Renewals guide

1. Put your clients in

A client is a name and, if you want the renewal email prepared for you, an address. You can add one from Clients, or create one inline while you are editing a tour, which saves entering the same studio twice.

Client email addresses live in your own session rather than on the server, along with your payment details. They are used to prepare a message and are not stored for later.

2. Put a term end on each tour

Open a tour and add its term end: the date the hosting arrangement with that client runs out. This is the single most important field in the product, and it is the one no platform can supply, because the platform is not a party to your arrangement.

If you do not know a date, put in the one you believe and correct it later. A wrong date that is a fortnight early costs you a reminder you did not need. No date at all costs you the tour.

3. Say what it charges and costs

Two different numbers, and the product keeps them apart on purpose.

• The charge is what the client pays you for the year. It is what a renewal invoice will be for.
• The hosting cost is what the tour costs you every month to keep up. The form takes a monthly or a yearly figure and stores the monthly one, because that is what every total reads; it shows you what a yearly figure works out to before saving.

A charge is refused without a term end. There is nothing to renew on a date that does not exist.

4. Read the three queues

The product asks three questions, and each has its own screen.

• Renewals — what is due in the next seven, thirty or ninety days, in date order.
• Offline — tours that were live and are not any more. You mark these yourself today; see below.
• Uncovered — tours you are hosting that have no active client agreement behind them. This is money going out with nothing coming in, and it is usually a surprise the first time you look.

5. Send a renewal

From a tour, choose Send renewal. dotpano picks the route from what you have connected: a draft invoice in Xero, a Stripe payment link, or your bank details for a transfer. It writes the email and opens it in your own mail app or in Gmail.

dotpano never sends mail as you. The message arrives from your own address, in your own thread with that client, which is where the conversation belongs.

Alerts

Scans run on the server on a schedule and raise real records, so what is waiting for you is the same whichever device you open. Marking one read is stored, so it does not come back on your other phone.

Email delivery is built but not switched on, so alerts are in the app for now. The scan runs twice a day, and each agreement raises one alert the first time it is seen inside your notice window — one, not one a day until you deal with it.

What it does not know

Three things worth being clear about, because a tool that overstates itself is worse than no tool.

• It does not check whether a tour is up. That needs a platform connection which does not exist yet. The scan reports itself blocked rather than returning a clean result, and you mark a tour offline yourself.
• It does not know you were paid. It records that an invoice was raised. Reconciling a payment against a bank account is not built, and an agreement on file is not proof of anything having been paid.
• It does not import your tours. Automatic discovery from Matterport and Realsee is what dotpano is being built towards and neither has approved it. Realsee has no customer authorisation path at all today.

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