Receive payments in bulk (tenant rent)

[Audrey Kittrell]

Hi Buildium Community,

Has anyone found a shortcut for receiving payments in bulk? Every month we have 50+ rents collected on the 1st that we need to post manually to Buildium on the tenant's ledger. It takes me an hour plus to go into each tenant's ledger and receive payment.  An hour a month isn't bad now, but we're expanding to 120 units next year!

-River Place Team in Cedar Falls, Iowa

[Chad Mirmelli]

Hi Audrey,

First off, the most efficient way to receive bulk rent would be through Buildium's ePayment system, which will automatically update the tenants ledger, mark the money as deposited, add the money to your bank account, and update the tenant with a payment received email.

However we understand not every client chooses to use our ePayment system, and some tenants will always prefer mailing in checks. So the fastest way to enter in a stack of checks within Buildium would be to click on the Outstanding Balances page (which can be accessed quickly by clicking on the number of tenants link in the outstanding balance dashboard). 

Once on this screen, you can choose to sort property by property, or simply scroll down the list checking the box for all checks in front of you. 

Then scroll to the bottom and click the receive payments in full which will pop up a screen to add the check numbers. 

Once you hit save, all the ledgers will be updated. 

This is the fastest method when receiving payments in full, however some tenants dont always pay off their entire balance, so I recommend for those checks to click the Shortcuts icon and select "receive payment". Use the search box that pops up to find the tenant or unit, and you will be brought to the receive payment screen that you are familiar with in your old process. The big time saving trick here is when you are done filling out the screen, click Add Another Payment instead of save payment...this will allow you to quickly move on to the next check with out any additional clicks.

Hopefully this helps you drastically cut down the time you are spending on rent collection. Check out the images attached!

[Stephan Koenig]

Chad,

Buildium's ePayment system is great! Our tenants love it.


We still have many tenants who do pay by money order. Honestly I have no idea why, but they bring in a money order.

Most manual payments arrive here BEFORE the rent is due, so before the 1st.

Therefore they do not show up (yet) on the outstanding lease balances page.

Is there another quick way to enter a large amount of these?

Thanks,

Stephan

[Elyse Leblanc]

Hi Stephen,

Sorry for the late reply!

At this point in time, my suggestion would be to use the charges and payments import template to enter those payments at one time instead of manually having to navigate to each lease ledger.

This help article describes our charges and payments template:

Import data: Charges and Payments

You'll add a line item for each payment with the requested information listed in the article above.

Once imported, the payments will appear on the tenant's ledgers, but you will still need to deposit those payments from the undeposited funds section of the banking page.

More "bulk" functionality is definitely a feature request we hear often, so I'll pass along your feedback to the product team on this!

Thanks Stephen!

-Elyse