add multiple attachments at the same time. The following screenshot shows the updated attachments dialog:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Ability to export or email Open Tenancy balances

The home page dashboard has always contained a panel showing a summary of open tenancies, including key details such as next payment due and balance. The panel now has options to more easily share the summary of open tenants – either by emailing it or exporting to excel.

See the following screenshot:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Clicking on the cog icon in the top-right corner of the Open Tenancies section shows a pop-up menu which allows you to export or email an excel file with the open tenancy details.

 

News – December 2017

Hello to all our customers! We have recently updated the web site to reflect legislative changes to the way in which financial cost relief is applied for tax returns of individual landlords.

Tax Worksheet updated with 2017-2018 Section 24 changes

We have updated the tax worksheet to take into account the new rules for financial cost relief from 2017 onwards.

In a nutshell, from April 2017, HMRC are restricting the finance cost relief for individual landlords on residential properties to the basic rate of income tax. The restriction will be introduced in stages from 2017 through to 2021 and will apply mostly to individual landlords (not companies) who manage residential properties and who pay higher rate tax.

The following screenshot shows the additional calculations displayed on the tax worksheet for financial periods after 6/Apr/2017:

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

The detailed calculations section of the tax worksheet displays details of how Finance Cost Relief is calculated for your business as follows:

Field	Description
F1. Total finance costs	The total expenditure your business has incurred for financial costs such as loan interest. Specifically, this aggregates all transactions in the financial period with tax category ‘Loan interest and other financial costs’.
F2. Percentage to deduct from property income	The percentage of the total finance costs that can be deducted from property income for the period in question.
F3. Amount to deduct from property income	The actual amount that can be deducted from property income – i.e. F1 divided by F2 x 100. This figure will be inserted into box 26 of the tax worksheet
F4. Amount to claim using basic rate tax	The remainder of the finance costs which can be claimed as a reduction from your income tax liability at the basic rate of tax (currently 20%). Refer to the HMRC guidelines for further details. The way to claim this amount will be clarified once HMRC publish the 2017/2018 self-assessment forms.

Some important notes:

• The finance cost relief section of the tax worksheet is provisional until HMRC publish full details of the final SA105 form for 2017/2018.

 

For further details see the following HMRC publications:

• Changes to tax relief for residential landlords
• Restricting finance cost relief for individual landlords
• Property Income Manual: Deductions: Interest: Restriction of relief for income tax purposes from 2017-2018

News – June 2017

Hello to all our customers! A brief update on changes we have recently made to SmartPropertyManager.com:

Customisable home page

Following on from recent improvements to the general look and feel of the web site, we have now added the ability to customise the appearance of the home page in a number of ways.

The following screenshot shows the various ways in which the home page can be customised. Read on for more details.

[Tip: click image to enlarge]

Walking through each of the allowable customisations:

• Show or hide the side bar by clicking on the horizontal bars icon in the top-left corner of the page.
• Collapse or expand individual panels by clicking on the minus/plus icon in the top-right of each panel.
• Show or hide panels by accessing the Customise Home Page dialog from the page settings sub-menu in the top-right hand corner of the page.
• Re-arrange the location of panels by dragging and dropping them into the desired location on the home page.
• Customise the content of individual panels by clicking on the cog icon in the top-right hand corner of the panel.

The web site will conveniently remember your customisations and reapply them the next time you access the home page.

Single downloadable help manual

The help manual can now be viewed as a full single page. To access it, go to any help page, go to the contents and then scroll to the bottom – as shown in the following screenshot:

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Useful hint: Many modern browsers support printing to PDF so you can go to the single page view and then print to PDF to get an easily downloadable PDF file containing all SmartPropertyManager’s help content.

Improved support for new internet domains

SmartPropertyManager.com now recognises and allows use of email addresses in new top-level internet domains, e.g. @business, @realtor, @property.

Additional Improvements

• We’ve made some changes under the covers to minimise the amount of content that needs to be generated which means that most pages now display more quickly than before.
• A few tweaks have been made to make printable page views print more visually appealing and simpler.