Overview
Now that you've set up your Management Fee settings, you can move on to the next step which is to create and pay those fees. To avoid accidentally creating the same management fees more than once, we recommend consistently creating your management fee bills every month rather than trying to go back and do several months at a time.
To assist in preventing this, our management fees feature defaults to the previous month. For example, using the feature to create management fees in February defaults to creating the fees for January. You can change the dates, but make sure you aren't duplicating management fees you've already created. The date range is also used to hide the properties for which the last date when you generated management fee bills is not after the start date for the date range.
Tip: When creating and paying management fee bills for the month, it is important to make sure you’ve entered all lease transactions for that month, otherwise, your management fees won’t be calculated based on accurate amounts!
We should point out that management fee bills are not created automatically for you each month. You must create management fee bills manually monthly or whenever you are ready to collect management fees. DoorLoop will calculate the amounts for you based on your management fee settings.
Note: Management Fees are not available to Starter Plans. Consider upgrading to the Pro or Premium Plans to access this feature.
The Steps
To create your management fees bill, click on the + Create New button in the upper left corner and select the Management Fees option found under Vendor Transactions.
This takes you to the Create Management Fee Bills wizard. Select the properties you want to run management fees for.
(The time period will default to the previous month. You can change the time period if needed, use the filters to narrow down the list of properties, or manually deselect properties you don’t want to create bills for.)
When you’ve selected the appropriate properties you want to create management fee bills for, click the Create Bills button.
You'll get a popup with the following options:
View Bills - this option opens a new tab showing a transactions list report listing the bills you just created. Here, you can click on the bills and edit them as needed.
Pay Bills - This option opens a new tab for DoorLoop’s Pay Bills wizard, with the management fee bills you just created already selected.
If you decide to Pay Bills now, continue with the Pay Bills wizard. The Pay Bills page will show the following:
If you have enough available funds for each property, the Payment Amount will auto-populate and you can click Next to pay the bills.
If you don’t have enough available funds but want to record the bill payments anyway, toggle off Automatically Pay in the Actions column and click the Edit links. Here you can override the insufficient funds protection by entering the Payment Amount for each bill and clicking the Save button. Now you should be able to click the Next button to pay the bills.
On the Create Payments window, you can change the Payment Date, the Payment Method, and choose whether you want to print checks later if you choose check.
Check - Enter a check number if you already have your own checks sent outside of DoorLoop. Otherwise, select "Add to Print Queue" if you plan on printing the check out in DoorLoop. Read: Print a Check for more information.
ePay - Choose this to send a payment electronically if you have already signed up for Checkbook.io.
All other payment method choices require payment outside of DoorLoop.
Click Finish to finalize the payment.
That’s it! You’ve created and recorded payments for your monthly management fee bills. If you try to create new management fee bills for the same month, DoorLoop won’t show any potential bills by default because you have already created them. Be careful that you don’t override this by including already billed properties and double-creating your management fees.
Next Step
Send an Outgoing Payment to a Tenant, Vendor, or Owner - If you choose ePay as the payment method, send the electronic payment to your recipient.
Print a Check - If you chose the payment method of check and chose to print later, don't forget to print your check.
Things to Consider
Record management fees after receiving revenue from your tenants and before you record owner distributions.
If you deduct your management fees from property revenue before sending the remaining income to the owner, go ahead and create the management fee bill payments right after you create the bills.
The bill payment reduces the funds available to distribute to your owner by the amount of your management fees. This way, when you record the owner distribution, you won't accidentally distribute the full revenue amount because you forgot to record your management fee bill payment.
If the owner of the property receives rent payments directly, record the management fee bill first, then record the payment after the owner pays you.
If the tenant payments go directly into the bank accounts of the property owners, you can record the management fee bill payments when the owner actually pays you for the bills you send them.
Fix management fee bills that were created incorrectly or are missing information.
If you created management fees with incomplete data, you will need to delete the bills and redo the management fee process. Make sure all lease transactions are accurate before redoing your management fees!
There are multiple ways to find and delete bills and bill payments, but we recommend going to Reports and choosing the Transactions List report in the Accounting section. Here you can filter the transactions by date, the type of transaction, and vendor to help you narrow down your transaction list to find the bills you need to delete. Since your property management company is the vendor, filtering by the correct time period and yourself as the vendor will likely suffice.
If you also paid the bills, you will need to find and delete the Bill Payments before deleting the Bills. Delete these by clicking on each line item in the report and choosing Delete in the lower left corner of the screen.
After you’ve deleted the bill payments and bills, you will need to redo the Create and Pay Management Fee Bills process. However, you will need to make sure the correct date range is selected, and change the Billed Properties dropdown to Include Already Billed. This way you can see the properties which previously had management fees created for them, and you can select the properties you need to recreate management fees for before continuing the process.
