Billing rent and collecting payments

A charge is what’s owed. A payment is money received. Nothing is “paid” until a payment is allocated to a charge — and Vespy lets you record the money now and sort out which charge it covers later, if that’s easier in the moment.

Rent bills itself

Once a lease is active, its rent charge day already generates a monthly rent charge — you don’t create rent charges by hand. What follows is for everything else.

1. Bill something one-off, or set it up as recurring

Go to Accounting > Charges and click Create charge. Fill in:

• Lease (or check Create without lease to pick a Tenant / Property / Unit manually instead)
• Category — where this lands in your chart of accounts
• Amount, Due date
• Name and Description (optional)

To make it repeat instead of billing once, check Repeat monthly. This reveals Day of month and End date fields, and — if the unit has fee templates set up — a Prefill from unit template dropdown so you don’t have to retype a recurring parking or storage fee.

2. Find and manage recurring charges later

The Charges page has a Recurring tab next to Charges — that’s where existing recurring rules live. Open one to pause, resume, or delete it, or to change its day of month and end date.

Note

A lease’s own rent charge shows up here too, but it’s read-only — a note on the page points you to Open lease, since rent amount and billing day are controlled by the lease itself, not edited from this screen.

3. Record a payment

Go to Accounting > Charge Payments and click Record payment. Fill in:

• Tenant
• Lease (optional)
• Amount
• Method — ACH, Card, Cash, Check, or Other (Check # appears if you pick Check)
• Received Date
• Associated Charge (optional) — pick one of the tenant’s outstanding charges and the amount auto-fills to what’s owed, fully settling it. Leave this as “Leave payment unallocated” to record the money now and sort out the allocation later.

Caution

If the amount you enter is more than the selected charge’s remaining balance, an inline warning appears and the button stays disabled until you fix it.

4. Split a payment across multiple charges, or fix a mistake

Open the payment from the Charge Payments list to reach its detail page:

• Allocate payment — for money you left unallocated, split it across several outstanding charges with a dollar amount per charge.
• Each existing allocation has its own Edit (change the amount) and Remove buttons.
• Reverse payment undoes it entirely — but only while it has zero allocations.
• If the payment is still pending (a check that hasn’t cleared, for example), an admin sees Mark received / Mark failed buttons here.

Afterwards

• Handling a security deposit — deposits are tracked separately from this ledger.
• Tenants paying through their own portal login create these same payment records automatically — see Inviting a tenant to the portal.