A past-due storage rental moves through four stages, and each one leaves a record. A late fee posts on your rule after your grace window. Reminder emails go out on an escalating schedule if you turned them on. A manager puts the agreement into default, which overlocks the unit. If nobody comes back, you place a lien, schedule a sale, and either record a redemption or record the sale with the surplus or deficiency. CampGuide runs the workflow and keeps the record. The state statute and an attorney decide the notice periods and what a valid sale requires, and the workflow tracks the dates you enter rather than deciding them for you.
Every lot has one. The unit that paid on the first for two years, then went quiet. The phone rings out. The email does not bounce, which is somehow worse. And the rig sits there taking up a spot that could be rented, accruing a balance that is not getting smaller.
The unpaid rent is the visible part of it. The bigger number is the pad: occupied, unrentable, earning nothing, and never showing up on a report as a loss because nothing was lost on paper. It was never earned.
Working through it is a sequence with legal weight at the end of it, which means the part that matters is not the workflow. It is the paper trail the workflow produces.
What does past due look like on the board?
The delinquency console is a list of agreements with an open balance, sorted by how far behind they are, with the actions available at each stage attached. The states move in one direction:
Any of these can go backward when someone pays. Curing a default unlocks the unit and returns the agreement to good standing, and the cure is recorded next to the default rather than replacing it.
When does the late fee post?
A daily sweep looks at past-due agreements that have cleared their grace window and posts your configured late fee as a line on the bill. Two details matter more than they sound like they do.
First, the fee points at the rule that produced it. Months later, when someone asks why there is an extra 25 dollars on the February bill, the answer is on the line itself and not in somebody's recollection of the policy at the time.
Second, a failed autopay attempt does not assess a late fee by itself. The delinquency ladder reads the open balance independently of what any card did. A card that expired and a renter who stopped paying look different, and the sequence only reacts to the balance.
What does an overlock actually do?
Default is a manager action, on purpose. The daily job posts late fees. It does not decide that a rental has gone bad. A person makes that call from the delinquency console, and setting default flips the unit to overlocked.
Overlocked is a real status on the board, not a note. The unit stops showing as rentable, gate access reflects it, and the status change is written to a log that has no edit path for anyone, including support. When you cure the default after a payment, the unlock is written to the same log directly underneath.
For a vehicle lot the physical side is yours: a boot, a chain across the row, a gate code turned off. The record of when access was cut and when it was restored is the part that has to be defensible, and that is the part the software holds.
What do the reminder emails say and when?
Past-due reminders are opt-in per park. Off by default. When they are on, a daily pass sends an escalating notice: a reminder while the balance is fresh, then a notice at default, then a notice at lien. Each notice sent is recorded, so the file shows what went out and on what date.
Two limits worth knowing. The emails escalate only through the stages the account has actually reached, so a reminder never threatens a lien that is not on the table. And the sequence sends notices. It does not overlock a unit, place a lien, or schedule a sale. Those are all things a person does with a button and a date.
Email is not statutory notice. Most storage statutes specify a delivery method for lien notices, often certified mail to the notice address on the agreement. Treat the reminder emails as customer service that happens to be logged, and send the notices your state requires the way your state requires them.
How does the lien and sale workflow run?
The lien track is four actions, each recorded with its date and the person who took it.
Notice that "generate the legal notice" is not one of these steps. The workflow does not draft your statutory notices or decide that your waiting period has run. It holds the sequence, the dates, and the money, and it keeps them where you can produce them.
What records does this leave behind?
This is the whole reason to run the sequence in software rather than a folder. When a lien sale is questioned, and they are questioned, the question is always some version of: prove it.
- The signed agreement, frozen. The document version that was signed is stored with a fingerprint of its exact text, so you can show years later that the wording was not altered afterward. The record also holds when the person viewed it, when they consented, when they signed, and from what device and address.
- Every status change on the unit. Available to occupied to overlocked, with who and when, in an append-only log.
- Every rent period posted. Each period keyed once, so the balance is a sequence of dated charges rather than a running total someone typed.
- Every late fee, with its rule. Each fee tied to the policy that produced it.
- Every notice sent. Date and stage, from the reminder pass.
- Both inspections. Move-in and lien inspections, with photos, on the same file.
None of those tables can be edited or deleted by an operator, by support, or by an administrator. That is a deliberate constraint, and it is the reason the record is worth anything. A log that can be rewritten proves nothing at all.
The unit that went quiet in March
Say A-4, a 12x40 open pad with a 32 foot travel trailer on it, rented since 2023. March rent posts on the 1st. It sits.
March 6, the grace window closes and the late fee posts against your rule. March 8, a reminder email goes out. April rent posts on the 1st and the balance is now two months plus a fee. Around mid-April you look at the delinquency console, decide this one has gone bad, and set default. The unit overlocks and a default notice goes out. You send your certified letter to the notice address on the agreement, the one captured the day he moved in.
May, nothing. You place the lien and record it. You schedule the sale for a date your attorney calculated, and the lien notice goes out. Late May, you do a lien inspection: photos of the trailer, the VIN, the condition, the contents visible through the window.
By June you have one of two outcomes. He pays, you record the redemption, you cure the default, the unit unlocks, and the file shows he cured before sale. Or the sale happens, the proceeds post against what he owed, and the surplus or deficiency is recorded to the dollar. Either way, what you can produce is a signed agreement whose text can be proven unchanged, dated fees tied to a written rule, an unbroken access history, and a set of photos.
The part that is on you
Storage lien statutes vary state to state and they change. Notice periods, delivery methods, advertising requirements, what happens to a vehicle with a lienholder on the title, what you owe back on a surplus, all of it is jurisdictional. Vehicle storage in particular can pull in a separate set of rules that has nothing to do with self-storage.
CampGuide does not read your statute. It records the steps you take, the dates you enter, and the money that moves, in a form that stands up when someone asks for it later. Get your notice sequence from an attorney in your state, then run it here so the record exists.