4. Create Your First Tenant Cost Report

Things you'll need:

• A computer
• An old water utility bill for the property

In this article, we're going to run through the process of creating a tenant cost report so you're ready to go when it's time to bill your tenants.  For this example, we're going to be billing our example tenants for the water usage in the previous month, on the utility schedule.  Utilities often bill mid-month and the property owner or HOA applies this to the tenant in the coming month.  There are other ways to bill for water, but this seems to be the cleanest and if you've got the entire property metered.  You'll always bill for the exact amount the utility is charging you.

If you're not already on the property view in the app, you'll need log into the app and navigate to the property view by clicking on the property in the left panel.  It should look like this:

From here, click on the Add Bill button to get started.

Next, you'll see a view where you enter information from the utility water bill you want to split amongst your tenants:

You'll need to enter the date range of the utility bill, total water usage metered by the water utility for the property, the cost of the bill to split, and the rate method.  A few notes about these:

• The Cost you enter here is going to be split amongst your tenants based on their individual water usage.  Most will enter the entire cost of the bill to be split, however, there may be a portion of the bill you want to be fixed amongst your tenants.  For example, you may want to subtract the cost of Fire Line into the building since this is not billed based on usage.  You can then charge the tenants a fixed amount for this, split evenly among them.  This is flexible and totally up to you.  Be sure to check the legal requirements for water submetering in your city and state.
• The rate method is defaulted to our recommendation based on whether you're metering the entire property or not.  You answered this when you created the property.  If yes, we default to SimpleSUB Effective.  If no, we default to Utility Effective.  There's much more information about the rate methods in the FAQ.

Let's look at our example water bill and find the information needed.  First, look for a date range for the bill.  In this case, it's called the Billing Period (note that all bills are a little different):

The next thing we need to find is the water usage that the utility measured over this billing period.  You'll also need to find the units (typically thousands of gallons or CCF).  This can be a little tricky to find.  For residential tenants, expect to see ~2000 - 5000 gallons or ~3.2 - 8 CCF per unit.  If you're not sure, call your water utility to verify.  There should be a phone number to call on your bill.

Finally, find the cost that you'd like to split amongst your tenants.  In our case we want to split the entire bill, so we'll just use the total.

Enter the information from your water bill in the Add Bill view as below.  Note, we're going to use the SimpleSUB Effective Rate Method since we're metering the entire property.

Click the Add Bill button toward the bottom when you've entered all the bill information.  Now you'll jump to the tenant cost report:

You've created your first tenant cost report!  All the costs show $0 since there's no water usage measured.  This will change to reflect usage once you've got meters connected and running for a month.  Next time you do this, you can use the tenant costs to bill your tenants for their actual water usage.  This is often done by entering water costs as a line item for the tenant's bill in your property management software.  You can always come back to this report by clicking the generate button in the list of bills.

That's it for now!  Once your meters arrive, you can follow the next article for the physical meter install.