Allocate housing benefit payments to a tenancy

Once you have recorded the payment of housing benefit from the local authority to the agency, this can be allocated to individual tenancies in accordance with the benefit payment schedule.

Allocations from the overall benefit payment may be made to tenancies which fulfil the following criteria:

• are associated with the benefit authority which made the payment
• have a non-zero benefit balance due
• have not already received an allocation from this benefit transaction

Allocate a benefit receipt from an existing bulk payment

STEP-BY-STEP

1. You can click through to a particular housing benefit bulk payment from the list of unallocated payments, and then click Allocate on the payment overview.
   
   
   
   
2. Alternatively, you can click Record Receipt from a tenant, property or tenancy overview screen, in the same way as works for normal rent receipts from tenants.
   
   
   
   
3. On the tenant receipt form, if you have clicked through from the payment overview by clicking Allocate, the Benefit to Agency (Allocate Existing) option will be selected. Select an unallocated benefit payment from the drop-down menu. 
   
   
   
   
4. Specify the amount of benefit to allocate to this tenancy, in accordance with the benefit payment schedule. This will automatically be allocated to the oldest benefit rents first, although you can modify this is required. 
   
   
   
   
5. Click Save to record the allocation.
6. The bulk benefit payment summary will be updated to reflect details of the allocation.
   
   

If no benefit rent is currently due, or if no bulk payments have been received or are awaiting allocation (i.e. all have been fully allocated), then some of the receipt type options may be disabled. 

Management fees

A management fee may be charged to the landlord when a benefit payment is allocated to pay rent on a tenancy. More details on applying management fees for collecting rent.