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Managing Rent Arrears

How do you manage and track rent arrears in Landlord Studio?

Ben Luxon avatar
Written by Ben Luxon
Updated over a week ago

Contents

Adding a Tenant with Rent Arrears

When you add a new property with an existing lease you there may be rent arrears that you want to add in.

Step 1: First you need to add the property to the system.

Step 2: Then add the lease.

Note: When adding the lease you can backdate the start date of the lease. This will create payments periods for all the rent expected between the lease start date and the current date.

Note 2: Make sure to correctly add the rent payment date, rent frequency, and rent amount.

Step 3: When all the details are entered hit "save".

The system will then ask you if you want to bring the rent payments up to date.

Step 4: Select "yes". This will automatically enter all the payments up to the current date.

Step 5: If tenants still owe rent from any of the previous payment periods you can edit the historic payments by clicking on a payment to edit it.

Step 6: If the tenant made a partial payment you can edit the rent amount.

If you are expecting more rent to be paid for this period, make sure to mark the payment status as "incomplete". This tells the system that more rent is expected for this period.

If you don’t mark the payment as incomplete the system will not expect the remainder of the rent amount to be paid and will move into the next payment period.

Step 7: Save.

Note: If the tenant hasn't paid any of the rent you can delete the payment entirely. To delete a payment, scroll to the bottom of the edit payment page and select delete.

Using the Pro-Rata Feature to Set a Custom Amount Due

Should you add a tenant who has rent still owing from another property or owes money for another reason, you can use the pro-rata feature to enter a custom amount owed for their first rent payment.

For example, if you move a tenant into a new property who has rent owed from a different tenancy, eg. the tenant moves from Unit A to Unit B but still owes rent for Unit A you can use the pro-rata feature to manually set the first rent payment amount owed to include the previous rent arrears.

When setting up the lease, scroll down and turn on pro-rata. This will automatically calculate the pro-rata amount of the first payment according to the details already entered on the lease.

Select it and you can manually override this amount to reflect the actual pro-rata rent amount plus any additional rent arrears owed at the start of the tenancy.

The system will then show the first rent payment due as equalling the pro-rata amount entered.

Tracking Rent Arrears

Landlord Studio will automatically calculate how much rent is still owed if a tenant makes a partial payment. Additionally, should they pay more than is expected Landlord Studio will ask if you want to overflow the payment into the next payment period.

The system will show the full amount of rent arrears due starting from the earliest incomplete rent payment, and will apply any rental income entered to the earliest payment period (unless you choose otherwise).

An example:

The tenant owes $500 per month starting in January.

They only pay $400 in January.

You would log the rent amount paid and mark the payment status as "incomplete". The system will show $100 still owing for January.

In February they only pay $300.

You log the payment selecting January as the payment period. The system will ask if you want to overflow the payment. Select yes and the system will apply $100 to the previous payment period and $200 to February.

The system will now show $300 rent overdue for February.

In March they pay $800.

You apply this to February and again overflow the rent payments. The system applies $300 to February and $500 to March.

Landlord Studio will now show as no rent overdue.

Reporting Rent Arrears

You can run the rent overdue report to show all overdue rent payments across your portfolio or on an individual property.

Additionally, you can run the rent ledger report. This report shows expected rent over a period compared to rent paid so far over that period and can give you a quick oversight of any rent payment discrepancies.

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