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Rent Guarantee Insurance – Charging Landlords, Assigning Payments and Tracking Arrears

This document explains how to configure and manage rent guarantee insurance deductions against a property, assign payments from insurers when a claim is made, make changes to arrears logic, and report on these transactions and deductions.

Overview

Rent Guarantee Insurance is typically treated as a source of business income, with payments to insurers treated as business expenses. To simplify tracking these, it is recommended to follow the prescribed methods below:

Collecting insurance payments as part of your fees

This method records Rent Guarantee Insurance as a landlord deduction and allocates the income to your fee balance.

You can add a series of deductions against a property on the 'Regular payments' page, so that the rent guarantee deduction can be generated each month automatically. Please ensure you select the 'General fee' option to add a series of fees to your business. For guidance on how to add a series of deductions, please see the article below:
​Landlord deductions - Adding a regular payment

To ensure these fees are easily identifiable, we suggest adding a dedicated expense category used exclusively for this deduction type.

To add a new expense category solely for Rent guarantee payments:

  1. Navigate to Admin > View all Employees > Admin page > Financial

  2. Select 'Expense categories' from the left-hand side

  3. Select '+ Category' and populate with:

    1. Category name - This will appear when you add a deduction

    2. Description - This will be the description that pulls automatically onto the deduction

We suggest retaining part or all of the deduction description when adding deductions to properties. This consistency will ensure they can be easily identified in your deductions export.

Note: Expense categories cannot be added retrospectively to a series of deductions that have already been added.


External reporting and nominal codes

For external reporting, you may wish to map this expense category to a nominal code. This will help to differentiate these deductions on your bank lines export, and on external accounting software if you import your bank lines.

To do so, please contact [email protected] to have a new nominal code applied to this expense category.

How to assign payments from insurers

When payments from insurers are assigned, you can mark them as 'Rent Guarantee Payments'. This will ensure the tenant arrears remain unchanged, but you still take a management fee as if it were a rental payment.

For a single payment from the insurer:

  1. Navigate to Financials > Unassigned lines.

  2. Locate the relevant transaction.

  3. Click on the edit pencil icon.

  4. Select a relevant Property as the Category.

  5. The subcategory will automatically populate with ‘Rent in’ using the % management fee assigned in the property record.

  6. Assign the payment to the relevant rent period.

  7. Select the checkbox under the subcategory dropdown marked ‘Rent guarantee payment’.

For a bulk payment from the insurer for more than one property:

  1. Navigate to Financials > Unassigned lines.

  2. Locate the relevant transaction.

  3. Click on the bank line ID.

  4. Once directed to the ‘Split lines’ page, enter each separate payment amount in the Amount box in separate rows.

  5. For each payment, select the appropriate Property as the Category.

  6. The subcategory will automatically populate with ‘Rent in’ using the % management fee assigned in the property record.

  7. Assign the payment to the relevant rent period.

  8. Select the checkbox under the subcategory dropdown marked ‘Rent guarantee payment’.

The Tenant Ledger and Landlord Ledger

Tenant ledger:

  • Rent guarantee payments will appear in red text on the tenant ledger and do not reduce tenant arrears.

  • If the ledger needs to be exported for court proceedings, you can generate a PDF that will not include the rent guarantee payments.

Landlord ledger:

  • Rent guarantee payments appear as standard rent income, including your management fee.

  • These entries are included in landlord statements in the same way as rent received from tenants.

Generating reports of Rent Guarantee Deductions

Users can generate an export of landlord deductions in any given period. That export can be filtered to highlight only rent guarantee deductions. To do so:

  1. Navigate to Admin > Exports.

  2. In the 'Financial' section, select either:

    1. Revenue (letting agents only)

    2. Bank lines

  3. Select the date range.

  4. Generate the export.

  5. Filter to only include the Rent guarantee payments:

    1. Filter by 'Description' if no nominal code has been mapped against the chosen expense category

    2. Filter by 'Nominal code' if a nominal code has been used

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