Flag Rental Payments as Fully Paid with 123Landlord.com

Today we added a great new feature - it's very simple, but very powerful.

Let's say you have a tenant that pays (for example) $1200 per month to rent one of your properties, but this month he/she can only pay $1100, and you decide this is acceptable.  The system would (up until now) still expect the remaining $100 to be paid, and this would show as an outstanding balance on all related screens.

Or, let's say your particular jurisdiction doesn't permit you to collect late fees, but you operate based on a discount basis - that is, you offer a discount if the tenant pays on time, but the full amount is due otherwise.  You would want to be able to collect an amount less than normal, or less than what is technically on the lease.

Now these scenarios can be accomodated.  We've added a feature were you can flag a rental payment period (due date) as fully paid, which means the system will no longer expect rent due from that tenant for that period.  This effectively allows you to say "with this payment, I'm satisfied for this period - stop calculating rent due".  It also works for discount scenarios because you can say "the lease expects $1200 every month, but this time the tenant paid on time, collect only $1100 and call it done".

Effectively, under the hood, the system does this by modifying the amount owed for that particular due date to what has already been collected for that due date, plus what you're collecting right now.  Using the example above:

$1200 is normally due.  You've already collected two payments - $400 and $500, so three hundred is still due.  Today you received another check for $200 - great, now we're at $1100.  You decide this is ok; let's call it even.  So the rent that is "expected" by the system for that tenant and for that due date only gets changed to $1100, and everything balances.

Previously, you could have accomplished the same thing by manually going into the Lease screen where you can edit the options for the lease, and modifying that particular due date (see Lease Overrides) to expect $1100, and then collecting your payment.  Today though, this feature is added as a checkbox on the Collect Payment screen to simply do it automatically as you're collecting the payment, which makes things a little easier and more intuitive.

NOTE: This feature is currently limited to rental payments only (type "Rent") - this is not currently available for other fixed or recurring charges on the lease; the system will still expect these payments to be received in full.

However, late fees can be still be flagged as complete by using the "This payment satisfies the late fee" box - which tells the system to not continue to charge late fees for the due date.

Also in this update: We fixed an issue with the Payment History tab not using the Include/Hide Closed Leases selector.