Rent collection, owner payouts and monthly accounting

Rent received and the date it arrived. Every expense, itemised, with the vendor invoice attached rather than summarised. The management fee, calculated and shown. The amount disbursed to you and the date it left.

A statement that shows a net figure without the working behind it is asking you to take the arithmetic on trust, and there is no reason you should have to.

On a schedule, and the same schedule every time. Late rent is either an administrative slip that a prompt notice fixes, or it is the first visible sign of something larger — and the only way to know which is to respond consistently and early enough that there is still room to work with.

Owners are told when rent is late, on the day, not at the end of the month when the statement arrives. Nobody wants to discover a problem four weeks after it started.

Massachusetts is strict about this, and deliberately so: a security deposit is the tenant’s money held in trust, subject to specific requirements about how it is held and accounted for, and mishandling it exposes an owner to statutory penalties well beyond the amount involved.

Deposits are held separately from operating funds, and the paperwork is kept from the day it is collected — not reconstructed at move-out, which is when the requirements are hardest to satisfy retrospectively.