We are a leading corporate housing firm based in Arizona, with plans to expand nationally. Our strategy involves leveraging Hostfully as our primary software solution to scale operations to over 30 units. Currently, our main challenge lies in the absence of robust support for monthly rentals within Hostfully. This issue primarily affects the payment system, requiring manual effort to divide the total stay balance into monthly installments, which is not sustainable as we grow.

This challenge is particularly evident on our Whitelabel website, where the absence of monthly pricing for reservations poses a significant hurdle. For instance, a unit priced at $3500 per month should ideally display as "$3500/month" when guests select dates on our booking platform. Instead, a five-month booking, which is common for us, currently shows as $17,500, leading to confusion and dissatisfaction among guests.

Despite these challenges, Hostfully offers comprehensive features that meet our needs in other areas. If Hostfully could implement toggling options for payments and quotes to "monthly" rather than just nightly or total amounts, it would significantly enhance its suitability as the top choice for corporate and long-term housing management software.

This is critical for our business to scale with Hostfully. Nearly all our stays are 30 days or longer. Being able to define all the fees and monthly rent separately is needed. Then, rules about what to collect on which dates, with automatic send of the monthly invoice are the minimum features we need.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by manually charging them? I don't see a way to manually charge someone, I see ways to mark something paid, ways to send a payment reminder, etc.. Are you suggesting we go and make an invoice in stripe directly?

More feedback on this, I think allowing us to pick the # of chunks to break the payments into is important. The use case where this matters are people on work assignment. If they are expected to do monthly expense reports they will likely want to pay monthly. Some people don't have enough room on their personal cards to pay for an entire month so they ask for every two weeks etc...

One size fits all wouldn't really work here. The system we moved from to hostfully had an amazingly intuitive way to handle this that met our needs 100% of the time. I'm attaching a screenshot of the UI, there is an add payment option that (by default) evenly splits the amount of the payment based on the # of payments, but, you can edit each one if needed (we never did). In the second screenshot you can see that there is a set of pre-defined choices for when that payment is due as well as a custom one, we would set a day for each one of those payments based on the agreement with the tenant and on that interval another stripe transaction would occur and bill the card.

I feel a better and more flexible and simple way to implement this only once is to allow managers to split payments the way they want and send balance payment requests for partial amounts due instead of the whole thing.
Right now if we go to "pipeline->Send Balance Payment Request" , it will
send a link to collect the whole remaining balance.
All we need here is the option to specify the $ amount when sending any balance payment request email. Then each manager can decide how to split the payments based on rental terms and agreement with each guest.

For us it’s anything longer than 30 days.
Additionally, it would be nice to set up a different long-term lease that the guest signs rather than the standard house rules sent out.
If stay > 29 days, long term lease, payment due 2 weeks in advance.
Stay - 14 days = first 30 days due
Next 30 day cycle - 14 days = next 30 days due. Etc.

It would also be nice if we could enable the ACH option in stripe to collect the money rather than losing the higher percentage to stripe for long-term guests.

Thanks! I define it as any stay longer than 30 nights.

The automatic feature suggested above would primarily be helpful for stays of 60+ nights (situations where we extend the guest’s stay multiple times so that they can pay 30 nights at a time.

Honestly, though, at this point I would be happy just to be able to extend a guest’s stay manually again. We have been having lots of issues lately extending guests stays via Hostfully due to A) current reservations showing as archived even though the guest’s stay is still in progress (which prevents us from extending their stay), and B) the inability to charge guests who book directly additional amounts when extending their stay (the pop-up that triggers this has been very unreliable lately).

Any help with this would be much appreciated. The features requested in my initial message are nice-to-haves. Being able to extend a guests stay is an essential.

Thanks!

We would define long term as + 30 days/nights. Additionally, I would add that when guests are "shopping" 30+ night stays

Totally agree. We frequently come across cases where the whole balance can not be paid at
once. for instance a 3month reservation which will be paid one month at a
time . But if we go to "pipeline->Send Balance Payment Request" , it will
send a link to collect the whole remaining balance. We need a way to be able to send payment request for partial payments(e.g. one month at a time) , and not the whole payment amount due.

It would be great if we could set up our long-term guests with a monthly automatic billing as opposed to manually having to send them invoices every month.

Thank you for your feedback, Jesse. We have received your idea and our team will consider adding it next time we work on the product. For now, the temporary solution is, you can set them only to pay only a percentage of the total payment at the time of the reservation. Then you can charge them manually and record it every month.

Based on the votes of the idea, our dev team will consider adding it and when it is done, you will be notified