What payment platform do you prefer to receive rent?

Question

I'm setting up a new website for my tenants in properties not managed by a Property Manager. What payment portal have you used that you can recommend? (Square, Quickbooks, PayPal, etc)?

Jason A Thompson · Answer

@Greg Moore

I’ve been using Cozy for almost 2 years and I have no issues with it!!! Excellent platform..  Hope this helps bro...

Matt Nico · Answer

Greg,

I use a combination of Quickbooks online and Cozy for payments. Cozy allows you to upload documents and assign rent and other payments and even does background checks. The tenants seem to like it, and it allows for bank account and credit card payments.

Then I use Quickbooks online to sort every house out individually and give me my profit / loss for each house broken out individually. This strategy works well now. If I have a lot of properties I'd probably try out the bigger software's that are more housing / landlord specific like appfolio or buildium. They talk about those on the podcast a lot.

Happy housing,

Matt

Clint Boling · Answer

@Brian Braddock

I like tenant cloud. I will be using this quarantine to set it up, and hopefully transition everyone who pays me directly.

Greg Moore · Answer

Epilogue: I tried Cash App (now owned by Square) with two tenants and both payments were rejected. Cash.App claims they do this for the payer's security. But this ain't baseball, so two strikes and I decided to revisit QuickBooks Online.

Easy to set up properties as classes /ovations, automate the invoicing (a nice looking invoice with my logo). The tenant can click a link in the email (I can see if it's been opened or clicked), and the Tenant has easy options to pay (debit, credit, Apple pay, and bank transfer). It all goes into my ledger for the property with no further action needed (assuming they pay). I think this maps nicely to what I need since I am already a QBO user.

Having said that, this thread got a lot of mentions for Cozy. I will definitely take a closer look!

Thank you for these helpful replies.

Account Closed · Answer

@Greg Moore take a look at www.rentcafe.com for tenant portals, tenants can download an app to make online payments the site also acts as a 3rd party listing, its hosted by Yardi

Alex Olson · Answer

@Greg Moore I would recommend cozy. It is 100% free for small landlords. Tracks everything, takes care of late payments, and allows for customers to pay by credit card if needed. Customers can also apply. It is cozy.co. hope this helps!

Adam Budgin · Answer

I use cozy as well and found it simple for both  myself and my tenants to use.  My tenants will pay cash as well sometimes and you can record the cash payment through Cozy for tracking purposes as well; they'll get push notifications a few days prior to rent being due.

Rob B. · Answer

Great question, George. I love to hear that you're shopping around for the right one. There are definitely some tools that can help with managing things moving forward. Aside from providing the basics (ie. listing tool to get the property published to 10+ major sites, scheduling tool to schedule viewings, tenant screening with comprehensive applications -- pulled reports from TransUnion, which include nationwide criminal background checks + credit checks + eviction history, digital lease creation tool, rent collection tool, and maintenance tracking tool), some services also offer your tenants waived ACH fees and additional capabilities which makes it an easier sell on your end when getting them to transition over (ie. their ability to report on-time rent payments to the credit bureaus; this can create an added incentive for making sure they pay that rent on time). I hope this helps!

Chris Svendsen · Answer

Oddly enough, due to tenant request all my rents are being collected with Venmo right now.  It only 3 tenants but all pay right way and cash in my account 2 days later, zero fee's. Good for both of us.

Brian Braddock · Answer

@Greg Moore I’ve tried them all and feel cash app is the easiest to use, but square makes it easier to invoice and track properties. I’ve also heard Quickbooks is the best for sending out invoices automatically, but I haven’t personally used it.

What payment platform do you prefer to receive rent?

Most Popular Reply