I charge my tenant $145/month as “oil escrow” so the tenant doesn’t get hit with large bill in the winter for heating oil use. Bills for heating oil can be upwards of $600/month in the winter. I save the $145/month and use it to pay the heating oil bills.
There are a few problems I run into with this situation.
The primary problem is: I cannot add this as an automatic charge to trigger in addition to rent, as a separate line item. I posed this here as a wishlist item:
Because I cannot add this as an automatic charge to trigger in addition to rent, as a separate line item, I went into stessa, and all at once, I manually created a $145 charge to the tenant, and dated it accordingly (I did this for 12 months worth of charges.
Problem 1 with this is that I had to click “create charge” every time. There is no way for me to DUPLICATE. This was very time consuming, tedious and leaves room for error.
Problem 2 with this is that my tenant was in shock when they saw that all of these were showing DUE at the same time when they want to pay rent through stessa. Even though I dated each item as a FUTURE monthly charge, it still shows as due now. Because of this, I had to go in and delete all of the manually created charges that I spent all of that time manually creating (without having a duplicate button!)
Request for Problem #1: Create the ability to auto-add additional charges, similar to how rent is charged (see post above). If this isn’t an option, it would be nice to have a way to duplicate charges, similar to how we can duplicate transactions.
Request for Problem #2: Tenants should not see that a charge us due that is billed for a future month. Maybe only have them show that the charge is DUE approx 10 days prior to the due date of that charge, but also allow them to be able to see future upcoming charges.