One date on the paper, thirty-six months of revenue
A lease is one document carrying one date. Sign a three-year shop lease on 1 March and the document says 1 March — and if that were all, three years of rent would land in one year’s books. The rent is earned month after month, the tenant pays quarterly, and neither rhythm is the date on the contract.
That gap is what makes leasing a different accounting problem from selling. A sale is one event with a long tail of collections behind it. A lease is a long event, and the books have to follow the event rather than the money.
The schedule comes out of one number
Nobody types a rent schedule. The contract carries an annual base and a frequency; the deposit, the agency commission, the maintenance charge and the water charge are each entered as a percentage of that base or as a value, and the two stay in step both ways. One button then walks the lease from start date to end date, a period at a time, and emits the lines.
What comes out is more varied than a list of rent payments. Commission and deposit are emitted once, on the first date, and never repeated. Maintenance and water each carry a switch deciding whether they spread across every instalment or fall once a year in the contract’s anniversary month — and maintenance tracks the escalation, so it is recomputed against the current base rather than the original. Service charges come from an expenses grid with their own rhythm and accounts. The yearly increase can be flat or compounding, which over ten years is not small change. Generate first and adjust after: the button rebuilds the whole grid.
The accrual is its own document, and nobody opens it
This is what separates the module from a receivables ledger with dates on it. When the contract’s term asks for it, committing the lease generates one accrual document per period — daily, monthly or yearly — each dated when the money falls due, and it is that document rather than the contract that recognises the period’s revenue. It doubles as the tax invoice for its period.
The contract splits its schedule against its own fiscal year: this year’s lines as income, later years as deferred. Each accrual runs the same split against its date — which is how rent deferred at signature becomes recognised revenue three years later without anybody posting a journal. The accruals can be held as drafts for review.
One rule holds the design together, and it is the most common misreading here: money is never collected against an accrual. Collections settle the contract’s own lines. What is outstanding on a lease is a question for the contract; what a shop earned in a quarter is a question for the accrual. The mechanics are in rent instalment accrual ledgers.
The first of the month, four hundred times
A manager administering hundreds of shops is not going to type hundreds of receipts. One aggregated document takes a date range and a range at every level of the property tree, and fills a grid with every unpaid instalment that matches, each line pre-loaded with what is outstanding. Trim the rows, reduce a figure where a tenant is paying part, and commit — one collect document is then created and committed per line, carrying the accounts and payment-order rules of its own term. An option stops a second run re-sweeping what the first took.
The sweep reads leases only, and cancelling the aggregated document deletes every collect document it made — so it is the wrong place to correct one tenant’s figure later.
Rent-free months, and late ones
Not every line is closed by cash. Three rent-free months while a shop is fitted out cannot be deleted from the schedule, because the accrual and the tax invoice for those periods assume the lines exist. An exemption is the instrument: the collection screen with one column renamed, settling the instalment exactly as a payment would without cash arriving. That is not a collection discount, which shrinks what the line owes so less cash closes it. An instalment of 10,000 met with 8,000 and a 500 discount leaves 1,500 outstanding; a 10,000 exemption leaves nothing.
Lateness runs the other way, and a fine is a second receivable standing beside the lease rather than an adjustment to it — its own document, its own invoice, and no effect on what the contract shows as owing. A scheduled run raises them from a rate applied to how late the money is, and deletes the ones it raised for tenants who have since paid.
Renewal writes a new lease; ending writes a settlement
Neither button edits the contract in front of you. Extending duplicates it, shifts every due date forward by one period, clears the paid values and regenerates the codes — and switches on the flag that ends the outgoing lease as the new one is saved. That flag is the only reason two live tenancies may overlap on one unit, because the module keeps a dated timeline of rent status per property rather than a field documents overwrite.
Ending early is a settlement, not an undo. The rent was earned, and the document works out the balance as the keys come back: the deposit less what is withheld, the unused commission, the water and maintenance already consumed, and rent prepaid for periods the tenant will not be there — each through its own accounts. Unless the term allows it, a lease cannot close with instalments owing. Both routes are in renewing and ending a lease.
Selling the units is a different chain — see the selling cycle as a module — and the wider stack is on the real estate industry page.
