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Operating a long-stay business in today’s tight-margin economy makes late payments an inconvenience you simply can’t afford. Add the shocking statistic that ‘nearly 40% of manual invoices contain errors,’ and the time wasted by team members on manual invoicing activities, and you’re looking at a recipe for disaster.
Here’s where automated billing comes in. A property management system can streamline invoicing operations and slash processing time (from an average of 10.1 days to only 3.9 days), improving revenue flow management. Let’s look at how your long-stay business can save time and money with automated billing and payment collection processes.
Make every penny count
In the current cost of living crisis, increasing utility bills, management costs, and agent fees can create a significant strain on your bottom line. To stay afloat, focussing on the profitability of every unit and area of your property business is a priority.
Using a property management system to take part payment at the booking stage helps maintain a steady cash flow. This underscores your guest’s commitment to their stay which, for long-stay bookings, maintains some security that your units are being held and paid for while running verification and affordability checks. It also protects you from losing money in the case of cancellations and contract breaches.
Once checks are complete and the contract signed, the system creates a flexible rolling billing type with a payment schedule and requests an initial first payment. Monthly direct debits can be set up to take automated payments month after month. Maintaining accuracy and consistency in billing processes, a property management system accounts for every penny across your long-stay business.
Save time on invoices
With manual invoicing processes, updating your booking system and producing a client receipt takes time. Not with billing automation.
After collecting payment, an automated billing system generates a receipt and sends confirmation. Syncing your property management system with the payment portal provides oversight on completed and outstanding payments in the management dashboard, without inputting any data yourself.
A frictionless billing system integrates to a wide range of payment providers and accounting software. Integrating an automated email functionality into your billing system facilitates communication with residents, such as sending reminder and late payment emails where necessary, reducing cumbersome back and forth spent on admin tasks.
Your team can spend hours manually creating, amending, sending, and chasing invoices, taking them away from tasks that truly matter, such as delivering exceptional guest experience. But with an automated billing system, you can work with a much leaner team and work on more intentional tasks that benefit your business. This also reduces your overheads on staff costs.
Never miss a payment
Knowing when you’re getting paid hugely helps your cash flow. But, when those payments are late, a manual invoice process might not pick it up (and a staggering 64% of businesses get paid late). This can also happen if you run a mix of short, medium, and long stays without systems and processes.
Meanwhile, an automated billing system flags overdue invoices, scheduling automatic late payment reminders that copy in your finance team for manual follow-ups.
Equally, relying on manual emails and spreadsheets can lead to missed stay extensions. If a resident feels forgotten, this can reflect negatively on your business. However, an automated billing system can help flag renewal dates, and support guests to manage their stay on their own terms, by providing a hard end date.
Renewals are an excellent time to renegotiate rates, especially if your property business is met with rising costs impacting profitability. Passing on costs to your residents takes some of the burden away, ensuring the sustainability of your business (and your residents’ homes).
Upsell extras & offer flexibility
Every unit and area needs to be profitable. For example, incorporating a coworking space with bookable amenities into your coliving or BTR operations can hugely boost revenue. But to manage this properly, and avoid extras not being accounted for, you’ll want to use a property management system that can handle the complexities of differing payment types and add-ons.
A property management system can add charges to invoices or send separate invoices to residents to account for upsold extras.
Meanwhile, software like res:harmonics that’s dedicated to coliving, BTR and serviced apartment operators allows you to switch units to a short stay serviced apartment model to fill occupancy gaps and increase revenue from every unit. If you’re managing long stay operations and notice short occupancy gaps between long-term residents a system like res:harmonics can help fill those gaps by seamlessly switching your unit to accept short stay, serviced apartment style bookings.
Learn how using a property management system can streamline your long-stay operations.
Request a demo to speak to someone at res:harmonics about how our software can automate and scale up your long-stay property business.
