A team that knows nothing about a tenant cannot treat them fairly. A team that cannot show what it did cannot defend the case.
Why both words matter
The case opens with the person, not the balance.
Duties wired into what the product will and will not do.
The honest version: we can evidence your work and stop you chasing where the law says stop. We cannot make the judgement call for you.
About Income Ally
Rules, thresholds, the words on your buttons and who sees which page, configured by your own admins.
A moratorium, an insolvency order, a live complaint, a debt past six years. Each suppresses chasing in the database, not on the screen.
Household, income, vulnerabilities and communication needs, in front of the officer before they write a word.
What nobody has touched, and how much you are correctly declining to chase. By officer, by patch, by team.
Who it’s for
Rent is the income a housing association actually controls, and it funds everything else. That makes arrears a finance question, an operational question, a customer question and a regulatory question at the same time — asked by different people, who need different answers.
How it runs a day
Nothing in the worklist is put there by a person. Every case says why it is there, and the date that reason was assessed.
Escalating arrears, a missed payment in a cycle, a broken arrangement, a former tenant approaching the end of the clock. Each is a rule you can read, change, or switch off.
When the reason a case exists stops being true, it closes itself and records why. No officer works a case on a reason that no longer applies, and nobody has to tidy up the queue by hand.
Record a moratorium and the case leaves the queue, the overnight email will not go out, and the send button refuses, and it comes back on its own when the period ends.
Income Ally capabilities
Nobody types in whether a tenant pays weekly or monthly. It is derived from how they actually pay, so "missed a payment" means missed theirs.
Every case is raised by a rule with a threshold you own. Change a number and your cases re-evaluate immediately, not on our next release.
Household, income and access needs read together, with a briefing an officer can ask questions of. It drafts for a person and decides nothing.
How long is left to enforce each former-tenant debt, which date it runs from, and what restarts it. Sorted by what lapses first.
Every suppressed pound and the legal reason for it. The part of the book you are correctly leaving alone, stated as a figure.
Arrears nobody has picked up, separated from arrears somebody worked and left. Those are different problems with different answers.
The duties it enforces
Thirteen duties change what the product will and will not do, which cases appear, which are suppressed, and what the send button refuses. Three of them, as examples:
Debt Respite Scheme Regulations 2020
The account leaves the queue at the queue itself, not rule by rule. One exception, deliberately: the six-year clock keeps reporting, because a statutory deadline does not pause for a moratorium.
Equality Act 2010 s.20 · Pre-Action Protocol
Somebody confirms they have read how the resident needs to be contacted, and the confirmation stores what they read. It stops counting if the needs change.
Housing Act 1985 s.83 · Housing Act 1988 Sch 2
So the tenancy regime decides the route before the balance does, and where it is not recorded the product says the grounds cannot be stated rather than guessing one.
Every duty, and what we don't do → The full list, with the limits of each, including the two places this stops short.
The legal spine of collection
Not per account, after somebody opens it. Across every tenant you are chasing, tonight, with the money attached to each answer.
Housing Act 1985 s.83 · Housing Act 1988 s.8 & Sch 2
Tenants and arrears in each stage, with the threshold for each rent period stated, and for the discretionary route, which of the four things a court looks for is missing.
Pre-Action Protocol for Possession Claims by Social Landlords
Six requirements, evidenced or not, per current tenancy in arrears, and which requirement is your gap. Compliance is judged at the point the claim is issued, so evidence assembled afterwards is worth very little.
Equality Act 2010 s.149 · Article 8 proportionality
Two figures kept apart: where a protected characteristic is recorded, and where the assessment and the adjustment offer both exist. A landlord that thought carefully and wrote nothing down stands where one that never looked stands.
Debt Respite Scheme 2020 · Insolvency Act 1986 · Limitation Act 1980
Every suppressed pound with the legal reason attached, and how long is left to enforce each former-tenant debt. Not a backlog. The part of the book correctly being left alone.
Arrears and the law
Written by the people who had to wire these duties into software, which is a good way to find out where the ambiguity is. Every one answers the question first and says what we don't do about it last.
All eight answers → Plus a glossary of twenty-two terms, and twelve questions to ask any vendor — including us.
Pricing
An income team that has to ration logins is a team working around its software. Every plan carries unlimited users, the full rule set, and both the current and former tenant books. Talk to us about your account volumes and we will put a number to it.
One patch, one team, a fixed period
Most landlords start here
Current and former tenants, every patch
Several landlords on one deployment
FAQ
No, and no software can. The Regulator of Social Housing regulates landlords, not products. What this does is evidence your work and decline to chase where the law says stop. Your compliance stays yours.
The thresholds every rule measures against, whether a rule fires at all, its priority, the words on every action button, the questions asked when a case is closed, which rules email a tenant instead of queueing a case, the documents the assistant answers from, and what each role may reach page by page. All of it from the Admin panel, by your own people.
No. Income Ally has no tenant-facing interface. Everything in it is for the landlord's own team, which is also why every decision it surfaces is recorded against a named officer rather than against the system.
No. Rules decide what goes in front of an officer, and a named person decides what to do. Every figure on screen is computed from the ledger, never generated. The one place text is written rather than calculated is the suggested approach panel, and that panel says on screen that it is AI-generated, that it can be wrong, and that your judgement decides.
Eight flat extracts from your housing management system: accounts, transactions, rent values, arrangements, benefit data, tenants, properties and officers. We publish the exact columns and coded values we expect, including which ones decide whether an implementation is right rather than merely finished.
Most teams begin with one patch and their real ledger, so the first thing they see is their own arrears in their own payment rhythms. Tell us about your organisation and we will set it up.
Tell us about your organisation and what you are trying to fix. It goes straight to the team, and a person replies.
