Learn more about how to clear arrears and track payments
This video will show you how to clear arrears and track payment when you first set up your Hammock account.
When you first add a new tenant, you will see an arrears balance here because no transactions have been reconciled with the rental payments received in the past.
Here is an example of how you can get started with tracking to make sure that the arrears balance is accurate once you have added a new tenant.
- Click into the ‘tenancies tab’, it will bring up all the tenancies you have already added.
- They click on the tenant’s name for example ‘Greg Copleland’
- The tenancy started in July and the tenant pays £420 every month.
- You will see the arrears table will look for a payment every month, since July for £420 because we haven't tracked any payments as yet and you will see month by month the arrears balance has built up.
- What we need to do is track these payments so that the arrears balance will disappear.
- Next you are going to click the ‘transaction’ tab and it will bring up different filters you can use to find the payment. If you know the reference your tenants use for the rent you can search by using the ‘keyword filter’ for example search TSB, and it will bring up all the rent payments with this reference.
- Click on this first payment and it will bring out some options for you to choose,
- Select ‘rental income’
- Select the ‘property’
- Select the ‘tenant’s name, then click ‘save’.
- By doing this you have tracked your first payment.
- Then another box will appear under what you saved giving you two options:
- ‘Find & Track More Rental Income Transactions’
- Search & Track
Or
- ‘Similar Transactions found’
- View matching transactions
- Click on ‘view matching transactions’ and you can see the previous payments of £420.
- Click ‘select all’ of these payments and it will back date the payments till August.
- Click ‘track’ now you have tracked all of those payments.
- Now that you have tracked all of those payments when you go back to the ‘tenancies tab’, you can see that you may still have one smaller arrears balance. So you can see what this is by clicking on the tenant’s name, ‘Greg Copeland’
- Now you can see that all of the payment is showing as paid, except in July it shows a ‘missing payment’. This is showing because, in July, tenant Greg paid me in cash.
- In order to remove the arrear you can add a manual payment by clicking on ‘Actions’.
- You will be taken to the ‘Payment options’ page
- You will have two options. You can either ‘Mark it as paid’ as if I was paid in cash.
- Or if you realised that you were not going to receive the rent, you could click ‘write off’ Instead.
- For this example, click ‘Mark as paid’ then enter the amount £420, click ‘save’
- It will now appear as a paid payment. Showing as manual instead of bank to bank because it didn't come directly from your bank feed, it will display that the arrears are cleared, now moving forward that will just track automatically.