The How to series · Post 23
Landlord statements without the Sunday
For owners whose month-end means landlord statements: about half a day a month on the reconciliation, and the Sunday it usually lands on.
It's the last Sunday of the month. Rent landed on Wednesday; the statements are still waiting. The contractor invoices sit in a folder of PDFs and the accounting system holds the rest, and one landlord has already asked why their statement is £80 short. Finding the answer is the job nobody scheduled.
That's the loop this post is about: the month-end reconciliation. Match the outgoings to the invoices and produce each landlord's statement. Then be ready for the phone call that follows: why is my statement £80 short? That £80 question is real in every letting office. A boiler repair or a check-out fee, and the answer sits somewhere in the month's paperwork.
The gathering is what eats the Sunday, not the maths. Adding the numbers up takes minutes. Getting them into one place, from the accounting system and from PDFs that don't talk to anything, is the half a day. And because month-end is a date rather than a suggestion, the work lands on whoever owns it, once a month, at the same point in the calendar.
Other businesses have their own version of this: the month-end pack, the supplier reconciliation. The letting version is the one with the Sunday attached.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
- 5 hours a month (half a day) gathering invoices and building statements
- × 12 months = 60 hours a year
- × £30 an hour (whoever owns month-end, often an office manager) = £1,800 a year
If month-end runs to a full day, double it. If year-end adds annual summaries, add those weeks on top. The exact figure matters less than the shape: a half-day-a-month loop is a week of somebody's year, every year, and it always lands at the same bad moment.
Score it: the three checks
- Hours. Half a day a month, concentrated, always at the same time: 3.
- Repeat. The same steps every month, from the same sources. A new starter could follow it from one page: 4.
- Risk-if-wrong. A slip shows up as a queried statement before money moves, because the payment run keeps its human approval: 4.
Verdict: two at 4 or more, start narrow. Take one landlord, one month: the machine assembles the draft statement, a person checks it and approves the payment run. If that holds, widen to the rest of the list.
Try one thing this week (free)
Pull last month's worst statement, the one with the queried deduction. Time yourself finding the paperwork behind that single deduction, start to finish, in one 20-minute sitting. Judge it by Friday: if most of the sitting went on the finding rather than the checking, the gathering is the problem, and it's the part worth handing over first.
Where a person stays
The machine assembles: it matches the month's outgoings to the contractor invoices and leaves a draft statement for each landlord. A person checks the deductions that need explaining and approves the payment run. The £80 question becomes a glance instead of an afternoon, because the answer sits attached to the line it came from. Nothing sends unchecked, and money never moves on a draft.
FAQ
It holds the numbers. It doesn't gather the contractor PDFs or build each statement from them. The gap between the system and the statement is where the Sunday goes.
The files stay yours, in plain formats you own, and nothing sends unchecked. The machine assembles a draft, a person approves it. Approval-first is the design, not an add-on.
The maths is per month, not per headcount. Half a day a month is six working days a year for whoever owns the statements, and month-end doesn't shrink because the office is small.
It doesn't go out. Software prepares the draft and a person checks it before the payment run is approved. A wrong draft costs minutes. A wrong statement never leaves the building.
The assembly and the matching do. The judgement stays with a person: the deduction that needs explaining, and the approval before anything moves. That's the part we wouldn't hand over either.