Payment Automation: Schedules and Reminders

Automated payment tracking helps reduce late payments while saving hours of manual follow-up work.

Setup Payment Schedule

Open the deal → Payments tab. It shows a Payment Schedule card and a Rent Collection line — "0 of 4 collected", "AED 6,000 of AED 120,000".

Create Payment Schedule asks for:

• Payment Frequency — monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual or custom
• Number of Installments — 4 for four cheques
• Payment Method — post-dated cheques, bank transfer, cash
• Bank Name — only when the method is cheques
• First Payment Date — today or later; for an existing tenancy it may be in the past, but not before the lease starts
• Generate payment records immediately — a checkbox

The annual rent is not retyped here: the form prefills it from the deal's Financial section, then splits it across the installments. Ticking the checkbox writes the individual payment rows at once, each with its own due date and amount. A schedule that would bill more rent than the contract is refused.

️ Add Payment is a different control on the same tab: it adds ONE payment — a deposit, a commission, a one-off charge — not a schedule.

Configure Reminders

Reminders are not a per-deal ladder you build. The tenant is reminded before each payment is due; each person on your team chooses under Settings → Notifications → Delivery Schedule how far ahead they hear about upcoming payments. If a payment becomes overdue, TenancyDesk keeps reminding the tenant and your team until it is settled.

The Notification Preferences grid at the top of the same tab sets which channels carry your own payment alerts — it does not change the tenant's reminders — the Payments rows, across EMAIL · SMS · WHATSAPP. Rows marked Required cannot be switched off.

Marking Payments Received

When the tenant pays:

1. Open Payments — the list page or the deal's Payments tab
2. On the payment row, open More options
3. Choose Mark as Paid (a bounced cheque is Mark as Bounced)

Reminders stop for that payment once it is marked paid.

The states a payment can be in: Pending · Due · Paid · Bounced · Cancelled. The Payments page groups them as All Payments, Overdue and Upcoming, with tiles for Total Expected, Collected, Pending and Overdue.

️ There is no colour ladder by days late — a payment past its due date reads Overdue, whether it is one day late or thirty.

Late Payment Tracking

What the product does:

• Marks a payment Overdue once its due date passes
• Counts it into the Overdue tab and the Overdue tile
• Keeps sending overdue reminders until it is settled — except for an existing tenancy awaiting confirmation, and for a payment that was already past due when the schedule was created

What stays yours to do — the product does not do these, and describing them as automatic would be wrong:

• Phone the tenant
• Visit the property
• Serve a legal notice (Dubai Law 26/2007 for a Dubai tenancy)

️ The compliance side does have dated notice deadlines per emirate, and those DO surface on the deal — but they are notice deadlines, not payment chasing.

What Automation Helps With

With payment reminders and scheduling automated:

• Fewer late payments through timely, consistent reminders
• Less time spent on manual follow-ups
• A clearer collection picture with every payment tracked in one place

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Next Steps

1. Create payment schedules for all active deals
2. Check your own payment alerts in Settings → Notifications
3. Train team on marking payments received
4. Review monthly payment reports