Set up rent to apply automatically

The whole point of using property management software to manage your rental properties is to alleviate as much of the day-to-day admin work as possible.

Applying rent is one of the most obvious tasks to entrust to your rental software, and Elevate makes this very easy so that you can always see up-to-date rental balances with minimal effort.

You can set up rent either at the outset when creating a tenancy, or at any later stage. Often rent may change over time and these changes may be handled in the same way.

Rent schedules

Recurring rent is handled by dedicated rent schedules. See full details on how these rent schedules work.

Set up rent when creating a new tenancy

When creating a new tenancy you can follow the steps in this article and leave the default "Apply rent every period" option selected.

If you don't want to set up the rent schedule to apply rent just yet, then select "Do not apply rent automatically" and you can set this up afterwards.

Set up rent on an existing tenancy

If you skipped the step of adding rent when the tenancy was created, you can easily set it up at a later stage. It may also be that the rent is changing, either in terms of the overall rent value or the amount being contributed from a benefit agency or the tenant's shortfall payment.

If there is no recurring rent schedule set up on an active tenancy, a warning will appear to draw your attention to this.

STEP-BY-STEP

1. From the relevant tenancy overview, click on the Rent & Charges > Rent menu, or click the List Rent button.
   
   
   
   
2. This page shows existing rent schedules, as well as all rent applied to date. 
3. Click Add Rent to create a new rent schedule.
   
   
   
   
4. Specify who the rent is due from - the tenant or a benefit payment from the local authority.
   
   
   
   
5. For the purpose of this article we will assume that rent is to be applied on a recurring basis, so leave the Recurring checkbox ticked. Read this article to add a one-off rent charge.
6. Specify the date from which this rent schedule should take effect and start to apply rent, and how often it should be applied.
   
   
   
   
7. Specify the amount of rent to be charged.
8. Provide a description, if required If the description is left blank then it will automatically create a description for each charge based on the date range covered, e.g. "Rent for 1 Jun 2018 to 30 Jun 2018".
   
   
   
   
9. Click Save to create the new rent schedule.

Rent charges will be applied as appropriate. 

How the system start date affects rent

The system will only automatically apply rent from the system start date. Any periods before that are ignored since they will probably already have been dealt with in another system.

If you have rent arrears from prior to the system start date then can be entered onto the tenancy so that the opening balance reflects outstanding rent, and so that this rent may be received onto the new system.

 RELATED ARTICLES

• How rent schedules work in more detail