Additional comments
Enabling tenants to comment on the report is a great way to ensure that you capture all the relevant information and you can prove should there be a deposit dispute, that the tenant was not only shared the report and given the opportunity to comment on, that they either did or didn’t or they’ve highlighted issues that may then require further actions.
One of the speediest ways of doing this is making sure that the tenant contact details are added, as we’ve shown in the previous video, to make sure that once the report is complete, that they have the ability to sign the report and comment on the report.
To enable commenting, if you go to settings and then reports, this is where you have your global setting for all report types. So you can actually change what you want the tenant to be able to comment on, depending on the report type, by selecting the managed types and then changing the settings accordingly.
But if we’re going to do it for the entire account, navigate down the screen, and as you can see here, we come to the tenant feedback area and as you see it’s toggled off. And it said tenant feedback allows tenants to leave comments and upload for upload photos to an inspection report. So if you have the allowed tenant to comment option, on you then can see what it might look like in your report in this screen.
So if you had to see that tenants made a ‘bottom drawer handle broken’ and it date times and references that point of when they’ve made those comments, you can also allow them to upload photographs, and then you can see the camera icon will come up on both your viewing pain here and also on the report.
You can also choose to show the comments in column or underneath the items depending on how you want to show your report. So if you put it underneath, that’s how it’ll look, or if it goes to column, it’ll be to the side of the report. So you’ll have your item description, condition comments, plus the additional comments made.
You can opt to always show photos on the report, show tenant comments summary, and also allow tenants to remove any uploads they may unnecessarily add. This does happen, so you might want to consider adding that as an option purely because of the fact that it will save you a lot of admin time should you need to have to go in there. But as you can see, every time you make a choice, the settings are saved so that the tenant always has the ability to comment on the report and it saves you having to have additional admin time trying to reset it each time.
And as I said, you can change that for each report type depending on what you want them to comment on. So some providers don’t enable commenting on checkouts, others do. So you’ve got that whole option to then make those changes to those reports on that specific report type. Once you’re ready to complete the report, click on mark complete.
And then when you review report, you’ll be able to see come up in the tab, the column for commenting on the report. So click on kitchen and now you can see that the additional comments column is there and you can add your comment and information to that detail.
So you can see here we’ve already added a comment to the extractor hood about additional scratch, but I actually want to add another comment. So if I click in the box, I’m going to put ‘slightly grubby to underside’, I’m going to click on the picture uploads, and then I’ve got all my demo pictures there, and then I want to find the extractor hood picture that I want to add. Click and open. And then that’ll upload to the system.
And as you can see there, the indicator in the red dot is indicating the picture and I can click on the picture to see that it’s there. So yep, I’m happy with that, click on save and now that information has saved, and that is then available for anybody to see, recipient wise, or the owner of the account or to also to the landlord if it’s been enabled and it’ll also show where it says training demo. That’ll be the name of the person uploading that information.
So that could be the tenant, the landlord, because each are given a unique link, which is another reason why you should always use contacts because it’s a much quicker, much faster way of ensuring that all the contacts and the comments are attributed to the right people, and as you can also see here their date and time to referenced against ‘13.16 for extract hood”. So should that be a dispute or the report go to dispute, then the evidence is irrefutable in regards to both what was captured at at the report stage, the fact that the report was then shared and the tenant was given the opportunity to comment on which they clearly have, and then all the photographic information recorded.
This will save a lot of time in regards to having additional PDF’s with maybe written commentary and also trying to find pictures and reference them.
So this is the ideal way to ensure properties is protected and any deposit disputes are quickly dealt with.
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