Harbourside Lettings
A fictional coastal lettings agency, showing how holding deposits move from "transfer it and email us the receipt" to a branded link paid in minutes — without touching the agency’s CRM.
Where the Time Was Going
A fictional business, drawn from a real and common shape — and the payment admin it was carrying.
Harbourside Lettings is a fictional three-person coastal agency of a very real shape: a high-street office, around ninety managed tenancies, and a steady stream of applicants. When an applicant was approved, a staff member emailed over the client-account details, the applicant transferred the holding deposit "when they got home", and the office checked the bank statement the next morning — and the morning after that. Until the money landed, the property was held on a promise.
- Each deposit collected by transfer meant 25–35 minutes of emails, statement checks and manual matching, spread across two or three working days
- Transfers arrived labelled "FLAT DEPOSIT" or a misspelt surname, then someone matched them to the right tenancy by hand in the Excel log
- The holding deposit starts a statutory 15-day deadline for agreement under the Tenant Fees Act — days lost waiting for a transfer came straight out of that window
- While the deposit was "on its way", the property sat informally reserved — applicants could simply go quiet and the listing went stale
What We Could Realistically Touch
An honest map of the existing setup — because what a third-party developer can and cannot access decides what should be promised.
Already in Place
- A cloud lettings CRM on a small-agency plan — with no API access at that tier
- Rightmove and Zoopla listings
- A client account at the bank
- A shared office inbox and an Excel deposit log
What We Worked With
- Tenancy references — exported from the CRM as a list, or typed into a one-field link generator
- The office inbox, for receipts and a daily summary
- The agency’s own processor account — their name on the statement, settlement to their client account
What Stayed Untouched
- The CRM and its database — no API on their plan, so nothing was wired into it and nothing pretended to be
- The client account and its banking — money arrives exactly as it did before
- Applicant personal data — SettlePay’s layer holds the payment reference, not the file
This is the honest IT shape of most small agencies: a closed CRM, an inbox and a spreadsheet. So the build works alongside the CRM rather than inside it — staff turn a tenancy reference into a branded payment link in seconds, and the matching that used to happen by hand travels inside the payment itself. No integration was promised that the CRM could not deliver.
From Payment Page to Payment System
The page is the visible part. The build is everything that stops payments needing to be chased, matched and remembered.
- A branded pay-by-link deposit page (the demo below)
- A one-field link generator: paste the tenancy reference, get the link
- Automatic receipts to the applicant and the office
- A live deposit log that replaced the Excel sheet — exportable as CSV any time
- A plain-English validity date on every request — no countdowns, no pressure
- A daily summary email listing anything still unpaid
An applicant has just been approved for Flat 2, 18 Anchor Quay. Press play to follow the holding deposit.
A simulated, user-controlled walkthrough — fictional data and simulated system connections. No real systems are involved and nothing plays until you press play.
Try the Interactive Demo
A working page in the Harbourside Lettings branding — a fictional brand, running in test mode only.
Holding Deposit
Flat 2, 18 Anchor Quay
Two-bedroom apartment, furnished
£450.00
This request is valid until Friday 19 June.
Demo cards: 4242 4242 4242 4242 succeeds, 4000 0000 0000 0002 declines
Deposit Paid
£450.00
- Property
- Flat 2, 18 Anchor Quay
- Applicant
- Eleanor Hartley
- Tenancy Reference
- HQ-2218
A receipt has been emailed to the applicant.
Funds settle directly to Harbourside Lettings' own client account.
Your Card Was Declined
Your bank declined this payment and nothing has been taken. You can try the same card again or use a different one.
Harbourside Lettings is a fictional brand created for this demonstration — it is not a SettlePay client and no real payments are taken.
The Part the Customer Never Sees
Every payment page comes with the management layer behind it — statuses, reminders and reconciliation that run themselves.
An illustrative view of the payment-management layer — fictional names and statuses, shown to demonstrate the workflow.
What That Adds Up To, Honestly
Quantified from published UK industry figures — and labelled as the model it is, not passed off as a client result.
Paid by link during the approval phone call, instead of after a weekend of statement-checking.
Around 25 minutes of emails, statement checks and manual matching removed per let, across roughly 40 lets a year.
The Tenant Fees Act deadline for agreement runs from receipt of the deposit — faster receipt leaves more of the window to actually use.
How These Figures Are Modelled
- Roughly 40 new tenancies a year, with 25–35 minutes of combined staff time per transfer-collected deposit — our stated assumption, as no published per-deposit figure exists.
- Holding deposits are capped at one week’s rent, with a default 15-day deadline for agreement — Tenant Fees Act 2019, GOV.UK statutory guidance.
- Staff time costed at typical UK administrator pay of £12–£14 an hour (Indeed and Reed salary data, 2025).
Like the business itself, these figures are illustrative: a scenario modelled on published UK industry averages, not measured results from a real client. Your own numbers will depend on your volumes and on how you get paid today.
Now Try It on Your Own Numbers
Drag the sliders to your business. The figures recompute live, costed against the same UK data.
And the deposit is secured during the approval call — not after a weekend of checking the bank statement, with the statutory 15-day clock already ticking.
A model, not a measured result: your admin hourly rate and time-per-item are yours to set, costed against published UK figures. Your own savings depend on your volumes and how you get paid today.
How It Connects
Behind the page, every payment carries its reference — an invoice number, tenancy, lot or mandate — so it is matched back to the business's records automatically, reminders go out on schedule instead of from someone's evening to-do list, and the books update themselves. Funds settle directly from the processor to the business's own bank account; SettlePay never holds funds. Payments are processed by FCA-regulated partners.
What Would This Look Like on Your Numbers?
Tell us how you get paid today — bank transfers, cheques, card numbers over the phone — and what systems you already run. We'll map what we could realistically automate for you, and what it would save.