Together we raised nearly $523,000 for Hurricane Katrina relief to be donated this week to the American Red Cross. In e-mail notices the last couple weeks, we told you our founder and Chairman, Dave Biggers, would personally match dollar for dollar any donations made through our website up to $250,000. You cleared $250,000 on Monday the 12th, but we didn't want to stop you! So in total our customers and other real estate professionals donated $264,213.53, to be matched by Dave.

Combined with our $150,000 donation to the REALTORS® Relief Fund to address housing needs in the wake of the disaster, we collected or donated $678,427.06, an impressive figure that proves that no one understands communities and pitching in like those who work with real estate and homeowners for a living.

One of our Vice Presidents, Adam Calvery, is in Mississippi with his Oklahoma Air Guard unit, and told us the Gulfport, MS area is "like 100 miles of 9/11, or Hiroshima without the fallout." Here are some of his other observations, sent along Sunday, September 11:

It's indescribable, and there are people there sifting through trees, sand, rubble, anything, looking for anything salvageable. I see the water and the MREs [Meals Ready to Eat] they have, and I know that some of that stuff was paid for by donations like those from our customers, and I'm able to see where that money is ending up, and that's really touching. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see these people. It's as though someone took a wire bristle brush about 1/4 to a 1/2 mile wide and just scraped the earth with it. Wherever it touched, it's almost scraped bare to the ground. There was a Ruby Tuesdays I used to eat at when I was stationed in Biloxi for a short time... you couldn't tell it ever existed now. Not the parking lot, not the sign, not the foundation, nothing. It's vanished. There are entire neighborhoods like that.

Our job has been to get the planes on the ground, parked, unloaded and back in the air. The planes range in size from being able to hold six pallets (aircraft pallets are about eight feet by eight feet), to 36 pallets (the C-5 Galaxy is huge, nearly 100 yards long in the cargo bay).

On our side of the runway/parking ramp we unload the planes, and on the other side the Army is loading up every kind of helicopter known to man and flying directly to the neighborhoods and aid stations and delivering the water and food. Since Saturday the 3rd, your Oklahoma Air Guard has unloaded and delivered 1.7 million MREs that have fed 150,000 people. I'm not sure of the total water count, but that's been the bulk of what we've been getting. We unloaded 850,000 lbs of water in one day, and that was about average for the week. We're averaging about 20-30 airplanes a day, and have about 30 people to do the unloading here. My point here is that the money that's being donated is going right to work and feeding people and keeping them "healthy."

If you haven't donated to the relief effort or want to help out more, the Red Cross can use all the cash it can get. Click here to give directly to the Red Cross.

The Aurora generation of WinTOTAL gives you tons of new and easier ways of doing business. As we've been telling you in the last few newsletters, visit the Aurora video library for online tutorial videos that guide you through the most important and timesaving new features.

One thing Aurora doesn't have that Athena did is Management Reports. We've improved business management with the Aurora generation all right, but one of the most important ways we've boosted its usefulness is by moving it out of WinTOTAL and on to your XSite. You don't need an XSite to perform essential features like creating an invoice and tracking your orders. But working together — and synched up automatically, so you don't have to retype or repeat work — Aurora and your XSite give you the industry's most comprehensive and best billing and management tools.

If you use Management Reports in Athena you know it takes effort to keep orders, files and contacts in sync. This is especially true if you're trying to help run a business with more than a couple appraisers. By moving the business management back end to XSites, a bunch of new doors are open that make it easy to run and measure your business. The biggest one is this: You'll never have to export an order from XSite Order Manager into WinTOTAL again.

When you automatically sync up Aurora and your XSite, they work together almost as extensions of one another. The Athena generation of WinTOTAL and your XSite are two separate entities, and they work independently. Aurora and your XSite will work seamlessly together, running desktop applications on your desktop and applications that can take advantage of a web-based environment, like billing and business management, on your XSite.

Don't worry: If you use WinTOTAL for billing, you can upload the current year's information into Aurora, and you won't lose a thing. You can also continue to view management reports you created with the Athena generation of WinTOTAL, you just won't be able to add data to them once Aurora is up and running.

In an office environment, making Business Management a web-based application allows appraisers in different locations, or even just different workstations, to be in sync at all times without you rooting through contacts, reports and billing information to keep everything on the same page. Appraisers in your office don't see or get involved with others' work or billing. You can even have an office manager without a WinTOTAL installation — which describes a great many multiple appraiser offices — create and assign orders, pushing them to the appropriate WinTOTAL station, and getting back all the status, billing and management information the business needs in one central place.

The functionality of XSite Order Manager — and then some — is now part of the Aurora generation of WinTOTAL. The Tracking PowerView in Appraisal Desktop will show you your dashboard view of all your orders, regardless of whether they originated with your XSite or not. You never have to leave the report you're working on to check your dashboard.

Creating XSite logins for clients who fax you orders is as easy as ever, only now you can do it from WinTOTAL, too. Creating XSite orders is even easier — select the client information in WinTOTAL and once you've set it up to automatically sync with your XSite, all the information appears just as if the order was placed online. This lets your client check status, retrieve completed reports and more, and you don't have to duplicate work re-keying information. No more creating an "order on behalf" — the relevant information is populated in the right places and stored automatically after it's entered in WinTOTAL.

You can still create invoices for reports in WinTOTAL, without an XSite, in much the same manner as you do now in Athena. And it's a good idea to take advantage of the QuickLists in the Order PowerView by setting up "canned" entries for your clients and charges. If you have an XSite, it will automatically bring in the invoice and payment information for recordkeeping and statusing purposes. If you don't, simply send the invoice to your client. And WinTOTAL's Tracking PowerView lets you track your orders without an XSite as well, and also lets you filter so you're looking at just WinTOTAL orders, just XSite orders, or all orders.

If you work in a multiple appraiser office you'll want to visit our website to learn how to create sub-accounts, reassign orders, set up fee tables and so on. You can also find out lots more information on running reports, entering orders, sending status messages and all the other timesaving tools we've included with Business Management — now on your XSite instead of in WinTOTAL. Note that you won't see any changes to the My Office area of your XSite until you install Aurora and point it in the direction of your XSite.

The Aurora video library includes several tutorial videos on the new ways of doing billing and business management with Aurora and your XSite. They serve as a great introduction before you get the upgrade or as a step by step, hands on learning tool once you do. Start here for a video overview of new billing and business management features in Aurora.