12 posts tagged with "feature"

We're excited to introduce our latest feature, Client Form. The Client Form allows your existing (and even new clients) to submit appraisal orders via a unique order link. New order requests flow direcly into your Appraisal Inbox and both you and your client receive an email confirmation of the new order submission.

Your client can then reply to the "order submitted" email and communicate with your team directly without having to log into a separate system. Messages between you and your client are synced to the appraisal's message thread in Appraisal Inbox in real time, keeping a central record of all communications.

The Client Form also allows clients to securely share files with you like engagement letters and other important documents. And your clients can upload additional documents simply by attaching them to the email thread when replying to you, ensuring that all necessary documents are easily accessible and organized.

Nobody likes filling out forms, especially appraisers. And in the valuation profession, there's a lot of redundant data entry. At Appraisal Inbox, one of our big goals is to save appraisers time by reducing the amount of double entry and time spent digging through multiple sources of data. Based on feedback from our customers and several iterations, we've completely revamped the form for adding appraisal orders to Appraisal Inbox. This allows you to add appraisals orders much faster by reducing the number of fields that need to be filled out and automating data entry.

Our "Smart Form" now requires fewer clicks and pre-fills fields in advance. This is accomplished by automatically generating the file number, auto-filling essential property data, and pulling in other crucial information. For example, when typing the subject property's address, the Smart Form automatically geocodes it and fetches the owner, property type, and other important data from public records. The Smart Form also allows users to quickly pull up clients (or add new ones) and assign team members based on their role and commission settings in just a couple of clicks.

We've excited to announce version 2.0 of Order Forward, which includes several major improvements. The new version is much more reliable and accurate, and can handle practically any order email format that your clients use. Additionally, the feature now automatically pulls order details out of PDFs that are attached to forwarded order emails!

With Order Forward, you can simply forward your AMC, lender, and other client order (including request for quotes) emails to order@forward.appraisalinbox.email, and Appraisal Inbox will automatically add the order to your Appraisal Inbox, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

Learn how to start using Order Forward: here

In the lifecycle of an appraisal assignment there are various "to-dos" - tasks that need to be completed. For example, everything from scheduling the inspection, pulling property records, selecting comps, writing the report, delivering it for review and everything in between. And with bifurcated appraisals, different team members are often assigned specific tasks. All of these tasks and when they were completed and by whom can be difficult if not impossible to track manually.

With Tasklists, Appraisal Inbox makes it easy for appraisal firms to create custom workflows. While there is a default Tasklist, additional Tasklist "Templates" can be configured by per-property type. For example, if your team's workflow for industrial and retail appraisals differ, that can be configured. Additionally, each Task can be assigned to different team members and given a due date (which display on the assignees Schedule and can be synced with their Google Calendar).

For appraisal teams, manually tracking fee splits and commissions is a time consuming and error-prone process. In the age of the bifurcated appraisal, there might be a primary appraiser, a trainee, a data-entry or research assistant and an internal reviewer on a single assignment. Additionally, the appraiser and trainee may earn a percentage of the appraisal fee while the research assistant and reviewer are paid hourly. To calculate all of these splits and commissions manually, no less than four separate calculations are required (and later reconciled across all the appraisals completed during the pay period for payroll - per assignee).

Appraisal Inbox automates this process by allowing you to configure a team member's default fee split. And as an option, a team member's fee split can be configured based on a specific user role (appraiser, data entry, scheduler, etc) and property type (industrial, multi-family, land, etc). For example, if a specific team member with the role of appraiser always receives 60% of an appraisal fee specifically for Industrial appraisals, this can be configured. Additionally, if that same team member always acts as a reviewer on industrial appraisals but is paid by the hour, that can all be set up. The neat part is, when adding an assignee to a new order - Appraisal Inbox knows which commission calculation to apply based on the subject's property type!

The fee splits can either be flat (i.e., hourly rate) or a percentage of the assignment's fee (with the option of Net or Gross an order's Expenses). And since the commission's are automatically saved in the system, running payroll (and slicing and dicing as needed) is easy as just a couple clicks and exportable to csv format (which can be imported to Excel or your accounting software).

With the massive growth of web-based business tools over the last decade, the ability to connect your services is more important than ever. Siloed applications that can't communicate with each other are going the way of the dinosaur (as are appraisers who refuse to learn and adopt modern tools). Technology in the appraisal industry has especially been lagging in technology and interconnectivity, resulting in time consuming double entry and serious productivity loss. But we're changing that.

Appraisal Inbox unlocks your data and productivity by allowing you to integrate with 3rd-party platforms or even your own server and create any custom integration with Webhooks. For example, whenever you add a new contact in Appraisal Inbox, you could use our Send Webhooks feature to automatically sync them to your CRM with Zapier. Or perhaps you want to send your appraisal orders to Google Sheets via Make whenever they are changed. The possibilities are endless!

To learn more, check out our Send Webhooks guide.

A typical appraisal assignment often has a number of fees and expenses which need to be tracked. For example, the order might have been engaged at a specific fee. But your client needs the order quicker than usual and is willing to pay an 8% rush charge. Additionally, you may need to track mileage for tax purposes as well as record the client's "upload charge" for internal record keeping.

Appraisal Inbox makes tracking these various fees and expenses simple for appraisers. You can track one or more fees (which can be a flat fee multiplied by quantity - or - a percentage of the report fee). Fees are automatically summed up for purposes of billing your client. And for internal accounting purposes, you can track your business expenses (either on a per-appraisal basis or stand-alone).

As the cliche goes, communication is key. On your team, you may have several people working on a specific appraisal order. For example, maybe there's someone who schedules and manages the assignment, the licensed appraiser, a trainee or two, an inspector and perhaps even a reviewer. Conversations between these various assignees often take place across a number of places like email, phone calls, messaging apps - making it difficult to keep everyone on the same page.

But instead of having to juggle it all, Appraisal "Inbox" brings conversations around a specific appraisal order into one place. With Team Messaging, your team has a single unified location to communicate about the appraisal order. In addition, Appraisal Inbox sends emails containing unread messages to the assignees on the order (optional - team members can unsubscribe). This means you don't even have to leave your email inbox to discuss an appraisal order with your team!

Keeping your schedule organized is a key part of running a successful appraisal business. Appraisal Inbox has a built-in Schedule featuring agenda and month views that are automatically populated when you set Due and Inspection dates for an appraisal order.

You can manually sync dates into your Google, iCal (Apple), Outlook or Yahoo calendars. And if you're a Google Calendar user, you also have the option of having Due and Inspection dates automatically sync from Appraisal Inbox into your Google Calendar.

To learn more, check out our Google Calendar integration guide.

On a daily - even hourly basis, appraisers are inundated with "request for quote" and other order emails from their AMC & lender clients. Dealing with this influx of emails is a major time sink and quite frankly, a huge annoyance. Each order and its status must be tracked which generally means manually copying and pasting the order details into Appraisal Inbox. This means less time focused the important value-added tasks like inspecting subjects, researching comps & typing reports. But what if there were another way?

Our "Order Forward" feature allows you to forward these order emails to a special email address and Appraisal Inbox does the rest! With a little magic, Appraisal Inbox automatically pulls in the order details - meaning you no longer have to manually enter it! No more copy-paste-tango, email juggling & time-wasting double entry. If you want to take it to the next level and automate the whole process, set up auto-forwarding rules in your email client. Additionally, you can add notes to your order and assign appraisers by cc'ing them.

To learn more, check out our Order Forward guide.