When we started building rent tracking for Domly, the first question was obvious: how do we know when a tenant has paid? The standard playbook in proptech is to connect directly to your bank account through an aggregator like Plaid or Flinks. Pull the transactions, match them to tenants, done. It sounds clean. But the more we talked to Canadian landlords, the more we realized that approach was a non-starter for most of them.
The hesitation isn't irrational. Handing over read access to your bank account, even to a trusted third party, creates a surface area of risk that most small landlords aren't comfortable with. And honestly, they shouldn't have to be. We asked ourselves: what's the minimum amount of information we actually need to track rent? The answer was surprisingly small. A name, a dollar amount, and a date. That's it. And all three of those are already in the Interac e-Transfer notification email that your bank sends you every time someone pays.
According to Payments Canada, Interac e-Transfer processed over 1.1 billion transactions in 2024, making it the dominant peer-to-peer payment method in the country. For rent specifically, the numbers are even more telling. A 2023 survey from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that electronic transfers have become the most common method of rent payment among tenants under 45. The old standbys of post-dated cheques and cash still exist, but they're declining every year.
So here's how Domly's rent tracking works. You set up an email forwarding rule in Gmail (takes about two minutes) that automatically sends your Interac notification emails to a unique Domly address we generate for you. Our system reads the sender name and amount from the subject line, matches it to the right tenant, and updates your dashboard. We never see your bank login, never access your account, and never store anything beyond what's in that email subject.
The matching part is where we spent the most engineering time, because real life is messier than a spec sheet. Sometimes rent comes from a spouse whose name doesn't match the lease. Sometimes a tenant sends two payments that add up to the full amount. Sometimes the Interac name is slightly different from what's on file because banks truncate or format names differently. We handle all of this. You can save aliases so that payments from a tenant's partner are automatically recognized. Partial payments accumulate toward the monthly total. And our matching algorithm normalizes names, strips accents, and uses fuzzy matching to catch minor discrepancies.
We also parse both English and French Interac email formats, including the four different subject line patterns that Canadian banks use for sends and auto-deposits. If you're a Quebec landlord receiving a mix of 'INTERAC e-Transfer' and 'Virement INTERAC' notifications, it all gets parsed the same way.
But tracking alone doesn't close the loop. The real payoff comes when Domly's AI assistant, Lucie, knows who has paid and who hasn't. On the first of the month, Lucie can send rent reminders to tenants who haven't paid yet, and skip the ones who already have. If someone has sent a partial payment, the reminder mentions the remaining balance. No more awkward manual follow-ups. No more checking your banking app, cross-referencing names, and composing a text at 9 PM because you just realized someone is three days late.
We still support manual entry for cheque and cash payments, because not every tenant uses e-Transfer. But for the majority who do, the email forwarding approach gives landlords a real-time rent dashboard that's accurate, private, and requires zero ongoing effort. That's the kind of feature we want to build at Domly: things that work quietly in the background so you can spend your time on what actually matters.
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