Tenants Makes the Deposit

Resident Makes the Deposit I realize many of you will completely balk at this idea, but I’ve tried it for years now with some success. Prior to having a drop box location, I would give my late payers a bank account number to which they could deposit the monthly payment directly. Naturally, I graduated from that step to providing deposit slips that were pre-printed so the account name and the account number wouldn’t be inaccurate. In this case, this added effort did reduce the monthly “I don’t have such and such information” telephone calls from the residents. I was never that concerned about a resident attempting to make a withdrawal from my account, although I’m sure that’s a possibility. To decrease this risk, you could have a separate bank account for deposits and sweep the funds into another account periodically. Another consideration here is that potentially you could run into a failed eviction for accepting partial payments. Whether or not a judge would consider a tenant making a small deposit in a last ditch effort to avoid eviction “constructive receipt”, I’m not able to answer. So far, (knock on wood), none of the folks I’ve evicted have tried this angle. However, what will invariably happen is that residents WILL make partial payments. The truck broke down, the child custody legal fees, etc. get prioritized over shelter and what few remaining funds there are end up in your account. Then you’re left with the fun job of trying to determine who paid what. Advantages to this method are that you don’t have to make a trip to the bank and if you have online banking, you know within a day or so if the deposits are there. Again, you don’t know whether or not they paid in pennies or stolen checks from their neighbor, but you at least see the deposit made.

I don’t recommend this method as a standard way of collecting, but perhaps consider it for the good payer who’s just had a bad month. Print the Checks for Them (Thanks to Earl B. for the following tip) I forget when it was, but probably sometime around eighteen months ago, one of my friendly competitors suggested I try this service. One of his friends was using it with success so I signed up for it. It’s inexpensive and allowed me to just sit down and print all the monthly payments at one time. I signed all new residents up on it and bribed some of my existing residents to join. The service is presented to the residents as an auto draft service and they sign off on a one-page form that authorizes you to debit their account. The program itself is a Windows-based software application that allows you to print these “Demand Drafts”. The advantage is that the payments can be set up as a recurring monthly payment and you can print them whenever you want. So, rather than waiting for the mail to arrive, you just sit down at your PC and hit print. The checks roll off your standardized printer. In other words, you don’t need any special equipment. On the first of each month (or whenever) you just head on over to the bank. Again, you don’t know if the resident has good funds or not, but at least you’re not waiting to make your deposit. One of the disadvantages is that you will have to purchase check stock, but I believe I received 300 checks with my initial purchase. Another advantage to using this software is that you could set up your own bills on this so that each month you just print out your recurring bills or a set of blank checks with your pre-printed information.