The Official AppFolio Blog

Fully integrated, free online rent payments are a beautiful thing. They’re hugely beneficial for everyone involved, but only if your residents take the time to set them up. These days, most residents are more than happy to pay their rent online and many will go out of their way to set up a payment because they know it means one less thing to worry about. However, some people need a little extra nudging. Here are a couple of ideas to help you increase the adoption of AppFolio’s Tenant ACH so you can sit back and reap the rewards.

Incentive Programs
Many AppFolio clients use incentives to encourage their residents to pay both online AND on time. These could range from “deal sweeteners” that prove inexpensive for you in the long run to contests which create some serious excitement for your residents (all while encouraging prompt, easily managed payments). For those who are struggling to get the proverbial ball rolling, this could be the extra “oomph” they need to improve adoption. Some examples include:

• Reduced rent amounts ($15-$25) for residents that make a payment online
• Gift certificate drawings (local restaurants, shops, etc.) for residents who pay online
• A vacation drawing for residents who consistently pay online, on time, and who exhibit great community behavior (no complaints against them) for a given amount of time
• Tickets to a local show or concert for the first 50 residents that sign up for online payment

If you market these incentives the right way, you can even make it fun for your residents to pay rent online.

Online Application & Payment Kiosk
Do you have residents who still swing by the office to deliver their rent check? Maybe they aren’t sure how to set up their account or they just haven’t had the time to do it yet. What better way to encourage them to sign up for online payments than by having a computer in the front office solely for that purpose! With a rent payment kiosk, you can convert residents to the paperless lifestyle by giving them an easy and convenient way to sign up. With staff on hand to help guide them through the process, your renters can transition quickly to online payments.

An added benefit is to use this kiosk for new renter applications. If a prospective renter comes in to your office, you can let them apply online right on the spot.

If you have any other ideas or stories about what’s worked for you, leave a comment and share the wealth of information with everyone!

Did you know that we put out a new version of our software each and every month? Each update includes a number of improvements and fixes based on what we hear back from our customers. We have recently released some great new features that will improve your tenant ACH experience and help you increase adoption. In my role I spend quite a bit of time with customers who use our online payments feature, so I know these are very valuable!

ACH Receipt Editing
When a tenant makes a payment via tenant ACH, AppFolio automatically creates the receipt for you. This saves you even more time than you were already saving just by accepting payments online (no more opening envelopes, sorting or batching checks, making bank runs, etc.). Of course, you have to tell AppFolio how you want the funds applied to the charges on the tenant ledger for this to work properly. Even so, the funds won’t be applied to the charges on the ledger the exact way you want them applied every time. There are just too many “situation specific” or one time exceptions.

In order to make it easier for you to address these exceptions, we’ve given you the ability to “re-apply” a receipt. This means that you can now change how the funds the tenant submitted should be divvied up amongst the outstanding charges on their ledger. To use this function, go to the receipt details page and look to the “Tasks” section on the right side of your page. At the bottom of the list of tasks, you’ll notice a “Reapply Receipt” function:

Click on this link and you’ll be taken to a page where you can change how the funds will be applied to the charges on the ledger. You can even reserve a portion of the payment as a prepayment by just zeroing out the amount to be paid towards the other charges on the ledger and checking the “Make Prepayment?” checkbox.

Track ACH Sign-Up
This feature tells you when the tenant has actually activated their account. With this latest release, you can now see not only if they’ve activated their account, but also how many automatic (recurring) payments they’ve scheduled, and how much (in total) they’ve set up to transact automatically.

On the tenant page, this information is in the Tenant Status area:

On the “Tenant Directory” report, you can add these fields to the report by clicking on the columns icon in the top right corner of the report (just above the scrollbar). At the bottom of the list of columns that can be added, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Tenant Portal Activations Update
You’ll now notice that when you go to send out an activation email, you can not only exclude tenants that have already activated their portal from the search results (notice the “Include activated tenants” checkbox), but you also have the ability to see (in the search results) which tenants have already been invited (“Last Activation Sent”), but who have not yet activated their account:

Tenant Portal New Users
We’ve made it easier for new users (who haven’t yet activated their account) to get started with making online payments. If your tenants having trouble getting started, you can not only see whether or not they’ve successfully activated their account by taking a quick peek at their tenant page (the “Tenant Status” section of the page) but, you can rest assured that we’ve taken steps to minimize the amount of confusion your tenants could face by adding a quick note to the tenant login page.

As always, if you have any questions about how tenant ACH works or if you’d like to get started collecting payments online in an easy, pain free way, please let us know! Thank you for all of your valuable feedback – we are definitely listening.

Scott Young is the resident expert for tenant ACH over here at AppFolio. His responsibilities include setting up tenant ACH for our clients, guiding them through implementation and adoption, and helping them resolve any questions or issues once it’s turned on and in use.

Let’s face it, sometimes the business of property management can be quite hectic so anything you can do in order to create efficiency, while also being as ‘green’ as possible, is most welcome. Below are a few ways AppFolio helps get you there.

Utilize AppFolio’s Online Tenant Payments (ACH) and encourage all of your residents to participate.
This will not only cut down on the amount of paper checks being used, but it’ll save you so much time during rent week, as you will no longer have to sift through stacks of checks, manually entering them into the system. Online tenant payments with ACH is fast, easy, and free…most of all, it’s green. We’ll even create a marketing package (refrigerator magnets, rack cards and posters) for you, so that you can spread the word to your residents! Check out these examples:

Add Owner Packets to the Owner’s Portal or email them.
This cuts down on the amount of paper you are using to print and mail documents to your owners, since your owners can login to their portal and retrieve their statements and reports and decide which ones they’d like to print, if any.

