Holiday Letting System: Announcing a new release. (V4.2)

For support requests (and discussion) by users of the Holiday Letting System.
To prevent SPAM, registrations are approved only for users. (Send us an email before registering if you have a good reason and are not a user). Remember, you can view the forum without registering.

Moderator:bblake

bblake
Site Admin
Posts:52
Joined:Sat Mar 01, 2008 3:42 pm
Holiday Letting System: Announcing a new release. (V4.2)

Post by bblake » Wed May 16, 2018 3:18 pm

A new release of the Holiday Letting System is now available for download from our website, at https://erwwen.com/holletsys/download.htm

This release offers a number of enhancements especially ones aimed at improving the ease of configuring and using the web site integration features. There is also one feature to help comply with GDPR and improvements to the diagnostic features. Highlights include:
  • Expense categories: Now supports up to 10 expense categories, increased from 6.
  • Changes to support GDPR. In particular the "Omit from Mailshots" checkbox can now be automatically set when booking data is downloaded into LetSys from a web form. The sample web form and processor are updated to show how to handle this improvement.
  • Rent calculation for short lets. A new option enables a more reasonable rent to be calculated for a short let which straddles two weekly rates. The fixed charge is now based on a weighted average rate, based on the number of days at each rate. Existing users will see no change, but can change to the new calculation formula by checking the option "Use weighted average when short let straddles two rates" on the rent tab of the configuration program. See topic Minimum Charge for short let for more details. Note that existing users will see no change in the way the rent is calculated, unless they check the box. As this gives a more reasonable result, new users will find this is the default.
  • Website integration options. These have become more powerful, and there are more options. Therefore they have been split into two tabs in the configuration program. “web-down” and “web-up” to cover download functions and upload functions respectively. More details are in the help file which you can view once you have upgraded.
  • Diagnostic log This is no longer pruned periodically as we could not look back far enough on a couple of occasions. More details are in the help file in topic “What’s new”.
  • Minor additions There have been some additions and improvements to the help file; also some messages are improved and clarified.
  • If you download a Web Booking Form you need to process all incoming bookings before changing the order of your properties or the booking form won't be found. This possibility is now detected in more cases, especially for some Wordpress built sites. There's an improved error message for this problem.
  • Fixes. This release also fixes a few issues. In particular (a) with Web / Synch Database which occurred when there was a property without a rates file and (b) when publishing the availability status in the first few days of a new year.
Existing users can upgrade to this new release free of charge. The new version has been tested on all current versions of Windows.

The new version can be downloaded from https://erwwen.com/holletsys/download.htm

The full list of the new features is here: https://www.erwwen.com/holletsys/releasehistory.htm

IMPORTANT:When you upgrade your software: First, take a backup (we strongly recommend the built-in backup tool found under tools on the menu).
Do not uninstall the previous version, or you will lose your settings and data. Just install “on top” of your existing version.
All options you have already set are preserved. You do not need to re-enter your registration code.
It is essential that LetSys is not running when you run the install module.

More details on how to upgrade are here: https://erwwen.com/holletsys/Support/upgrade.htm Please note that this version will now become the only supported version. While many users may not need the new features and may choose not to upgrade, we will not assist with problems unless you first upgrade to the latest version.

Brendan Blake.

Post Reply