Creating a lease
Leases - New. A lease ties a tenant to a unit for a period, at a rent.
You will need:
- The unit being let
- The tenant and their contact details
- Start and end dates
- The rent and how often it is due
- The deposit held
- Any escalation - a scheduled increase during the term
The start date must come before the end date, and rent and deposit cannot be negative. The system refuses these rather than storing a tenancy that cannot be true.
Generating the agreement
Once the lease exists you can produce the tenancy agreement from it, so the document and the record say the same thing. Re-typing an agreement separately is how a signed paper ends up disagreeing with the system about the rent.
What a lease drives
An active lease is what makes everything else happen:
- Rent becomes due on schedule
- The unit shows as occupied
- The owner's payout is calculated from rent collected on it
- Arrears are measured against it
This is why a lease should be created when the tenancy starts, not when the first payment arrives.
Renewing
When a term is ending, renew rather than editing the dates on the old lease. A renewal keeps the history of what was agreed and when, which matters in a dispute. Editing the original quietly rewrites the past.
Ending a lease
Use Terminate on the lease. Record the end date and settle the deposit - returned in full, partly withheld for damage or arrears, or withheld entirely. Terminating properly is what frees the unit for the next tenancy and stops rent continuing to fall due.
Simply letting a lease run past its end date leaves the unit occupied in your reports and keeps raising rent nobody owes.