Your software gives you the time-saving option of sending postal mail automatically or at the click of a button through our Mail House service. This allows storEDGE to send postal mail from your business to your tenants. To use Mail House, you must first request that it be activated. To request a price quote for this functionality, email support@storedge.com. This article will describe the Mail House functions, including details about:

• What documents can be sent through Mail House
• Using Mail House for rate changes, invoices, and delinquencies
• Sending ad hoc documents through Mail House
• Tracking documents that have been sent through Mail House

⚠ Mail House can only send mail to tenants who live in the United States.

What documents can be sent through Mail House

You can use Mail House for a variety of purposes. You can save time by setting your software to automatically send a bifold postcard, letter, or certified letter. Note that there is a 10-page limit on letters and the postcard is a folded document.

Mail can be sent through Mail House for the following actions in your software:

• Rate change: You can set a template attached to the action Rate change that will automatically mail a notice to your tenants when their rate changes.
• Invoice: You can set your software to mail invoices to tenants whose tenant pages are marked with Receive printed invoices.
• Delinquency: You can set your software to mail delinquency notices, such as lien notices and auction notices, to tenants automatically.
• NSF: If a tenant's payment is denied due to insufficient funds, you can turn on Mail House to send an NSF notice.
• Ad hoc documents: You can use Mail House to send your ad hoc documents.

  📖 You can learn more about ad hoc documents on our help site.

Once you've set these actions to trigger Mail House in your software and have templates in place that you'd like to use for these actions, your software will automatically prompt Mail House to send postal mail to your tenant, and you won't need to perform any action in your software.

⚠ There is a 10-page limit on letters. 

⚠ Even if the tenant has an email address on file, the delinquency notices and rate changes will be processed through Mail House if you have chosen to use Mail House for those purposes, and you will be charged for those mailings. You cannot cancel Mail House documents once they have been processed by your software.

Using Mail House for rate changes, invoices, and delinquencies

Triggering Mail House for specific actions occurs when you have specific settings in place. In order to trigger documents to be sent, first be sure that Mail House is turned on for your company by the storEDGE support team for the actions that you'd like to trigger. Then, you'll have the ability to customize your Mail House settings.

• Rate changes
• Invoices
• NSF notices
• Delinquencies

Rate changes

First, ensure that the storEDGE support team has turned on Mail House for rate changes. Then, access your Documents and Emails settings on the Settings tab, and ensure the template that you'd like to be sent for a rate change has the Rate Change action selected, and that it is turned on.

Next, access your Mail House settings in the Settings tab and choose the document that you'd like to set from the list. Note that only documents set under the Rate change action will appear in this list if they are turned on in your document templates. Here, you can also choose to send your letter as certified mail by checking the box next to Send Certified. This option is not available for post cards because they cannot be sent via certified mail.

From here, Mail House will take over by sending your mail to your tenants whose rates are affected when the change occurs.

Invoices

To set up Mail House to send invoices to your tenants that want to receive them, first make sure that your document template for invoices is turned on in your Documents and Emails settings.

Then, select your invoice document in your Mail House settings. You can choose to have your invoices sent as certified mail if you wish.

Only tenants whose files reflect that they will receive invoices through the mail will receive invoices through Mail House. To turn this feature on for a tenant, go to the tenant's page and select Edit Tenant.

Scroll down to preferences and select the box next to Send printed invoices via mail house. Note that this option will only appear on the tenant page if Mail House invoices are turned on for your facility.

NSF notices

To trigger your software to send a notice to your tenant when their payment is denied due to insufficient funds, access your Mail House settings and select the template that you'd like to send from the dropdown list. To send NSF notices via certified mail, check the box next to Send Certified. Once you've made your selections, click Save.

Delinquencies

Mail House is a useful tool for automatically sending lien notices and auction notices to your tenants when they trigger specific delinquency stages that you have set in your software.

Before your software will trigger any mail to be sent through Mail House for delinquency, you must first adjust your delinquency settings by accessing the Settings tab and selecting Delinquency Stages under Billing. You can also access these settings through the link in your Mail House settings.

You'll see options for both your Recurring Delinquency Stages and your Non-Recurring Delinquency Stages. Here, you can determine at what point in delinquency that you'd like mail to be sent. To add the Mail House option to a delinquency stage, select edit next to the delinquency stage that you'd like to trigger Mail House to send a letter to your tenant.

Next to Resulting Actions, select the document type you want to send.

Next, you'll select which template you want to use for the action, which you previously set in your Documents and Emails settings. Click the box next to Send to Mail House. Once you've clicked that box, another option will appear to send the document via certified mail. Click that box if you choose, and click Save.

There is another way that you can set your Delinquency Stages to send documents via Mail House. When setting your delinquency stage, choose Send mail (Automatic) or Send certified mail (Automatic). You'll then choose the document that you want to send, click Save, and your document will automatically be sent.

📖 You can learn more about Delinquency Stages on our help site.

⚠ Once you've set any document to be sent through Mail House automatically on your facility's behalf, you cannot cancel the document from being sent. Once it has been queued to be sent, you will be charged for it. To avoid further documents from automatically being sent via Mail House, you will need to turn off the settings that trigger them for your facility.

Sending ad hoc documents through Mail House

Sending ad hoc documents through Mail House is simple. You have the choice to send ad hoc documents to a group of tenants all at once, or to an individual tenant if you choose.

First, make sure the storEDGE support team has turned on Mail House for ad hoc documents. Next, you'll follow the same process that you would for printing an ad hoc document - the only thing that you need to do differently is to select Mail House instead of Letter during the Select Method and Recipients process, and Mail House will do the rest. You can learn more about creating, printing, and sending ad hoc documents on our help site.

Tracking documents that have been sent through Mail House

Your software gives you several methods for tracking mail that has been sent to your tenants through Mail House, showing you what has been sent and when, and the cost of the documents sent on behalf of your facility through the Mail House service.

One of the places where you can see what has been sent through Mail House is on your Communication tab. If your software has sent anything through Mail House, then a new tab will appear titled Mail House. Note that if your facility does not have this feature turned on, or if you haven't sent anything through Mail House yet, this tab will not appear in your software.

Here, you'll see a detailed list of what has been sent to each tenant. You'll also have the option to track the delivery of certified mail here.

You can see what has been sent to an individual tenant by checking the tenant's page and accessing the Documents tab. Here, you can see when a document was sent, and have the option to view it as well.

Additionally, you can get a detailed list of sent Mail House documents, along with the costs incurred, in your Reports. To run this report, access your Reports tab and select Financial. In the drop-down list, select Mail Usage and define the dates for which you'd like to run your report. Last, click Generate Report.

The resulting report will give you a breakdown of the costs your facility has incurred for sent mail and will detail the tenants that have been mailed documents through Mail House.

Contact your storEDGE support team at support@storedge.com if you are interested in utilizing this time-saving, autonomous feature at your facility.

Troubleshooting Delivery Issues

Mail item is taking longer than expected to deliver:

storEDGE's 3rd party mail provider's primary mail locations are in the midwest - Michigan and Illinois. They also mail from New Hampshire and Florida and will be expanding to California, Oregon, and Arizona in the near future. They utilize a proprietary geo-routing system that factors in logistics and facility location to optimize delivery times but delivery times vary and may take longer than if you mailed the letter from your location.