Decreasing Late Rent Payments With Automated Collections

As a property manager, one of your top priorities is collecting rent from your tenants on time. This process can be tedious, leaving you to wait for checks in the mail and follow up with tenants about missing or delayed payments when something unexpected comes up.

Fortunately, receiving and keeping track of rent payments doesn’t have to be difficult. By digitizing and automating rent payments with the right solution, you can easily collect rent every month, decreasing the chances of late payments and giving your tenants a more straightforward way to pay.

Why Leverage Automation in Property Management?

In today’s digital age, many aspects of running a business can be automated—including some of your property management processes. No matter if you want to send out automated reminders to tenants or automatically process maintenance requests, you can find a solution that helps you do just that. As a result, you and your team can provide tenants with quick answers and assistance, all while you free up time to focus on more complex tasks throughout the workday.

How to Automate Rent Collection

One of the best ways to use property management automation is to automate rent payments. With a flexible rent payment platform, tenants can pay their rent in a way that best suits their needs, whether they want to easily pay online each month or schedule automatic monthly bank account withdrawals. This gives tenants the freedom to pay rent how they want, and you enjoy greater peace of mind that rent will be collected consistently and on time.

Generally, automating rent collection is a matter of setting up Automated Clearing House (ACH) processing through your preferred solution. Once you receive a tenant’s consent and they provide you with their bank account number and bank’s routing information, you can enable the system to automatically remove the specified amount from their bank account when rent is due. The system will transfer that money to your preferred bank account within a few days, typically sending your tenant an automated email or text message receipt once complete.

Top Benefits of Recurring Payments for Property Management

When you set up recurring rent payments, you save yourself and your tenants a lot of hassle. On the date rent is due, the system takes care of everything, allowing both parties to avoid the consequences of a missed payment. Explore a few key ways you and your tenants can benefit from a reliable payment processing system.

1. Fewer Late Payments

A late payment can mean several issues for your business—you need rent on time and in full to keep your business running, and payments coming in days or weeks late negatively impact your operations. Plus, you want to avoid wasting time trying to get ahold of tenants and reminding them their rent is due, especially as late rent payments can be subject to tenant laws.

Through an automatic payment solution, you can make it easier for tenants to pay rent on time because they don’t have to remember to send a check or manually pay online. As a result, they can confidently know their rent is transferred to you each month—avoiding potential late fees—and you can experience fewer late payments.

2. Easier Documentation Process

If you manage several properties with numerous tenants, manually documenting rent collection can be highly complicated and time-consuming. Keeping track of receipts, invoices, statements and other financial documentation becomes a headache for your team without a reliable system in place.

Simplifying rent collection via an automated solution can make record management easier. The right payment platform can provide transaction information, reporting and analytics, and other essential financial details to help you stay on top of rental payments—all kept in one convenient, accessible digital environment.

3. More Secure Experience

Sometimes, collecting rent manually—particularly through paper checks—can be an unsecured process. For example, say you provide a mailbox for tenants to drop off their rent checks every month. If someone unassociated with your management business gets into that box, they could gain access to highly sensitive tenant information.

Protecting your tenants’ personal details is a central part of your job as a  property manager. If current or prospective tenants can’t trust your team to securely handle payment information, they’re likely to leave and rent elsewhere. Choosing a secure rent collection platform creates a safe payment experience with features like end-to-end encryption and tokenization, so your tenants can feel confident their data is safe.

4. Greater Convenience

Today, consumers everywhere use digital payments for a variety of expenses, whether they’re shopping for clothes online or paying for a service. This convenient process makes it quick and easy to pay with a preferred debit or credit card or through an ACH transfer—no need to put a check in the mail or take out cash from the bank.

Why not extend that same experience to rent payments? No matter if a tenant schedules their rent payments for automatic transfer or elects to pay with a debit card every month, you can provide them greater convenience by offering them that option, especially because paying online is likely something they already do frequently.

5. Save Time and Effort

A reliable payment solution can make each workday easier for your team. Rather than physically collecting payments, following up about late or missed rent, and manually keeping track of payment history, you and your co-workers and employees can focus on other, more complex tasks that require your attention. Ultimately, setting up automatic rent collection can save your business considerable time and effort.

How CSG Forte Makes Payments Easy

CSG Forte offers various digital payment solutions to help your property management company simplify rent collection, including our secure and accessible ACH platform, Dex. Through Dex, you can implement ACH payment processing that improves your cash flow and creates a secure, convenient experience for your tenants. In just a few days, you’ll have your funds as expected, allowing you to keep your operations running smoothly.

There’s no need to worry about whether the system will accept a tenant’s bank—Dex provides access to more than 20 banks. Plus, setting up ACH for your tenants with our platform is easy, as everything you need is available in Dex. As a result, you get a straightforward payment processing system that makes collecting rent a breeze.

Get Started With Recurring Rent Payments Today

CSG Forte is ready to help your property management company simplify rent collection so you can receive more payments on time and ensure your business doesn’t fall behind. With over 20 years of industry experience, we can help you build the ideal payment solution for your needs.

Ready to get started? Learn more about our payment solutions, and sign up for an account today.