A Letter from the President                                                                                             Previous Letter
September, 2008

August was marked by a pesky hurricane, Fay, that visited Florida a record-setting four times, and Michael Phelps' daunting eight gold medals. Both events remind us of the value of careful planning, hard work and plain dumb luck. The dumb luck we ran into this month was a timely complaint from  a long-time customer about tenants who prepay their rent.  

We'd had lots of feedback about handling bankruptcies and late charges, but never about pre-payments before.  He pointed out that, in IPM 2007, if a tenant is paid in full, the receipts screen gives you no help  in spreading a payment.  Say  you've got a tenant with rent at $500 a month, a parking fee of $20, a Landscape fee of $25, and a pass-through water bill of $21.48. So the tenant pays with a check of $566.48, in the middle of the month for the next month. How do you know how much for water or landscape? You have to check the tenant's Charge/Due screen or consult a paper file.  Unfortunately, I had to admit he had a good point. And that we hadn't addressed that issue in IPM 10.  

Sure, you could pull up multiple screens in IPM 10, but it's still and extra step you shouldn't have to take.  We needed to add the "Charges" to the receipt screen for prepayments - and we needed to do it before the first release.  That's what I call great timing; if we'd gotten IPM 10 rolled out before we heard about this, it would have to wait for a future update.  Now it could be part of the product from the first day. And because we'd designed IPM 10 to be easy to enhance, flexible and modular, it didn't that long to implement that the new column. Dumb luck, good planning and hard work; always a good combination.

Another stroke of luck that hit us this month was an email out of the blue from one of the previous developers of IPM.  As a historian by avocation, I'm looking forward to hearing more about the early days of IPM, and the transition from DOS to Windows. We'll share anything that's fit to print in our next Newsletter. 

On the subject of hard work, September is focused around getting ready for the pre-release Webinars for IPM 10, and getting all the pieces pulled together to make the transition effortless for our customers.  It'll be a demo of what IPM 10 looks like, and a side-by-side comparison on how to do the steps in the monthly cycle.  We look forward to sharing the excitement! The first webinar is on Tuesday, September 16, at 2 pm  Eastern and  it will be repeated on Wednesday, October 8 at 2 pm Eastern - we invite you all to attend. Unfortunately, space is limited at both webinars, so register early - email Sales@fullhousesoftware and tell us which webinar you want to attend.  In the Webinar we'll show you IPM 10, walk through common tasks and compare IPM 2007 to IPM 10.0 live.  If you can't attend either webinar, we'll record it and post it on our website where you can view it for free.

Let's hope our luck holds up throughout September; we're only half-way through the hurricane season and the only hot air I want around here is me practicing for the webinars.

Sincerely,

William J Bennett