PROBLEM: Managing utilities for house hacking and rentals

[Patty Yang]

For househackers and rental property owners:

I find that managing utilities is a menial manual set of tasks every month from checking the bill and sending to tenants, but also can take more time if you have to keep on checking if your tenants pay for it. Do you have the same problem? What are the top problems you face? Has anyone found a way to automate this or tools they use?

I have utilities that needs to be billed in my name(like water) and I also have tenants(in house hacking situation) who have different utilities owed per their agreements(yes i know I probably should change that soon). For example, I have tenants who have utilities included in rent with a cap at $100 so if they go over they pay excess. 

Wondering if people are experiencing this and have found a better way to manage this process. 

[Michael Haas]

I'll echo what others have said - I charge a flat fee (in my case, $75) per person for all utilities in my rent-by-the-room homes and do not charge for overages - if I had an assistant doing this I'd consider it, but my time is more valuable than the overage more often than not. If my time is worth about $60 an hour to me and it takes 20 minutes to discover that my tenant owes me $20 I don't actually "make" a cent. Again, if you have an assistant with a $20 hourly rate it could be worth the manual process.

I'd be down for automation though if there was a solution that provided it. I think most landlords doing flat-fee utilities would prefer to bill-through utilities if there was an automatic solution to remove their time from the equation.