Collecting Application & Application Fee's

[Bryan Henry]

Hey Everyone!

I am a new investor with two doors currently, and I wanted to start a discussion on how everyone is collecting application  and application fee's.  I have found that the canned applications on the websites (Zillow, cozy, rentprep etc...) do not ask all the questions that I would like to have on my rental application.  Because of that, I am thinking about moving to an application that I create and hand out to tenants.  Assuming it is reasonable to expect tenants to email the filled out application to me, the only major draw back I see with this method is how to collect the application payments.  I am trying to avoid receiving application payments in the mail, driving around town to meet tenants and physically picking up payments, and expensive property management software.  My current thought is to use quickbooks and send out email invoices that can be paid online.  This will then allow me to management my accounting as well as application payments and even rent collection all from one source, decrease the duplicate effort of having to manually enter these transactions into an accounting tool.

What is everyone else doing? Looking for any great ideas from more experienced landlords to simplfy this process!

I look forward to the discussion!