Use technology as much as you possibly can when it comes to marketing your properties.
With AppFolio, we give you the tools to quickly and easily advertise your vacancies online (Craigslist, the Internet, and your website). The ease of the entire process saves you so much time, while allowing your properties to receive maximum visibility. The bonus is that unless you really need to create print outs, you are saving even more trees!

Bookmark your AppFolio data onto your iPad, iPhone (or other smart device).
This is extremely helpful when you are on the road and need the number for a vendor or tenant. It saves you from having to call into the office, or even, from having to go back to the office to obtain the information you need. Not to mention, you won’t have to lug around papers or even your laptop! From your iPhone: Open Safari > Navigate to your AppFolio > Click the plus sign at the bottom of the window > Select Add to Home Screen. From that point, you’ll see the icon on your iPhone’s desktop for AppFolio.

About Vanessa
Vanessa Green is an active member of our Client Services Team and has been working with property managers for many years. She works out of our Dallas office and loves helping our customers every day. In her free time she is a mom who also enjoys photography, technology, shooting, coffee, and road-trips.

With AppFolio’s tenant ACH offering as cheap as it is (it’s free!) and easy to use, many of our customers ask us how they can get even more of their tenants to pay rent online.

Here is a list of 5 ways you can encourage your tenants to pay online:

1. Make it a policy. Yes, forcing people is not always possible, but sometimes even suggesting it is a policy can work.
2. Give everyone a $5 Starbucks gift card if they sign up for recurring online rent payments.
3. Enter every tenant that signs up for online payments into a raffle to get a $50 Walmart gift card.
4. Put reminder messages on how to sign up for online payments in your office, in e-mails to tenants, on your website, on flyers in their unit, the laundry room, etc. Anywhere that they will see it!
5. Tell them! Every time you talk to tenant, make sure to mention it.

With these tips hopefully you can motivate most of your tenants to pay rent online and start enjoying all the extra time you will have during rent week.

We recently held a contest and asked property managers to guess the true cost of processing a monthly rent check. Property managers from across the U.S. submitted their guesses and were automatically entered into a drawing to win a Flip Video Camera.

The lucky winner is (drumroll please…) Keith from Real Property Management & Realty in sunny Orlando, Florida. He is the proud new owner of a very fun Flip Video Camera. Congratulations Keith!

Accepting rent checks each month is expensive for property managers – it takes about 5 minutes to process each check, so the real cost is $2.00 per check. This really adds up! If you’re processing 500 checks / month = $12,000 per year in employee time just handling and processing the rent checks.

However, it is possible to reduce these costs by moving rent week online. At AppFolio we’ve built a complete property management software solution that includes the ability for residents to pay rent online. Some of the benefits of our integrated online payments are:

• Easy for Residents: Your residents can pay rent online in seconds
• Integrated with Property Management Software: Payments are automatically entered into AppFolio and completely integrated with your accounting records.
• Zero Additional Fees: Instead of paying up to $1.50 for each ACH transaction, with AppFolio there are zero additional fees – Online ACH payments are included with your monthly service.

If you’re interested, visit our website to learn more about accepting rent payments online.

Congratulations Keith, from all of us at AppFolio!

Our new online tenant payment system has been live for a couple months and during the set-up process I’ve heard many of our customers ask if they can add a convenience fee to online payments. We strongly discourage this as it has been shown that making a resident pay a convenience fee to submit their payment online lowers adoption. Our customers definitely get the maximum value from accepting online payments when more residents pay online. So it is important to provide incentives that will actually encourage renters to pay online.

Some of our customers are coming up with creative ways to get the majority of their residents paying rent online. A unique approach is to actually add a convenience fee for accepting paper checks – the opposite of the traditional convenience fee to process online payments.

If you think about it, it makes sense. The bulk of the time property management companies spend during rent week is on accepting, receipting, and depositing paper checks. A recent study found that it takes about 5 minutes to process each check – if you’re processing hundreds of checks each month that time really adds up.

By providing incentives for the residents to pay online, the residents save money each month and the property management company saves enormous amounts of time and energy. A win-win for everyone! Of course, you should check your laws in your area to make sure this is okay as it can vary from state to state.

One of the most interesting aspects of my role as the VP of Product Management is that I get to spend quite a bit of time listening to our customers describe their problems and learning about the process they go through to solve these problems on a daily basis. Many vendors in our industry also hear about these problems but often times respond by producing software that addresses each issue, one by one. But, as more technologies are released that help property managers run a more efficient business, it becomes really difficult to manage, integrate (and pay for!) all of these new mostly stand-alone technologies.

For example, a modern property management company will invest in:

• Property management accounting software
• Tools for posting vacancies (to Craigslist, the Internet, the business website)
• Online rent collection for residents
• Resident background check software
• A company website
• A portal solution for their Owners and Residents

During my initial conversations with residential property managers they talked about the challenges of getting all of these different software solutions to “work together” and their frustration at the cost and headache of managing multiple vendors. It became very clear to us that what property managers needed was a single and complete property management software solution so they could spend time focused on their business rather than solving technology compatibility issues. We also heard (loud and clear) that property managers are tired of paying extra for additional features.

We most recently announced online rent collection using ACH, integrated with AppFolio property management software and we are the first vendor to include it at no additional charge to our customers. In an industry where property managers typically pay their provider up to $1.50 per ACH transaction, it is pretty exciting to offer this service to our customers with zero additional monthly fees.

We have such an exciting opportunity to build property management software that matches to how property managers actually run their business!