Just curious what others would do in this situation…
June 1, 2019 I had my tenants start depositing their rent payments into my bank account at the local branch. I am able to log in and see the deposit slip image and credit the tenants for their payments. I made it very clear that deposit slips with their name or lot number must be used in order to get credit for the payment. I also provided pre-printed deposit slips with the lot number and bank account number for their convenience. June went very smoothly.
Now it’s July and I have 2 tenants who did not pay and I have 2 cash deposits with no deposit slips. Essentially, I have 4 tenants that could have made those two payments and 2 tenants that did not make any payment. I am about to have all 4 of them served with 7 day notices to quit and assume the 2 paying tenants will produce their receipts to put a stop to the eviction. Looking for feedback on this plan of action.
In the mean time, I sent out a friendly reminder to all tenants to always use deposit slips with their rent deposits.
This is the specific reason why people enforce paying additional cents for lot rent. Lot 20 pays $300.20 so that when the new teller doesn’t require a deposit slip you know who it’s from.
But in your case I’d have your manager ask each tenant who has not paid these questions, specifically in this order:
“When are you going to pay your rent?” - Two likely outcomes - “uh, soon” or “I already did!!!”
If they say soon, have Manager hand them Pay or Quit notice. If they claim they already paid… “Okay, great, what date and time did you pay? We don’t have a deposit slip to show it was yours” - Well I paid on Tuesday at 3pm.
“Did you get a receipt from your deposit or have anything to confirm you paid it?” - Probably not but could be helpful info.
“Going forward we are going to ask you pay 20 cents extra since you are in lot 20 so that this is avoided in the future. Thank you”
It’s not fool proof but you should be able to corroborate some of this with your online records. I don’t think serving everyone a pay or quit notice is a good idea until you do some digging.
Did you have printed the specific lot number for each tenant on the deposit slip? So, in other words, you were ordering a separate printed batch for each lot?
@Shelly I had a batch of deposit slips printed and then I hand wrote the lot numbers on each one. I sent 12 slips to each tenant for the year. I only have 22 tenants so it wasn’t hard to do. After a while they all finally got on the program (as did the bank) and it worked out really nicely.