Court orders: collecting rent through the court

Sometimes a tenant stops paying and chasing them stops working. Collection then moves to the court. This is where you record that in the system: which installments you filed, when, and what the court eventually decided.

When you can file

The system already works out when an installment becomes eligible for a court order, and flags it as urgent on the Tasks page. How long that takes depends on the contract's payment cycle, following Ejar policy:

Both are editable under Settings → Notifications.

Filing a court order

From the Receivables page, find one of the overdue installments and choose File a court order on its row. The system then shows every overdue installment on the same lease, and you tick the ones the order covers. The row you started from is ticked for you.

Installments that cannot be claimed are listed underneath with the reason: already covered by an open order, not overdue yet, or nothing owed on them.

You pick the installments. That can be one or several, and they must all belong to one contract, one tenant and one property.

The order gets its own workspace number, in the form CRT-7, exactly as a contract gets CON-7. Use it in your correspondence with the court if it helps.

The request then goes through an approval chain. In the default team setup:

1. The accountant submits the request. The amount claimed is what the selected installments still owe, net of anything already paid or discounted, and is worked out for you.
2. The general manager approves.
3. The accountant confirms the court accepted it, records the court's own case reference, and attaches the filing document.

On the solo owner setup, those three steps are a single form. You fill it in and the order is filed.

You can reshape the chain under Settings → Workflows like any other: add or remove an approver, set escalation, require attachments.

What changes when you file

Chasing stops. Accounting does not. That principle is what the whole feature is built on.

Once the filing is confirmed:

Pre-due reminders keep running. Next month's rent is not part of the claim, and a tenant you are suing over March still owes April.

Multi-unit contracts

If you file only one unit's share of an installment that spans several units, the remaining shares are still owed and are chased as normal. Chasing stops for the contract only when every installment owed on it has been filed.

Money that comes back through the court

Record the payment exactly as you would any other: amount, method, date, receipt. There is no separate money path for court-recovered funds.

The quickest way is from the case itself. Open the court order and choose Record collection; the form opens on the oldest installment the case still claims, and you can pick a different one. A case often collects in several instalments rather than one, so record each as it arrives.

The payment reduces what the court order still shows as outstanding, and the court order's own page keeps a running total of what has been recovered since it was filed. Money the tenant paid before the order was filed is not counted as recovered, because the court did not produce it.

The case page also lists every payment collected under it, with the date, the installment, the method and whether it has been reviewed yet. If that list does not add up to the recovered total, the page says so: it happens when a payment was recorded without naming an installment, when one covered more than the installment it was recorded against, or when a payment was later reversed. The recovered total is the reliable figure.

Once every installment a case claims is settled, the case says there is nothing left to collect. It does not close itself: recording the outcome is your decision, because "the money came back" and "we forgive what did not" are separate answers.

The Court orders page in the sidebar lists every case you have filed, with what it claimed, what has been recovered, what was written off and what is still owed. Filter it by status or by property.

[!note] Opening a recovered payment shows the case it came back under. The Payments list does not mark them, so a recovery looks like an ordinary rent payment there; open it, or use the Court orders page, which totals what each case brought in.

Opening a court order

Click any row on the Court orders page to open the case. You can also type its reference into the address bar (/app/court-orders/CRT-7), or reach it from the card on the contract.

The case page is where the paperwork lives. It shows what the case claimed, what has come back, what was written off and what is still owed, alongside the installments it covers and who opened it. Below that are its two approval chains, filing and resolution, each with the documents attached to it and the notes recorded on it: the supporting documents from the request, the court's own filing document, and at the end the transaction proof and the decision document. Before this page existed those files were only visible while an approval was still waiting on somebody, and disappeared from view once the chain finished.

Confirm filed with court and Record outcome are on this page too, so you can work a case without going back to the contract first. Deleting a case is a workspace admin action and sits at the top right.

Closing a court order

When the case is finished, open the court order and choose Record outcome:

You then decide what happens to whatever the court did not recover. This choice is required:

• Return it to collection: the amount goes back to normal chasing.
• Write it off: the remaining amount is written off on each installment, with a reason recorded. It can be restored later like any other write-off.

Recording the outcome goes through an approval chain too (accountant, then treasurer, then general manager by default), and nothing is applied until that chain completes.

Changing a claim you already filed

You cannot add installments to an order that has already been filed, which is why the filing screen asks you to pick them all up front. If a new installment falls overdue afterwards and you want it included, a workspace admin deletes the existing order and files a new one covering everything.

Each contract can have one open court order at a time. Deleting the open one returns its installments to normal chasing immediately.

Where the approvals appear

Everything waiting on somebody, both the approval before a case is filed and the one before it is closed, sits under Court Orders on the Tasks page. It used to share the Contract Lifecycle tab with lease renewals and terminations, which made it easy to miss and easy to mistake for something else.

The tab appears when you have court work in it, or whenever the Court orders module is on. If the module is off and you have nothing outstanding, the tab is not drawn at all. If you have something outstanding, it is drawn whether the module is on or off, because work already on your desk always finishes.

Effect on the contract

Filing a court order does not end the contract or vacate the unit. Eviction is a separate step that goes through the contract termination workflow, which you start from the contract itself.

Who can do what

Accountant and General Manager hold it by default, and you can grant it to any other role under Settings → Roles.

It is a separate permission from approving, so a workspace that wants two different people on the two halves can have that: take the permission off whoever approves, or point the approval step at another role. By default the General Manager holds both, which suits an office where the same person decides to go to court and signs off on it.

On mobile

The mobile app shows court orders and lets you approve their steps from the Tasks inbox, so an approval never stalls on someone who only has their phone. Filing and recording an outcome are done on the web, because both are long forms that involve picking installments and uploading documents.