How to automate rent collection: The Goodlord how-to guide

Traditionally, most letting agencies have offered a rent collection service as part of their partial and fully-managed service. On paper, this makes perfect sense. The managing agency has the most day-to-day contact with the tenants, so why wouldn't they also collect the rent?

The reality is that rent collection is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone parts of tenancy management.

At the end of every month, your agents manually log-in to bank accounts, confirm payments against payment schedules, update spreadsheets and outdated CRMs, and approve transactions. And this is all before they have to start chasing late rent payments!

If you're working without an up-to-date, centralised view of what's been paid and what's overdue, you're essentially flying blind. If you don't know who’s paid what and when, your tenants could be in rent arrears for days or even weeks - and what should be a simple process of getting rent to landlords has suddenly become very painful.

Goodlord platform offers a fully automated rent collection service, replacing manual processes with a simple and effective alternative. In this article, we'll explain in detail how your rent processing is holding your property managers back and how our service can help.

• How rent collection traditionally works (and how it breaks)
• How Goodlord rent collection can help
• Goodlord's automated rent collection service: a step-by-step guide
• Conclusion

How rent collection traditionally works (and how it breaks)

In most letting agencies, the rent collection process is a homegrown mix of spreadsheets, bank transfers, payment methods, and unoptimised manual data entry. In some cases, entire systems are maintained by a single team member who remembers to click "OK" on recurring payment reminders each month.

While these processes will each have their own little quirks, they will generally follow the same blueprint.

Each month, a member of the agency's finance team will log into their client account management system to see what rent payments have come in. They will then cross-reference those transactions (often manually) against a list of tenants whose rents are due. If they're lucky, these payments are processed through an online rent collection service that can export and upload them to their CRM or accounting system.

Only once this process is complete can the agency property managers see which tenants are in rent arrears and start chasing. At this point, valuable time and energy have been lost.

In many agencies, chasing rent is one of the many small tasks competing for priority in a property manager's day. If the system is set up to handle the process automatically, the first chase after those in arrears can be days (or even a week) after the rent was actually due.

All this, and we haven't even mentioned the reconciliation problem.

Anecdotally, at Goodlord, we find that around half of tenants use the wrong payment reference. In these circumstances, the funds will still arrive, but it won't be clear which tenancy they're intended for. Someone in the agency will then have to go back into the system again to investigate, make a guess, and assign it to the correct tenancy. This is a slow, risky process that exposes the agency to compliance risks, leaves a landlord without their rental income, and potentially wrongly places a tenant in arrears.

As your portfolio grows, manual processes like these can become completely unmanageable for your team. More properties mean more financial admin, more transactions, and more late fees.

What Goodlord Rent Collection actually does

Goodlord Rent Collection is designed to remove the manual work from one of the most repetitive parts of agency operations. Instead of relying on agency teams to sort through standing orders, manually operate reconciliation tools, and badger late-paying tenants, the platform automates the key steps in all your agency's payment processes.

Once Rent Collection is activated on an agent's Goodlord platform, it begins working for new tenancies automatically. The system picks up the tenant data already entered as part of the agency's normal pre-tenancy work, such as the rental fees and the payment schedule set out in the tenancy agreement. From there, Goodlord prepares automated reminders and chasers based on the instalment plan. This means agents can say goodbye to entering the same information twice.

Things are just as rosy on the tenant side of things. Tenants pay their move-in fees through the Goodlord platform as usual, and the transaction information is retained for ongoing rent payments. Thanks to this fully GDPR-compatible system, tenants pay rent in the same place they used to secure the tenancy. This reduces confusion, creates trackable audit trails, and improves tenant communication.

As soon as a tenancy goes live, the Goodlord payment platforms spring into action. Tenants receive automated rent reminders via email three days before their due date. If the rent is late or there are payment failures, Goodlord sends additional reminders at scheduled intervals.

When the rent goes through, reconciliation processes are handled automatically through the rent collection software. Because the payments and direct debits pass through the dedicated accounts created for each tenancy, they are instantly matched to the correct tenant. In most cases, the Goodlord payment software allows agents to complete the process within five minutes of the tenant sending the money.

Don’t just take our word for it:

"We get the remittance straight after the money's been paid to Goodlord - with its unique account number - so we can reconcile rent payments easily on our accounts system as soon as it comes through, without having to spend time worrying about which payment's which." - James Conway, Director at David Conway Estate and Letting agents

Goodlord's rent dashboard gives their team an overview of which payments have been made, which are due, and which remain outstanding. This almost completely removes the traditional agent and landlord responsibilities to manually track their own processes.

Goodlord's automated rent collection service: a step-by-step guide

The beauty of the Goodlord Rent collection system is that it runs mostly in the background of your established processes, using data your agents have already entered into the platform. That’s why Goodlord saves time and admin costs.

Here's how the process looks in practice:

Step 1: Rent schedules are automatically created from the tenancy agreement

The process starts with the tenancy agreement itself. When an agent creates a tenancy in Goodlord, the platform uses the contract information to automatically generate the rent collection schedule.

That includes key details such as:

• The rent amount
• Payment frequency (for example, monthly)
• Tenant contact details
• The agreed payment schedule

Because this information is pulled directly from the tenancy agreement, agents don’t need to re-enter any data. There’s no duplication of work and no risk of introducing errors through manual entry.

Step 2: Goodlord automates the rent collection process

Once the tenancy goes live, the platform creates dedicated payment details for the tenancy, which tenants use to pay their rent.

From there, the system manages the entire payment cycle automatically:

• Tenant visibility: Tenants receive secure login details so they can view their payment information.
• Automated notifications: The platform sends reminders to tenants before rent is due and follows up if any rent payments are missed.
• Joint chasing: If multiple tenants are responsible for the rent, the system automatically contacts all relevant parties until the full amount is received.
• Automatic payment receipts: Tenants receive confirmation when payments are made, reducing the number of queries agents receive.
• Instant allocation: Payments are automatically matched to the correct tenancy as soon as they are received.

Step 3: Agents track payments through the dedicated dashboard

As the process works, your agency's teams can monitor:

• Completed payments
• Payments that are still due
• Tenancies in arrears
• Reminder histories and audit trails
• Full payment histories for each tenancy

Agents can also make quick adjustments if needed, such as adding credits or making minor changes to payment schedules, without having to reissue or resign the tenancy agreement.

The result is a clear, real-time overview of rental income across the entire managed portfolio, without the need to log into bank accounts, review spreadsheets, or track down information across multiple systems.

Conclusion

Before automation, the way agencies collected their rent payments had largely calcified. Even today, many agencies rely on outdated online banking tools and, in some cases, cheques and cash payments. What worked in the 00s should have no place in the modern Private Rented Sector.

Automating your system creates a faster, more reliable rent collection process that runs largely in the background of your agency’s existing workflow. Instead of chasing payments, checking bank statements, and manually matching transactions, your team can rely on a system that keeps rent collection organised, visible, and efficient.

If you're ready to take your agency to the next level of efficiency, book a demo with Goodlord today.