How do we deal with Section 8 and Rent Collection?

Setup & Support
1

How do we deal with Section 8 and Rent Collection? Do I need to change my lease to Tenants portion only??

2

@weomhomes I want to preface this by saying that I do not use Stessa’s rent collection service. I stick to the bookkeeping features for me and my clients.

I could see you tackling this in 2 ways:

  1. Use the “Partial Payments” feature (see Stessa Rent Collection | Stessa Help Center ), allowing them to pay just their portion of the rent owed. Would require a bit more policing if they deviate from the expected number. Another downside is your balance sheet on the tenant ledger would still combine the tenant’s responsibility and Section 8.
  2. Split the unit into 2 tenants - “John Smith” and “John Smith - Section 8”. Have “JS” set up for just their portion of the rent, etc. Separately, manually enter “JS S8” transactions. That way, your balance sheet can separately track each entity’s responsibility. Downsides, your reports are going to be more granular and possibly confusing.

Hope that helps.

-Tom

www.realcentsorganized .com

3

Hello Tom

Thanks so much for the help.
I’m thinking option 2 sounds like it will work better but I’m unsure what is meant by “

Split the unit into 2 tenants - “John Smith” and “John Smith - Section 8”. Have “JS” set up for just their portion of the rent, etc. Separately, manually enter “JS S8” transactions”

Could you please elaborate on this?

4

@weomhomes Essentially cheat the system by creating another apartment within the building, tagged for Section 8. Put in a fake tenant, mirroring the lease agreement.

In this example, John S8 is tracking the portion of Section 8 funding. You can record everything separately and track what is owed. Then separately, you can send the real John the intended rent requests for just his portion.

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It makes things more complicated, including your reports, but it achieves the goal.

Hope that helps.

-Tom

www.realcentsorganized .com

1 Like
5

Thanks again Tom!

Just to make sure, do you know if I set the lease to the full amount owed, rent collection to “allow partial payments” and manually link the S8 payment to said unit before the 15 day grace period that I set.

Would this sync the payment properly avoidng late fees /notices with the rent collection side under the tenants portal?

6

@weomhomes I cannot say for sure as I do not have experience with this, but your thought process makes sense to me - if both payments are received and recorded before the deadline, the system should not trigger late fees, etc.

-Tom

www.realcentsorganized .com