How to Collect Rent from Tenants (Landlord Guide)

To collect rent from tenants reliably, you need three things in one place: a fixed due date each tenant knows, a paid-vs-due list you can glance at without doing mental math, and a way for the tenant to actually pay that doesn't depend on them installing anything. Most small landlords bolt this together from a calendar reminder, a bank app, and a spreadsheet, which works until you own a second property or a tenant swears they already paid. This guide walks through the whole cycle: inviting tenants, setting a recurring rent template with a due date, tracking who's paid and who's behind, and folding property expenses (utilities, repairs) into the same ledger so your year-end numbers are already done.

Step 1: Add the property and invite your tenants

Start by creating the property itself: give it a name you'll recognize ("Bay Street Apt", "Belgrade flat"), set the monthly rent amount, and pick the currency. If you own apartments in two countries, each property keeps its own currency; there's no forced conversion muddying your rent ledger.

Then add tenants by email. Each one gets an invite link. If a tenant creates an account, they see their own running balance and a Pay button. If they'd rather not (plenty of long-term tenants won't bother), you can still bill them: they receive a public share link with the amount and a Pay button that opens their bank app pre-filled. No install, no signup, no friction on their side.

Why this matters: the single biggest reason rent collection gets messy is that the tenant's "how do I pay" step has friction. Removing it — a link, a tap, done — is worth more than any reminder system.

Step 2: Set a recurring rent template with a due date

Manually creating a rent bill every month is exactly the chore that slips. Instead, set up a recurring template once: type "Rent", frequency monthly, and set the day-of-period to your lease's due date: the 1st, the 5th, whatever the lease says.

From the next cycle on, the rent bill is created automatically and posted to the property's ledger on that date. You don't get a "remind me to invoice the tenant" entry in your calendar, because there's nothing to remember: the bill already exists, the tenant already has the link.

A concrete example. A €1,200/month flat with a due date of the 1st: on the 1st of each month a €1,200 rent bill lands in the ledger and the tenant's share updates. If two roommates share the flat and split rent equally, that's €600 each, generated automatically with no re-typing the split every month.

On the due date itself, the recurring engine does the creating; collecting is still a human decision (you mark it paid when the money lands). That's deliberate: you never want software silently deciding a tenant paid when they didn't.

Step 3: Track paid vs due at a glance

This is the part spreadsheets get wrong. A spreadsheet tells you what should have been paid; it doesn't update itself when money actually arrives. So you end up reconciling the sheet against your bank app by hand, the exact chore you were trying to avoid.

On the property ledger, each rent bill has a clear state: due (created, not yet settled), or paid (you marked it settled when the transfer arrived). When a tenant pays, you mark it, or, if they paid through the app's Pay flow, the settle-up records it for you. Either way the tenant's balance moves.

The tenant balance answers one question you actually care about: is this tenant ahead, behind, or current? A tenant who paid two months up front shows as ahead. One who missed last month shows the shortfall as a number, not as a mental subtraction you redo every time you look.

If a tenant insists they already paid, you have a dated record of every rent bill and every settlement: the conversation is a two-second look, not an argument.

Step 4: Fold property expenses into the same ledger

Rent is only half of a landlord's month. The other half is expenses: the electric bill, the water bill, the plumber, the new dishwasher. If those live in a different place than your rent records, your year-end profit picture requires stitching two systems together.

Instead, log expenses against the property as they come in. When a utility bill arrives, snap a photo from the property page: the same receipt-scan flow the rest of the app uses pulls the total (and line items) off the bill, you confirm, and it posts to the property.

Two things then happen automatically:

1. Split-with-tenants when it applies. If the lease says the tenant pays utilities, the bill splits by the property's default rule (equal between tenants, by room size, or by usage) and lands on their balance next to rent. If you eat the utility (common on all-inclusive rents), you log it as your own expense and it just sits in the property's cost column. 2. Your net position stays current. Rent in, expenses out, per property. When tax season comes you're not reconstructing the year from a shoebox.

Step 5: Handle the awkward cases (deposits, late payers, co-owners)

Security deposits. Log the deposit as a one-off bill marked "Security deposit" so there's a dated record of what was collected. Releasing it on move-out is a manual bank transfer: the app tracks the record, it does not hold escrow. That's fine; almost every small landlord already returns deposits by transfer anyway, and now the amount and date are written down.

Late payers. A missed month shows as a balance the tenant is behind, so you can see it without doing math, and you have the dated bill to point to. Reminders are a manual send by design: you decide when to nudge, rather than an automated dunning machine firing at your tenant on day one.

Co-owners. If you own a property with someone else, add them as a property member. Both of you see the full ledger, and rent income splits between owners by the ownership ratio you set, useful when a flat is 60/40 between two people.

Multiple properties. Once you're past one apartment, a rollup across all your rentals gives you one balance number per tenant, with a per-property breakdown a tap away. That's the point where a spreadsheet genuinely stops scaling and a ledger earns its keep.

What this workflow is — and isn't

This is built for the long tail of small landlords: you own somewhere between one and ten properties, you're a human (not a management company), and collecting rent plus settling utilities plus chasing the occasional late payment is the job. For that, the workflow above removes the two real pain points: the "how does the tenant pay" friction and the "did they actually pay" bookkeeping.

It is not a full property-management platform. There's no automated late-fee accrual, no maintenance ticketing, no listing syndication, no in-app lease-document storage. If you need those, you need dedicated software (Buildium, AppFolio, Rentec). But for most small landlords, the boring recurring math-and-collection part is 90% of the actual monthly workload, and that's exactly the part this handles.

Cost check: rental properties are a Pro feature ($7/month or $70/year): unlimited properties and tenants, recurring rent templates, utility splits, Pay-button settle-up, and per-property CSV export for taxes. On the free plan you can still track rent as a recurring bill with a roommate or tenant (up to 3 people per split), you just won't get the dedicated property ledger, paid-vs-due tracking, or expense rollups described above.