When a letting agent sends you a payment, you want to record the rent they’ve collected, the fees they’ve charged and any other costs they’ve deducted.

Until now, doing that in CLARIFYProperty meant learning about split transactions. You needed to translate the agent’s statement into lines, categories and signed amounts before you could finish the job.

The accounting capability was there. The interface still asked you to think too much like the software.

Rent Collection Rules give that everyday task its own language and flow.

Start with how you receive rent

When creating a Rent collection rule, you choose Direct tenant payment or Letting agent payment. That choice determines the information you need to provide.

For a direct tenant payment, you choose the property and rental-income category. A matching receipt can then be applied using the amount actually received.

For an agent payment, you set up the property or properties covered by the payment and the expected rent collected. Agent fees are calculated using each property’s current fee setting, giving you a starting breakdown to review when a receipt matches.

The rule remembers the recurring details. Each receipt still gets the attention it needs.

Review the agent’s payment in familiar terms

Suppose your agent collects £1,000 in rent, charges a £100 fee and deducts £50 for maintenance. The payment arriving in your bank account is £850.

Choose Review on a matching receipt and you work with Rent collected, Agent fee and Other deductions. You can check the rent, adjust the fee for this receipt and add the maintenance deduction against the appropriate property and expense category.

You enter deductions as positive amounts: £50 for maintenance is simply £50 deducted. CLARIFYProperty handles the underlying signs and allocations.

The review shows how the breakdown compares with the amount received. Once they agree, choose Confirm and apply. An unexplained difference stays visible for you to resolve; it doesn’t silently become a maintenance expense.

Changes made during review apply to that receipt. They don’t quietly rewrite the rule’s defaults.

Keep the flexibility, introduce it when it’s useful

Underneath, an agent receipt still uses split transactions to record the rent and costs correctly. That remains a useful implementation, but it doesn’t need to be the first concept a user encounters.

The flexible editor remains available as Advanced categorisation for situations that need it. Users can reach for that control when their task calls for it, having already done useful work through the simpler flow.

This is the direction we want to keep taking with CLARIFYProperty: let the user’s task shape the interface. Someone recording an agent payment should be able to start with “here’s the rent collected, and here are the deductions” and have the software take care of turning that into the right accounting entries.