As soon as you have created your pending tenancy and assigned your applicant(s), you can begin to process financials for that tenancy. 

If you have taken a holding fee from the tenant, you will need to post that as a receipt onto the tenancy record. You will do that by right clicking from the tenancy record - financial - receive payment

Fill in the details of the receipt:

1: Enter the amount you have received and confirm the bank account the money has come into

2: Fill out the payment date and payment method

3: You can use the payment notes box to confirm what the receipt is for

4: The screen will display how much you now have on account as a balance

5: Save

Your tenancy will then sit with a balance in hand in the client account and on the tenancy record itself to be used as needed towards the rent/deposit etc when these are charged. If the tenancy doesn't go ahead and the money needs to be refunded, you can do so by Issuing a Refund.

If you end up with a scenario where the tenant pulls out of the tenancy and you as the agent are allowed to keep the holding deposit, you can then raise a sales invoice for the fee by right clicking from the tenancy - financial - create sales invoice. Please see here for a link through to creating Sales Invoices for more information on this. 

And you can then allocate your holding fee against it by right clicking from the tenancy - financial - receive payment - DO NOT enter anything into the amount received - simply tick alongside your invoice and save. You would then be able to mark your tenancy as cancelled.

NB: You won't raise a sales invoice for a 'holding fee'. Invoices are charges that are due to you as the agent - e.g management fees, set up fees etc. They are monies that you will be deducting from your tenant or landlord and transferring the money once received out of the client account, into the business account as money that the business has made. 

Because Expert Agent deals solely with client accounting, you are unable to pay money out of the client account if you do not have the money for that particular client in the first place. You are not allowed to use money from one client to cover the cost of a payment to another. If you do not yet have money on account for that client you will not be able to make the payment.

You will need to have either received in the rent from the Tenant, have retained funds on account for the Landlord or have recorded a receipt into the client account from your Landlord directly to cover the cost of the invoice. Once you have the funds on account, if you want to pay the contractor ahead of processing the Landlord payment, you can do so by manually allocating to mark the invoice as paid.

In the below example we will look at marking a Purchase Invoice as paid outside of our usual Landlord payment run with a rent that has been received from the Tenant.

From the Landlord record - right click - Financial - Receive Payment.

 The receive payment window will open as below.

1: You will see in the 'unallocated' field, the available funds you have for this landlord in relation to the selected property. This will be any receipts posted that haven't yet been used to pay off any invoices or paid to the landlord. In our scenario, this is the 22nd March rent receipt.

2: You will see a list of 'outstanding' invoices in relation to the selected property. Click on the select box alongside the invoice you want to mark as paid from the available funds. In our scenario we are just selecting the £300.00 Garden wall invoice.

3: Clicking save will mark the invoice as paid. You will be alerted to the save working successfully by a green pop-up.

 Back on the landlord statement, the balance carried forward will remain the same as we have not recorded any additional funds as received, we have simply used funds that were on account to mark the invoice as paid. You will see that the invoice is now showing as '(paid)' rather than '(outstanding)'. 

When we go to pay the above Landlord via Landlord payments, they will show with the £384.80 balance to pay to them, but their available income will show as £500.00 rather than £800.00 as £300.00 worth of income has already been used to pay the invoice.

The government has announced that with effect from 1st  June 2019, it will be illegal for landlords and letting agents to charge administration and other types of fees to tenants – except those few prescribed by the legislation. You can find the full legislation directly via the government website: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2019/4/contents/enacted

The ban may require you to make changes to your tenancy agreements and other such documentation. 

If you subscribe to our Compliant Letters and Agreement pack via The Letting Centre, all relevant documents have been updated for you.  

You will also find that you now have a document within your Compliant Letters and Agreements tab “LC – Fact Sheet, Letting Fees Act 2019” that will provide you with some information from The Letting Centre that you may find useful.

If you are not yet signed up to the Compliant Letters and Agreements, please see here for a video demonstration on how this works. 

You can visit the Letting Centre - compliant lettings documents and support page for further information on how to have the pack added to your Expert Agent subscription.