Comments on: How to Organize Your Rental Property Payments To Make Your Life Easier

By: Robin G. Grimes

Robin G. Grimes — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:16:06 +0000

How I collect rents:
1. I setup a deposit only account at my bank that maintains a zero balance.
2. I gave the tenant a set of payment slips that includes the Bank routing and account number.
3. The tenant can go into any bank branch and deposit the rent directly into my “deposit only” account.
4. The bank setup a daily sweep for me that moves all money from the “deposit only” account into my LLC account automatically.

Bonus, there is a 24 Hour branch of the bank inside the 24 hr Walmart within 2 miles of my rentals.

Rent is late after midnight on the 3rd day, so the tenant has no excuse and there are no “lost checks”.

Robin

By: Sande

Sande — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:20:27 +0000

You seem to have a pretty solid method going on here, I’d like to know more about the software you use for online payments, and also if any tenants had a problem with this?

By: GitaFaust

GitaFaust — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:57:50 +0000

We prefer QuickBooks as you can use it to remind you for your bills, pay online bills and collect ACH.

Bills: create and memorize your bills, and track bills dues, date, amount and to whom.

Calender: When you enter the bills – there will be reminders for which bills are due when.

Online bill pay: Pay bills right within QuickBooks. Check with your bank whether it will let you connect QuickBooks to their online bank to pay the bills. Some banks to charge free. We use TDBank – is Free!

ACH: QuickBooks does it again – just started this new ACH service.

And it handles more – tenant statement, budgets, reports etc.

By: Dick Rosen

Dick Rosen — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 03:22:13 +0000

Tell me more about ACH, I talked to my bank and they had some electronic bank draft program that I had to pay for and I had to manage on a constant basis. Didn’t seem very worthwhile to me. What is ACH?

By: Jill

Jill — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:44:08 +0000

That’s it. I’m finally convinced. I have been putting this off but your article has really encouraged me to go ahead and get started with on line bill pay. I can see that it would save me hours every month and then make income tax so much easier.

By: Brendan O'Brien

Brendan O'Brien — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:44:32 +0000

I will say up front that I am a Quicken competitor. There are many other products (not just mine) that are far more sophisticated than QRP. I would strongly recommend that anyone considering QRP find a way to check it out before buying (there is no free demo AFAIK).

By: Joshua Dorkin

Joshua Dorkin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:33:08 +0000

Are you a satisfied user of this program, or do you work for them, Christine?

By: Christine

Christine — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:52:39 +0000

Instead of using 3 programs (Quicken, Google Calendar, Bank Direct Deposit), you can use Rentmatic (www.rentmatic.com), which allows you to store property information, create a rent roll and processes tenant’s ACH payments. It is easier because you are able to see which tenants have paid in your rent roll/deposit history, rather than having direct deposits that don’t synch with your rent roll.

By: Amy Larson

Amy Larson — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:50:18 +0000

Have you had any blowback from potential tenants in mandating that they pay the rent via direct deposit?