Best way to receive rent payments
- Due before they get the keys
- 2,775
- Prorated first month
- 925
- Deposit held
- 1,850
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Receiving rent well is mostly about timing and matching: when the money is actually yours to spend, and whether it arrives in a form you can attribute to a tenancy without opening a bank statement. Both are decided when the tenancy starts, and both are cheap to get right then and awkward to fix afterwards. This page is those two decisions and what follows from them.
Open the Lease agreement Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Set the reference before the first payment
Give each tenancy a short fixed reference and put it on every demand. Names change, households share surnames, and a payment arriving with no reference is the commonest reason a rent is recorded as missing while sitting in the account. Where tenants pay irregularly, ask for the period in the reference too, because allocation is the other half of the problem.
Know when funds are actually final
Settlement is not finality. A bank debit can be returned after it appears, and a card payment can be disputed for longer still. If a payout is spent the day it lands, a return produces a negative balance and sometimes a fee. Leave a short buffer, particularly in the first months of a tenancy, and find out from any provider how a return is recovered from you.
Choose where the money lands, deliberately
Into your own account, or into a provider's and out to you on a cycle. Direct is simpler and leaves you reconciling. Via a provider means somebody else holds your rent for days, and if you hold money for other owners, that arrangement interacts with client money rules. Neither is wrong; not knowing which you bought is.
Reconcile monthly whatever the method
The ledger says what you recorded, the bank says what happened, and they agree only if somebody checks. Monthly catches the unreferenced payment, the returned debit and the posting made to the wrong tenancy while each is still small and still fixable.
Lettza Pro
Keeping the rent against the tenancy that owes it
A worksheet answers the question in front of you and forgets it. A let does not forget: the lease has dates, the rent falls due every month, the arrears carry, and the work order raised in July is the one the owner asks about in October. Lettza Pro keeps every property, unit, lease and tenant, the rent charged and received against each, and every document rendered from that record rather than retyped into it.
- Download the document as a file to send to a tenant or an owner
- Your lease and rent roll without our name on them
- Save a worked tenancy and open it again next month
- Your business name and logo on every document you print
- Take every property, lease, ledger and document out at once
- Email the invoice, receipt or reference letter straight from the record
- Take rent by card or bank debit through your own Stripe account
- Send what you collect to your accounting software instead of retyping it
$49per month, whole team
Start Lettza Pro PricingLettza Pro is $49 per month and renews automatically each month on the day you started, until you cancel. The price and the renewal date are shown before you pay and again on your account page, and we email you if the price ever changes before it takes effect.
What the person managing the let asks before running the Best way to receive rent payments
How long until rent is really mine? Treat bank debits as provisional for a short period after they settle, and card payments for longer. Providers differ on how a return is recovered.
What reference should tenants use? A short fixed one per tenancy, issued by you, not the tenant's own name. Include the period where payments are irregular.
Should rent and deposits arrive in the same account? No. Keep deposits separate as a matter of practice, and in several states as a matter of law.
Ask us about your lettings paperwork
Ask us anything about running the let with Lettza: whether it fits the way you charge rent, how the record handles a mid-tenancy rent change, what moves across if you are coming off a spreadsheet, or how the documents come out with your own name on them.