Flex Reporting product training webinar

Curious on how to utilize this powerful vacation rental data and analytics tool? Join Escapia experts as they highlight the features and functions of Flex Reporting!

In this webinar, the Escapia support team covered the brand new Flex Reporting vacation rental reporting and analytics tool! Topics covered included what the Flex Reporting feature is, navigating Flex Reporting dashboards, covering vacation rental data Performance Insights, and reviewing the Flex Reservations Report. Additionally, the team went over common uses for the reports module, as well as system requirements and troubleshooting tips!

The Escapia team also answered some common customer questions.

What is the Flex Reporting vacation rental analytics tool?

Flex Reporting is a powerful user-friendly tool that really focuses on simplifying data for you. That data is also easily customizable, which is a really big benefit for your vacation rental reporting and analytics needs. Flex reporting can help you monitor reservations, track performance, and also identify trends – all tailored to your business needs, as it’s highly customizable so that you can see the data you want without extensive exporting, sorting, and filtering.

Some key features of the reporting tool for vacation rentals is the advanced customization. You can focus on metrics that are important to your business, and it has all sorts of intuitive sorting and filtering. It also includes the necessary standard reporting features, including downloading for sharing and printing.

You can find Flex Reporting under the new reports tab, and you’ll see that we’ve automatically built two different reports for you: the Flex Reservation Report and the Performance Insights report. While these base reports cannot be deleted, you’ll be able to add additional vacation rental data analytics reports and delete those as needed for your business. Next, we’ll break down what the two default reports are specifically built for!

  • Flex Reservation Report will show reservation data based on over 30 plus existing reports in Escapia. The report shows a default list of data, but lets you add lots of good customizations so you can filter only specific vacation rental data based off of 30 plus existing reports in Escapia.
  • Performance Insights is going to really help you focus on your business’ overall performance. You can filter this information as well if you want to see the nitty gritty details on things like how a set of units is doing.

The reports themselves are also flexible! You can rename, duplicate, and download as a PDF or image. You can also restore the dashboard should you customize and want to revert to defaults, meaning your vacation rental analytics can be as complex or simple as you’d like!

For those who have multiple reports, you can also search between them, delete old or out of date ones, and use folders to specifically drag and drop similar reports together and keep your vacation rental reporting schedule simplified!

How to use the Flex Reporting vacation rental reporting filters

Probably my favorite part of the reports module is the filtering options. You’ll notice that there’s a ton of options, and what you see isn’t even the limit! Selecting the pencil on a filter option will allow you to go into even more detail on date ranges and options on each filter, and you can easily revert to the default as needed.

We of course have the most common filter options like ADR, RevPAR, occupancy rates, and basic revenue, but our vacation rental reporting and analytics options go into more depth than that! You can use filter options like different renter types, unit codes, and regions. You can also select layered filters on top like year or quarter for deeper analysis! 

Additionally, you can use the columns system that shows all applied filters next to each other. You can easily edit them on the top left set of options, and they also have a ton of different options, particularly for vacation rental property managers who have multiple offices. You can filter by location, reservation type and more, and when you select a filter option you’ll see that the columns are intuitive and will auto-update upon selection. You can even filter based on if a rental agreement is signed!

An example of Flex Reporting Performance Insights vacation rental data

Our first example is going to go over Flex Reporting’s Performance Insights. This is the default view in Flex Reporting so you can see how your business is doing at a glance. You’ll get a really quick view about revenue, bookings, occupancy, etc. so you can make actionable business decisions off of your reporting tools for vacation rentals. You’ll also notice towards the top that we have specific display options, so you can choose what will be viewed in the chart itself. Specific category filters for this part of the vacation rental analytics tool include:

  • Revenue – this will show your gross rental revenue for the filtered time period, without including revenue associated with fees or add-ons
  • Bookings - the number of guest bookings for quick unit analysis
  • Nights sold – the number of nights reserved for guest bookings that does not include unit owners or guests of the owners
  • Occupancy – the percentage of nights reserved by guests divided by the total available nights
  • ADR – the average daily rate that customers are paying (a great number to calculate your profitability!)
  • RevPAR – the revenue per available rental, which can help you alongside ADR and occupancy in maximizing rate value

Underneath the performance insights, we also have the performance chart. The chart will give you the data when hovered over in a quick and easy format, and you’ll notice that if you hover over any of the years, quarters, or other date periods in the time axis you can view data specific to it. 

We also take a specific overview of the filters, and we highlight how data can reflect across added filters in addition to how to revert data to its’ defaults. Also worth noting is the ease of creating a downloadable CSV of the data, which can be done via the three vertical dots right above the performance charts.

You’ll notice the breakdown chart, which reflects what is currently in the chart. This can break things into your specific category filters, and you can add additional qualifiers via the “Edit Columns” option! Choose to view your vacation rental property analytics by business critical filters like “booking channel” or “reservation type” and it will update across the breakdown chart!

An example of Flex Reporting Reservation Report

From here, you can get to the Flex Reservations report in the folder area of the Flex Reporting tool – we’ve helpfully loaded it in as a default, so it will always be available to you. This report looks a bit cleaner than the Performance Insights report, but there’s a ton of customization available to adapt your data views!

You’ll be able to quickly add or remove columns as needed to the report, and soon you can simply drag and drop them to best you and your reporting needs! Filters function similar to the Performance Insights vacation rental analytics tool with deep filter options and click and confirm status. Similar to Performance Insights as well is the ease with which you can share these reports by simply clicking the three vertical dots and downloading.

Of course, you can filter beyond the defaults to popular options like booking and creation dates, renter types, office location, and more – there’s at least 100 different options! But this report pulls data from 30 different other reports, so it replaces a lot of the digging you may need to do. You can also customize and save this report and others so you don’t have to pull the same reports over and over.

Another popular feature with the Reservation Report is our “Drill into” option. This is a feature exclusive to our Flex Reporting tool that will help you isolate a single data point and identify like-situations so you can identify areas of opportunity! There’s massive potential for finding unique fields here, so have fun and play around with the tool to see where you can optimize for greater growth as a business.

The incredible power of the Flex Reporting Vacation Rental reporting and analytics software

The best part about these reports? The Flex Reservations report pulls data in real time, and the Performance Insights report updates nightly, so you can have data available to you whenever you need it. Flex Reporting represents the next great stride for your business’ growth and can have unlimited potential in helping you identify opportunities to maximize revenue, occupancy rates, and more! 

If you’re interested in how Flex Reporting and any of the other incredible tools can help your business grow, reach out to our team today.