Rent collection software for Ontario landlords (2026): what it costs and what to check

Most guides to this are written for American landlords and quietly assume Zelle, Venmo and ACH. Ontario runs on Interac e-Transfer, cheques and a spreadsheet — and the software choices look different once you account for it.

This is a working guide for someone with two to ten units.

Start with what you're actually trying to fix

Ask which of these is your problem, because they need different things:

1. Money arrives late or unpredictably. You need scheduled autopay, not a payment button.
2. You can't tell who paid. You need payments posted against a lease, not a bank feed with names in it.
3. Year-end is a rebuild. You need an export, which means every payment needs to carry a unit, a month and a balance from the start.
4. Tenants dispute fees. You need the breakdown shown before they confirm.

Most small landlords have all four, and don't realise 2 and 3 are the same problem arriving at different times of year.

The Interac problem, stated precisely

e-Transfer is fast and effectively free, and neither of those is the issue.

The issue is that an e-Transfer arrives as a line in your bank feed with a person's name on it. No unit. No lease. No month. No resulting balance. And it only moves when you ask, which is why rent collection quietly becomes a recurring calendar event in your own head.

Software that just gives your tenant another way to send money hasn't solved anything. What matters is whether the payment arrives attached to a record.

What it costs

Fees land in two places, and you should price both:

Subscription — usually per unit per month. Watch for a monthly minimum, which is what makes enterprise tools absurd below about twenty units.

Processing — per payment, usually charged to the tenant. On a $2,000 rent payment in Canada you're looking at roughly:

• By card: around 2.9%–3.5% plus a fixed charge — call it $59 to $70.
• By bank (PAD/ACSS): typically capped, in the $5–$10 range.

The gap between those two is around $50 a month per unit. If a platform makes card the path of least resistance, that's a choice being made with your tenant's money.

For reference, AshGlow charges 1% + $0.40 capped at $5 in processing, plus a 0.10% platform fee capped at $2 — $7.00 total on $2,000 — and subscription is $1.99 per unit with the first two free and no monthly minimum.

What the RTA means for how you charge

Two things Ontario landlords get wrong often enough to be worth stating:

Late fees. Ontario is stricter than most provinces about what you can charge a tenant for paying late. Don't assume a US-oriented platform's late-fee feature is lawful here.

<!-- TODO: founder to verify current LTB guidance on late fees before relying on this -->

Charging tenants the processing fee. Passing a payment surcharge to a tenant has conditions, and how it's disclosed matters. Whatever platform you pick, it should itemize the fee on screen before the tenant confirms — both because that's the defensible position, and because a tenant who saw the number doesn't dispute it later.

When in doubt, the Landlord and Tenant Board and the Landlord Self-Help Centre both publish current guidance for free, and both are better sources than a software vendor. Including us.

The questions to ask any vendor

1. What's the monthly minimum? (If they won't say, that's the answer.)
2. Does a payment post against a lease, or just land in a list?
3. Can I export a full year in a format my accountant will accept?
4. Does the tenant see every fee before confirming?
5. Where does the money actually sit between tenant and me?
6. What happens to my data if I leave?

Question 5 matters most and gets asked least. Rent should settle to your bank account. A platform that holds funds in between is a platform you're extending credit to.

Incorporated? Ask about HST

Residential rent is exempt, so most small landlords never register and never think about it. But once you're registered — which incorporating often pushes you toward — HST paid on business inputs becomes an input tax credit, and software subscriptions and platform fees are business inputs.

You can only claim what you can evidence. A year of e-Transfers gives you nothing to claim against. Itemized platform charges do.

Educational, not tax advice — worth one conversation with your accountant before year-end.

A sane way to evaluate

Don't migrate a portfolio to test software. Move two units, run one full rent cycle, and look at what actually happened: did it charge on the right day, did the tenant understand the fee, did the payment show up attached to the lease, and could you export the month cleanly?

Two units are free on AshGlow, which makes that test cost nothing. It's also the test we'd rather you run than sit through a demo.

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Prices in CAD, current as of 2026. Processing rates are set by payment processors and change. Nothing here is legal or tax advice.