I own a park in Minnesota and we have the old Badger Read O Matic disc water meters with remote readers on the outside of the homes that my park manager goes around and writes the numbers down off of. I manually put those readings into excel and get the total gallons used. Then I manually create invoices using a free invoice generator online. Then I would print and hammer out envelope after envelope to mail to tenants.
Long story short I just took delivery of brand new Sonata ultrasonic water meters with cellular receivers that will wirelessly send me all the readings. I originally thought I would save money and continue to do the billing myself but I gotta tell you I really hate doing that billing manually and it takes a looong time.
Would like to get recommendations on how others do their water billing and approximate cost of whatever method they use and what is included for the price. I have about 53 occupied lots for reference. I am going to ask Master Meter who sold me the meters if they have a recommendation but I would like to hear from other owners.
I use to do my billing exactly like you are doing it. The envelope stuffing was brutal - not to mention running out of printer ink and having to go to Office Max to buy more.
Now I email tenants their bill. I have a handful of tenants who don’t have email addresses so I text them their bill. After I calculate their bill I copy and paste the totals to a separate spreadsheet, then copy the total and paste it to an email. Here’s what the summary looks like:
July Bill
Lot 1
PLEASE PAY EXACT AMOUNT
Begin W/S Usage
571,200
End W/S Usage
572,000
Total Gallon Usage
800
Sewer bill
$39.02
Water Bill
$19.49
Rent
$350.00
Home Payment/Rent
$0.00
Other bill
$ -
Total bill
$408.51
I use Google Voice for texting and Google Mail for emailing. I’ve considered creating a mail-merge program with MS Word and Excel which would make the billing much more automated but I’ve had issues keeping Google Mail synched with MS Outlook. Someone on the forum mentioned that a basic version of Rent Manager can be licensed for around $75 per month that offers a billing calculator and billing delivery option.
Feel free to contact me if you want more details on my spreadsheets. It’s not the most sexy way to bill but it’s free - and takes about an hour to bill 76 tenants.
Not a park owner (I’m researching the space while building software for park owners), but a few of the billing threads here seem relevant to what you’re after.
On the DIY side, other posts describe roughly what tmp mentioned: a usage spreadsheet so you’re not copy-pasting every invoice by hand. That should cut the per-tenant time down a lot once it’s set up.
A couple of the submetering vendors people bring up (Metron, ABT, MarineSync) will also take the reads and handle the billing, though posts suggest that runs a few hundred a month on a park your size, so it’s probably a tradeoff between your time and that fee.
On the software side, Rent Manager and a few others get mentioned for folding water into the regular rent invoice, which might matter if you’d rather tenants get one bill instead of two.
I also put together a free tool based on your description that might help- drop in the meter reads and it outputs a PDF or CSV, all in the browser without an account. Happy to chat about it too (and really open to feedback and can change it to better fit!)
Ran ops across 9 CA parks (old mechanical meters, not ultrasonic, but same read-and-bill grind) a couple reference points: third-party sub-metering billing services (Metron, Synergy, etc.) typically run $3–8/site/mo for invoicing + resident comms + compliance docs … at 53 lots that’s roughly $160–425/mo depending on what’s bundled (ask if a bad-debt guarantee is included, some skip it). The gap most smaller parks hit: your Sonata system is already doing the hard part (the reads) the only piece left is turning that data into a statement, which is a smaller/cheaper problem than the full sub-metering-as-a-service packages solve. I build exactly that for small parks — happy to DM what I’ve got if useful, no pressure.