How do I record advance rent?

Sometimes you'll have a tenant that wants to pay for a few months or even a year or two in advance.  How you record this transaction is important to keep things accurate.  Let's take a look.

Let's say you're wanting to record a check that a tenant has given you - manually record a payment.  In order to do so, you'll follow these simple steps.

The first step is to select to "Record Payment" for a specific tenant.  If you're unsure of how to do this, please see the article describing the many aspects of the Units & Tenants page.

Next you'll want to click the green + icon to add future month's charges to the tenant account.  Keep in mind that this won't actually add the charges until the payment is saved.  After clicking the green + you'll see a delete icon that will allow you to remove the charge if you didn't mean to add.

Finally, after you've added all of the charges for which you're wanting to apply a payment, you'll input the payment amount and note that it will automatically assign to the charges due on the account.  Then just click to save.

At this point, you've now successfully recorded advance rent.  What's important to note here is that we added an individual charge for each month.  If you added a single charge for multiple months, the due date on that charge is important.  You can do this, but you'll have to set the due date to the actual due date of the last month being paid, not the current month.  This is because the system looks to the last rent charge paid to determine which month's rent needs to be paid next.  The safes thing to do, is follow the instructions above.

--------------

Next let's assume you have a tenant paying online that wants to pay for multiple month's upfront.  The first thing to do in this situation is ensure that you're monthly processing limits allow for a transaction of this size.  In many cases, the transaction limit is a limitation.  Should this not be an issue, you'll want to do the following.

First you'll want to go to your "Add/Adjust Charges" screen for the tenant, click the green + icon to add a new charge.

Next, you'll want to fill out the details of the charge.  You'll want to add a charge for each month you're wanting to record advance rent, or, add one charge with the due date set to the last month for which you're recording advance rent, not the current month's rent that is due.  This is very important.  If you do not do this, the system will continue adding rent charges.  We recommend adding a rent charge for each month.  Not only will this guarantee that the system is going to work as expected, it also adds more clarity on tenant ledgers and overall accounting.

Lastly, you'll want to verify the charges being added and then save.

After you've added the charges to the account.  Your tenant can now log into their account and submit their rent payment for these charges.