Setting Up Rent to Own

Your Rent to Own functionality should require very little time to configure in the Rain system. Within your initial Rent to Own transactions, you can configure how each will work as needed. This article will cover how to set your defaults in the Settings area.

Rent to Own vs. Rentals in the Rain System

You may already be familiar with how Rentals work in the Rain system. Rent to Own differs from Rentals in the following ways:

• Payments are automated over time, for whatever total RTO contract period you set.
• You can use any product already saved in your system in the Products module, and an RTO contract can cover a group of products, as needed.
• There is no special scheduling calendar, all dates are automated based on the starting contract date.
• You can either use the built-in, autofill-capable contracts for the system (see setup options below) or you can upload signed contracts in the initial contract transaction (click here for the article on Creating Rent to Own Contracts).

You can get to this part of the system by clicking on the Gear-Shaped Button on the far right side of the blue Admin Toolbar and then clicking on Settings > POS > Rent to Own.

Settings for Rent to Own

To activate your Rent to Own system, you'll need to speak with someone on our team. You may already be working with an Account Manager, but if you have already launched your system, you can just call us at 877-909-6699 and use option 2, and we can look into getting that activated for you.

Once the system is activated for you, go to the gear-shaped button on the far right side of the blue Admin Toolbar and click on Settings > POS Settings > Rent to Own.

The upper section of your Rent to Own Settings tab is for default values that you are free to change on each Rent to Own contract you create. So the system will populate the various fields with the information you would usually use with an average RTO contract, and each of those fields is editable on the actual setup transaction, if needed. Here are the fields you need to configure:

1. Monthly Maintenance Fee - This fee can be for maintaining the contract, and can represent whatever monthly work you and your team do to maintain the rent to own contract, including periodic service on the item(s). You can also check the box for a tax rate you have set up in your system, if taxes apply to fees.
2. Late Fee - A late fee is a good way to make sure your renters take their payments seriously, just make sure they understand up front how your fees work and when they will be applied.
3. Payment Grace Period (days) - This is the number of days you allow past the due date of each payment before the payment is considered to be late.
4. Monthly Protection - You can break up the protection service on the item into monthly payments with this field. It is recommended to itemize this expense in this way, to allow the system to track the expense and also to show the customer the breakdown of what they are paying for. As with fees, you can also check the box for a tax rate you have set up in your system, if taxes apply to your protection service.
5. Manage Contract Templates - Click the Configure button to see the default contract template or to upload and configure your own. This contract system allows for live fields that auto-fill important information for you (see examples below).
   
6. Edit Department Trade-In Costs - This function allows you to set default discounts, either by percentage or dollar amount, for your Departments. So if it's your practice to discount the retail price by 10% of your Instruments when doing Rent to Own, you can set that for that Department, and if you have another Department you discount differently (or not at all), each can be set individually. Set each Department individually as shown below, then Save. Click to Edit Department Trade-In Costs again to set a new Department, the system will remember all of them that you set, and will display the last one you set when reopened.
   
7. Credit Card Autobill Settings - Turn this ON if you wish the system to auto-bill a card after a payment fails. You can set the duration in days the system will wait after a failed payment to retry the charge with the Days After Due Date to Start Retrying setting. Please note that successive charges that fail will NOT trigger a late fee again; each main payment date that is missed will charge a late fee, so this setting will just retry the charge for you to see if it will go through. Setting this to be a shorter duration than the number of days of grace you offer on late fees can be a very good thing. Next, you will set the period in days that will pass in-between retry attempts with the Reattempt Every This Many Days setting. And lastly, you can set the number of Maximum Retry Attempts the system will make before it stops trying.
   
8. Notices - If you wish for the system to send email notifications of late fees to your customers, set this toggle to ON.

Once you have made your configuration preferences, click the Save button at the bottom to set them in the system.

Setting Up Recurring Processing with Your Vault

One critical step in setting up your Rent to Own is having your credit card processing company configure and activate the Vault for your account with them.

Please click here to see how to proceed with that setup.