Rent Calculation in Property Manager 2 and 3

Most of the data in our FREE Software for Landlords is entered by the user. The exception are rents, which the system sets up for you. There's been some discussion about how this should work, so we thought it helpful to set down the rules as they stand.

• The system goes through each of your Tenancies
• If the Address has been sold, it does nothing
• If the Tenancy start date has not been entered or is before 1990, it does nothing
• If the Tenancy has been ended and so is historic, it does nothing
• The system finds the latest Rent Request item by Due Date for the tenancy
• Starting from the start date of the Tenancy, the system checks dates at the Tenancy interval - each month, each week etc, up to today's date
• For each date, if that date is later than the last Rent Request and not after today then a Rent Request will be set up on that date if none exists currently

A typical example, for a Monthly Tenancy starting on 1 January 2011 would be:

• The first time the user logs on on 1 January or after the 1 January rent will be created
• Logging on again in January will not create another rent request
• The first time the user logs on in February, the 1 February rent will be created
• If the user does not log on again until May then rent items will be created for 1 March, 1 April and 1 May

One effect of this method is that if you manually change the rent due date then the system may re-create rent items on the day that, logically, they should fall. This will lead to misleading, rogue rent items. Here's how they look:

We're looking at a monthly tenancy from 3/7/2011. Because rents are paid on the first of the month (i.e. a few days in advance), the user chose to change the due dates of the each payment to the first. When the system was next used, the process noticed that no amount was loaded for 3/10/2011 and created one, effectively duplicating the one set at 1/10/2011.

To avoid this situation, we recommend that the Due Date is treated as exactly that, not changed to be the date that the rent is received.