Billing every unit individually is slow but self-correcting, because you notice the odd one as you go. Billing the whole portfolio at once is far faster and has the opposite property: a single wrong rate or a stale meter reading goes out to two hundred people simultaneously, and you spend the next week answering for it.
The work is not in the sending. It is in the checking.
Get the inputs right before you start
Meter readings first, and dated. Every metered unit read within the same short window, with readings entered before anything is priced. A reading taken three weeks late puts consumption in the wrong month and creates a bill somebody can legitimately dispute.
Confirm move-ins and move-outs. A tenant who left on the 8th should not be billed a full month, and a unit occupied from the 20th should be pro-rated. This is the single most common correction and it is entirely preventable.
Check rate changes have been applied: new rent for units that were reviewed, new utility rates if a tariff moved. Once.
Then preview, and read it like a stranger
Before anything is sent, look at the run as a whole and ask four questions:
- Is anyone billed zero, or billed nothing at all? Usually a lease that never got activated.
- Is anyone billed twice? Usually a duplicate charge from a manual adjustment.
- Which bills moved most against last month? Sort by variance, not by unit number. The three biggest movers are where the errors are; the rest of the list is noise.
- Does any single bill look impossible? A water charge ten times the norm is a mis-keyed meter reading, not a leak, roughly nine times out of ten.
Five minutes on those four questions prevents most of the week that follows a bad run.
Send with the derivation attached
Every metered charge should carry its reading, its rate and its arithmetic on the bill itself. Not because it looks thorough, but because it converts "why is this so much?" from a phone call into a glance. See how to read a metered bill for what a tenant is actually trying to check.
When you get one wrong
You will, occasionally. Two rules:
Correct it as a new entry, not by editing the old one. A bill that silently changes after a tenant has seen it destroys more trust than the original error did. Issue a credit or an adjusting charge that references the original.
Tell everyone affected before they tell you. A message that says "we got the water rate wrong on this month's bills, here is the corrected figure, here is the credit" costs one message. Being found out costs the rest of the month.
Same date, every month
Predictability is worth as much as accuracy. Tenants who know bills arrive on the 1st and are due on the 5th behave differently from tenants who are surprised each month, and an arrears figure means something when the billing date is stable and nothing much when it isn't.
What a billing run is, mechanically
A billing run is the single operation that raises this period's charges against every active tenancy at once: rent, service charge, metered utilities, any recurring items, and any one-off charges queued since the last run. One action, several hundred ledger entries, one set of documents out.
It is worth being precise about what it is not. It does not collect money and it does not decide who has paid. It creates the obligations that later payments are applied against. Treating the run as "sending bills" is what leads to portfolios where the bill went out but nothing was raised on the ledger, so the arrears report shows everybody current and the month looks quiet until it does not.
Everything downstream inherits from it. Arrears ageing ages from the due dates this run set. Landlord statements report what this run billed. Receipts reference the charges it created. A run done badly is not one bad afternoon; it is a month of corrections in every report that reads from it.
The pre-flight checklist
Run through this before you press anything. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the whole article.
Tenancies
- Every new tenancy activated, with its start date and rent.
- Every ended tenancy closed, with its end date.
- Mid-period move-ins and move-outs flagged for pro-rating.
- Units that should be vacant actually showing vacant, and none of them billed.
Charges and rates
- Rent reviews effective this period applied, and only those effective this period.
- Utility tariffs current, with the date the new rate takes effect recorded.
- Service charge amounts current, and any annual reconciliation reflected.
- Recurring extras still valid: parking, garbage, borehole, security. These outlive the reason they were added more often than any other line.
Meters
- Every metered unit read, within the same short window, before pricing.
- Estimates identified as estimates, and last month's estimates trued up.
- Rollovers and replaced meters handled deliberately rather than as an enormous consumption.
Documents
- The account or reference number on every bill, correct and unchanged.
- The due date, the payment channel and the period covered stated on the face of the bill.
- Contact details for a query that a tenant can actually reach.
Read the preview like a stranger
Beyond the four questions above, three specific sorts find nearly everything else:
Sort by variance against last month. The three largest movers in both directions, every time. Errors are not distributed evenly and they are almost never in the middle of the list.
Sort by total, ascending. Zeroes and near-zeroes are the tell: a lease that never activated, a meter that stopped, a rate that failed to apply, a unit billed for utilities but not for rent.
Group by charge type and count the lines. If eighty units should carry a service charge and the run shows seventy-eight, find the two now. Counting is the check people skip because it feels too simple to be useful, and it catches the errors that reading individual bills does not.
Last, spot-read three complete bills end to end: a simple one, a metered one, and the most complicated tenancy you have. You are not checking arithmetic, you are checking whether a person who did not produce it would understand it.
When the run has already gone out
Errors survive a checklist occasionally. What decides how expensive they are is the next hour.
Correct forward, always. A credit note or an adjusting charge that references the original entry. Editing a bill a tenant has already read is how a billing history stops being evidence, including in the months where you were right.
Tell everyone affected before they find out. One message naming the error, the corrected figure, the credit and the new due date. Tenants forgive a wrong bill that was owned quickly and remember one they had to prove.
Fix the input, not the output. A wrong rate corrected on one bill will reappear next month. The correction is not finished until the rate, the reading or the lease behind it has changed.
Write down what happened. Two lines in a log: what went wrong, what caused it, what changed. Portfolios that keep that log stop repeating errors after the first occurrence; portfolios that do not, re-learn the same lesson roughly twice a year.
Make the run boring
The goal for a billing run is that it stops being an event. Four things get you there: the same date every month, a checklist that is worked rather than remembered, a preview nobody is allowed to skip, and an input stage for readings, move-ins and rate changes that is closed a day before the run rather than during it.
That last one is the real discipline. Most bad runs are not caused by the run. They are caused by somebody entering a meter reading while the bills are generating.
For a portfolio of any size this is what property management software built for Kenya is for: charges raised from the tenancy rather than typed, the preview produced automatically, corrections posted as new entries, and the same ledger feeding receipts, arrears ageing and landlord statements. The checklist above is the part that has to happen either way.
Common questions
What is a billing run?
The operation that raises a period's charges against every active tenancy in one go, covering rent, service charge, utilities and recurring items, creating the ledger entries that later payments are applied against. Sending the documents is the visible half; raising the charges is the half everything else depends on.
When should a billing run go out?
On the same date each month, with due dates that do not move. Predictability is worth as much as accuracy: an arrears figure means something when the billing date is stable, and very little when it is not.
How do I check a billing run before sending?
Sort by variance against last month, sort ascending to find zeroes, count the lines per charge type against the number of units that should carry it, and read three complete bills end to end. Five minutes on those four checks prevents most of the corrections that follow a bad run.
What do I do if a bill was wrong?
Issue a correcting entry that references the original rather than editing it, notify everyone affected before they contact you, and fix the underlying input so the same error does not recur next month.
Should tenants be billed before or after the period?
Either can be defended, but the lease should say which, and the bill should state the period it covers. Disputes far more often come from an unstated convention than from the convention itself.
How should mid-month move-ins be handled?
Pro-rate on a basis written into the tenancy agreement, and show the calculation on the bill: days occupied, daily rate, total. Pro-rating that arrives as a single unexplained figure is questioned nearly every time, even when it is exactly right.