Take a payment at the counter

When a tenant walks up to your counter or calls in to pay by check, you can record the payment from anywhere in the dashboard — no need to navigate to their lease first.

Open the Take Payment panel

Click the + New button in the top-right header, then choose Take Payment.

This is the fastest path on busy days because it works from any page. If you're already on a tenant's lease detail, the same action lives in their Quick Actions panel as the green Take Payment button.

Find the tenant

Type any of the following into the search box:

Tenant name — full or partial. "Ang" matches Angela, Angelica, etc.
Unit number — "A-001", "B-12".
Phone — works with or without formatting. "5551234" and "(555) 123-4567" both find the same tenant.

Results appear after you've typed two or more characters, capped at 20. If you don't see who you expect, narrow the query — searching only "A" matches too many tenants to display.

Record the payment

Click a result. The recording form opens with the lease summary at the top and four payment-type tabs: Cash, Check, Money Order, Other.

Pick the type, enter the amount, and (for checks) the check number. The optional Description field is appended to the payment record so the tenant's history reads cleanly later — especially useful when the payment covers something other than current rent (e.g. "July rent" or "deposit reimbursement").

Click Record Payment. The receipt is saved to the lease's payment history and the tenant's outstanding balance updates immediately.

What gets recorded

Manual payments don't go through Stripe. They:

Land in the payments table with the chosen payment_method
Reduce the tenant's outstanding balance
Show up on the next dashboard refresh under that lease's Recent Activity
Are tagged to the current billing period so reports group them correctly

Common scenarios

Tenant pays with cash for last month and this month

Record one payment for the combined amount and use the description field to note the period span — e.g. "June + July rent, $300 total". If you'd rather show two clean line items in their history, record two separate payments instead.

You took the cash but recorded the wrong amount

Open the lease, scroll to Payments, and use Apply Credit to reverse the overcharge with a clear reason ("corrected $50 overcharge from earlier today"). Don't try to delete the original — keeping both rows preserves the audit trail.

Tenant disputes a recorded payment later

The payment record includes the staff member who recorded it, the exact timestamp, and the description you entered. Pull the record from the lease's payment history and review it together with them.

Apply a goodwill credit
Issue a Stripe refund
Customer notes and flags (mark a tenant as VIP or flag a chronic late payer)