Tracking Rent in LeasePilot HQ: A Month in the Rent Tracker

Rent collection is really two jobs: getting the money in, and knowing at a glance who has and hasn't paid. LeasePilot HQ's rent tracker handles both, and the easiest way to understand it is to follow a single month from start to finish. Let's walk through July.

Day one: generate the month's records

At the start of the month you open the Rent page and click "Generate July." One click creates a pending payment record for every active lease in your portfolio, with each amount auto-filled from that lease's monthly rent. You don't build a spreadsheet row per tenant — the platform reads your active leases and produces the month's expected payments in a single action. If you've already generated some records, that's fine: already-generated months are skipped, so clicking again is safe and won't create duplicates.

How each due date is calculated

You'll notice each new record already has a due date, and it isn't just "the 1st" for everyone. LeasePilot HQ calculates the due date from the lease start date plus five days — giving each tenant a five-day grace window measured from when their lease actually began. So a lease that started on the 15th is due by the 20th each month; a lease that started on the 1st is due by the 6th. There's one careful edge case handled for you: the due date is capped to the last day of the month, which matters in February, where a lease start day of the 27th plus five days would otherwise spill past month's end.

How tenants actually pay: ACH through the portal

Tenants pay through the tenant portal, and the primary rail is ACH — a bank-to-bank transfer on the same network as direct deposit. A tenant links their bank account once, then pays each month from any device. ACH is the default for a reason that's specific to rent: it's a recurring, predictable payment on a fixed schedule, so the lower cost of a flat ACH fee outweighs the few business days it takes to settle, versus the percentage-based fee a card would carry on a $2,000 payment. When an ACH payment clears, it records against that tenant's pending record automatically — you don't re-key it.

Logging the payments that come in other ways

Not every tenant pays online, and the tracker doesn't pretend otherwise. For a check, cash, Zelle, or Venmo payment, you have two ways to record it:

• • "Mark paid" — a one-click action that instantly records a pending payment as paid with today's date, ideal for the moment a check lands in your hand
• • "Log payment" — the fuller path, where you select the lease and the amount and due date auto-fill from it, then you enter the paid date and payment method (Check, Cash, Bank Transfer, Zelle, Venmo, or Other)

When you log a payment, there's a notes field for a check number or a partial-payment detail, and a dedicated late-fee field so any late fee you collected is recorded alongside the rent rather than lost. Selecting the lease auto-calculates the due date from that lease's start-day-plus-five logic, so you're not doing date math by hand.

Mid-month: watching for overdue rent

This is the half of the job that manual tracking gets wrong. Any pending payment that passes its due date automatically flips to Overdue and shows in red — you don't have to run a report to find late payers. The summary card at the top of the Rent page totals the overdue amount, and your dashboard surfaces overdue rent in its summary cards too, so the number is in front of you without going looking for it. Filter the view by status "Overdue" and you have exactly the follow-up list you need, nothing more.

End of month and beyond: filtering and history

The month picker lets you pull up any month's payment history — the view shows every payment with a due date in that month. Filter by "Pending" to see who still owes for the current month, by "Paid" for a clean list of what's been received, or by "Overdue" for the late list. Because every record is timestamped, you also build, month over month, a documented payment history for each tenant — the kind of record that matters if a late-payment pattern ever needs to be shown, or a dispute needs settling. And short months like February are handled correctly throughout, so the history stays accurate.