Housing Benefit Tenancy

Housing Benefit Tenancy

When you create a housing benefit tenancy there are a few things to remember.

A. 
Make sure that you have entered your benefit suppliers, like Cumbria County Council etc, in the contact module.
Tick the Benefit option in the contact record, do not tick the applicant or tenant options. 

B.
 When you create a contact record for a housing benefit applicant or tenant, they are not a benefit supplier.
 There is no need to tick the Benefit option in the contact record or the tenant will appear in the benefit supplier  
 list when you go to select the benefit supplier when creating a new housing benefit tenancy.

C. 
I shall explain the next point with an example. Say the tenant is paying a rent top-up of 10.00 / month paid in advance, and the housing benefit is 425.00 every four weeks paid in arrears, and the tenancy starts on 01/01 2013.

When you go to activate the tenancy agreement, the charging schedule form will appear. At the bottom of the form there are four tabs ( Rent, Housing Benefit, Management Fees and Settings ).

The rent tab shows the rent top-up amount, next due date and the fact that the payment is made in advance.
You can change the amount, the next due date to anything you want. This is quite strait forward.

The benefit tab the Next Charge date is the one you need to pay attention to. This is the date that the housing benefit is due From, not the date that will appear on the rent schedule. In this example if you set the next charge date to 01/01/2013, the rent schedule would show the housing benefit with a due date of 29/01/2013, that
is the date that it is expected to come in on.

This is the date that you can waste time over, particularly on old housing benefit agreements that have been in existence for ages. It is useful before you enter housing benefit tenancy agreements to make sure that you have the 
Due From date sorted out. If the housing benefit comes in, in arrears, say 7 or 30 days in arrears the same principle applies. The schedule will always show the date you expect to receipt the housing benefit.

Under normal circumstances you should not need to change anything on the Management Fee and Settings tabs

    • Related Articles

    • Changing the rent or housing benefit on a periodic agreement.

      Go into the tenancy module and double click on the tenant record in question. Select activity / schedule.  Click on the periodic button and the basic tenancy charging details will appear in the right hand column.  The periodic option at the top of ...

    • Housing Benefit

      You can do this in one of two ways. ​ A: Decrease rent top-up and increase housing benefit, or B: Increase rent top-up and decrease housing benefit  I shall explain this with an example where we decrease the rent top-up and increase housing benefit. ...

    • Receipting Housing Benefit

      Receipting Housing Benefit   - Go to the 'Tenancy' module and click on 'Benefit Receipt'. - The 'Benefit Receipting' window will then appear. - Click on the address book against the 'Account Ref' to bring up the contact list. You can also select the ...

    • Viewing the tenant and housing benefit balance

      This can be set in preferences. From the overview screen click on preferences and then the tenancy option. There is a tick box on this screen which will allow you to see the tenant balance, housing benefit balance and total balance. Tick this and ...

    • Adding tenant to property with housing benefit

      Adding a Tenant to a Property with Housing Benefit     - Go to the 'Property' module and select 'Add Tenant to Property'. - Select the tenant from the contact list by single clicking on the correct contact record (so it is highlighted in blue) and ...