Managing your own properties

If you signed up with I manage my own properties, Domi Vera leaves out everything an agency needs to account to other owners. Your leases, tenants, invoices, statements and the tenant portal work exactly as they do for an agency. What changes is the owner side, because the owner is you.

What you will not see

• No owners to manage. Your account has one owner record, made when you signed up, and every unit belongs to it. There is no Owners tab and no owner to pick when you add a unit.
• No owner invoices, fees or payouts. The rent your tenants pay is already yours, so nothing is paid over and no management fee is charged.
• No owner portal. Your income is on the Income page instead.

Who owns each unit

Under Properties › Ownership, add each trust or company that holds some of your properties. When you add or edit a unit, choose Owned by: yourself, or one of those entities. See owning entities.

The Income page groups your units the same way, so you can see what each entity earned.

The Income page

Income shows, for each unit, for a month or the last 12 months:

• Charged: what you invoiced (approved invoices only; drafts are not counted).
• Collected: what your tenants paid.
• Expenses: what you recorded as spent on the unit, levies included.
• Net: collected less expenses.

Deposits are shown apart: they are your tenants’ money until the lease ends, not income.

Levies

What the tenant pays you for levy charges, such as water and refuse, is income. What you pay the body corporate is an expense.

On the Levies tab, add each unit’s charges from the body corporate’s statement once: the ones you pass on to the tenant (water, refuse) and my share (the levy itself). Start the units on the control sheet with what each owed the body corporate.

From then, each month’s charges are the body corporate bill in Expenses by themselves. Fill in what changes (a water reading) and mark the bill paid — or tick debit order on the unit once. See levies.

You don’t need a recurring expense for the levy, and you don’t record it twice: the Levies tab is the one place.

Other costs

Capture repairs and anything else under Expenses › Bills, against the unit, with the invoice attached. They count against that unit on the Income page.

For what comes every month, set up a recurring expense once: rates and taxes as Variable (each month’s bill arrives at last month’s amount for you to confirm), insurance as Fixed with debit order ticked. See expenses.

Starting to manage for others

If you start managing properties for other owners, your account can be switched to an agency account. Contact support and we will do it with you: we agree the month owner invoices start from, and your existing leases carry on unchanged.