Working with Late Fee Schedules

The RentPost Late Fee Scheduler system is one of the most flexible systems for assessing late fees available.  It's extremely capable of accommodating nearly any schedule you'd like to setup.  Depending on how you setup your late fees, this will either be extremely straight-forward or require just a bit of planning.  So, let's walk through the interface, and then a couple examples to get you started.

The first thing you are going to want to do is edit the tenant record you want to assign a late fee schedule to.  Then choose the advanced option for your late fees.

This will pop open the Late Fee Schedules window that will show all of your late fee schedules in the system.  You can edit these or add a new schedule, which is what we're going to do for this guide.  So, to get started, you'll want to choose add new.  This will then display what you see below, to add your schedule.

So, from here, the first thing you'll want to do is give your new schedule a nice nickname.  This should be something short and simple that will help you recall which schedule this is you are creating.

Next, I should point out the yellow box.  This is very important as we've written a code to interpret your input and output that into plain english.  Refer to this box to verify that your input is giving you the results you expect!

So, let's do a couple examples here to explain how you might go about creating one for your company.

$25 assessed after 5 days

This is probably the simplest schedule to create and one of the most common.  So, please see the settings below.

Now, note that we set the late fee to $25 and then selected a 5 day grace period here with it only occurring once.  So, after 5 days, the tenant will be charged $25.  Pretty simple, right?  Let's try a harder one...

$25 assessed after 5 days and $5 every day thereafter

So, this one is a bit more complex, we'll assess the tenant $25 after 5 days, and then $5 every day after that until the late charges on the account have been paid in full.

OK, so, note that we added a new line on this one.  This is done by clicking the green plus button.  We've left the first line alone, that's b/c there isn't anything to change there, we still want to assess $25 after 5 days.  The only difference here is, we want to add $5 every day after that, that they are late.  So, the new line is set to $5 and then 1 day for the grace period and then recurring.  Note that we could have set the grace period on this recurring item to 2 days for an every other day scenario, and so on and so forth.

Do note here that the green plus button disappeared and is no longer an option.  After you add a recurring late fee line item, you can't add anything after that.  This would cause serious issues.  So, to be able to add others, you'll need to change that item to one-time or remove the line item all together.

So, that wasn't so bad was it?  After you've setup your late fee schedule, just add that schedule to your list, then go back to your tenant and make sure it's selected as the chosen Late Fee Schedule, save your tenant record and you're all set.  When charges are late, the late fees will now be automatically generated.

It should be noted that the RentPost system is going to generate late fees based on this schedule.  Many landlords and mangers don't really stick to their schedules and enforce them.  We suggest that you do so and use the system as the scapegoat with your tenants.  From our experience, tenants pay on time more often and don't send in as many late fee removal requests.  However, it should be noted that the system will assess these late fees, so be sure that this is the result you want.  You will have to manually remove any unwanted late fees on a per tenant basis.

Also note that, if you fail to record a payment on time for a tenant, the system doesn't know any better, it's still going to assess the late fees.  If you have this tenant setup for online access, they will also get a notification that their rent is late and they've been charged a late fee.  We recommend being punctual with recording revenue and rent payments from tenants, it's very quick and easy and will make your life easier.

Thanks and if you have any questions regarding working with Late Fee Schedules or any custom scenarios you can't quite figure out, please let us know, we'd be happy to have a look.