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Rent Arrears Polite Chase Ladder

Example prompt: "Each weekday at 9am, check our rent ledger Google Sheet for tenants in arrears. Draft a soft reminder at 3 days, a clearer chase at 7, a firmer note at 14, and escalate to the landlord with a full timeline pack at 21 days — leave a pre-action protocol draft ready for the agent's review at 28 days."

The Problem

Chasing late rent is the single most uncomfortable repeating job in a lettings office. The wording matters in both directions — a polite first reminder kept friendly is a tenant who pays this week and stays for another year; a clumsy escalation at day-three is a relationship lost on the kind of mistake nobody notices until the renewal is declined. Done by hand, the ladder slips because nobody enjoys the morning of drafting eight versions of the same email with the right tone for each, and a tenant who is genuinely struggling can sit at day-fourteen with no contact at all because the office got swamped on the day they were due to be chased. By day-thirty the arrears are big enough that the conversation is harder than it needed to be.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a weekday workflow that reconciles the rent ledger every morning and walks the ladder for every tenancy. A code step computes days-overdue against the most recent unpaid ledger row, excludes tenancies on an active payment plan or where the manager has paused the chase, and classifies the rest into six bands — Day 3, Day 7, Day 14, Day 21 (landlord pack), Day 28 (pre-action draft), Past 31 (manager only). Each band drafts the right artefact in the right tone: a friendly nudge at three days, a firmer note at seven, a formal-arrears reference at fourteen, a landlord notification pack at twenty-one with the full timeline and a twelve-month cumulative view, and a pre-action protocol draft at twenty-eight which lives as a Google Doc for the office solicitor to review before any notice is served. A morning Slack post in #arrears gives the property manager the day's ladder in one place. Nothing auto-sends — every tenant reminder, every landlord pack, and every pre-action draft is a Gmail draft (or a Drive doc) for review, because the cost of a wrong word at any rung of the ladder is much higher than the cost of the five-minute review.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): A schedule fires every weekday at 9am.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Tenancies', 'Rent Ledger', 'Payment Plans', 'Tenant Notes', and 'Landlords' tabs.
  3. Step 2 (code): For each Active tenancy, find the most recent unpaid ledger row, compute days_overdue and outstanding_amount, and classify into one of six bands; exclude tenancies on an active payment plan or with a 'Pause auto-chase' note in the last 3 working days.
  4. Step 3 (conditional): For Day 3, 7, and 14 bands, first dedupe on (tenancy_id, ledger_row_id, band) against 'Arrears Chase Log' — if a draft already exists for this exact rung on this exact ledger row, skip. Otherwise draft the polite/firmer/formal-arrears tenant chase email in Gmail and log to the 'Arrears Chase Log' tab. One draft per (case, ledger row, rung) is the contract — without this guard, a Day 3 band covering days 1-3 would generate a fresh draft every weekday a tenancy sits in the band.
  5. Step 4 (conditional): For Day 21, dedupe on (tenancy_id, ledger_row_id) against 'Landlord Arrears Notifications' — one landlord pack per ledger row. Otherwise draft the landlord arrears notification with the timeline and the twelve-month cumulative view, and log to the tab.
  6. Step 5 (conditional): For Day 28, dedupe on (tenancy_id, ledger_row_id) against 'Pre-Action Drafts' — one pre-action draft per ledger row, so the solicitor reviews a single authoritative version. Otherwise generate the pre-action protocol summary as a Google Doc in the case folder on Drive, draft a Gmail to the property manager with the doc link, and log to the tab.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Post a single consolidated morning message in #arrears on Slack with all five sections.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Update the 'Arrears Dashboard' tab with this morning's snapshot.

Integrations Used

  • Gmail — every tenant reminder, landlord notification, and pre-action draft cover email is drafted in Gmail
  • Google Sheets — Tenancies, Rent Ledger, Payment Plans, Tenant Notes, Landlords, Office Contacts, Arrears Chase Log, Landlord Arrears Notifications, Pre-Action Drafts, and Arrears Dashboard tabs
  • Google Drive — the case folder where the Day 28 pre-action protocol summary lives as a Google Doc for solicitor review
  • Slack — the #arrears channel where the morning ladder digest lands

Who This Is For

Letting agents and managing agents running residential portfolios of fifty to a few hundred tenancies, where the rent ledger is reconciled in-house and the cost of a missed chase is measured in tenants drifting further into arrears rather than in software.

Time & Cost Saved

A morning of arrears chasing across a hundred-tenancy book typically catches five to fifteen overdue tenancies and takes between one and two hours to draft by hand at the right tone for each rung. This workflow takes the routine drafting to zero and turns the morning into a fifteen-minute review of the consolidated digest. The bigger gain is the tenant who is chased politely on day-three rather than firmly on day-fourteen — a payment that lands two weeks earlier is a tenancy that does not drift into landlord-escalation territory at all.