Onboard a lease that is already running

Start: Leases Result: a live lease billing from a date you choose, with its history and arrears carried in.

Use this when taking over a portfolio. The leases are already running, often mid-year, with history you did not bill.

Steps

1. Create the lease with its real contractual term - the dates the agreement actually carries - and choose to onboard it.
2. Set an accrual start date: the date from which your books for this lease start. This is usually the month you took over.
3. Enter the opening balance - what the tenant owed at that date, as a single carried-in figure.
4. On the onboarding form, enter each finished month from your books - charges, payments, interest - and click Confirm month. Each month is carried forward, so you mostly adjust amounts. A charge you leave blank records nothing that month, but the unit’s charges still come back the next month (blank), so a month without one doesn’t lose it.
5. When the history is caught up, open the lease on Leases and click Go live (top right). Billing and interest take over from the next month.

The owner’s side of each month

You don’t type the owner’s income. Under the tenant’s lines, Owner income from the tenant works it out the way a live month’s owner invoice does: the rent, and each charge marked Income for the owner (at the owner’s share), with what the agency keeps listed below it. Then:

• Owner charges - the owner’s own costs that month, such as a body-corporate levy. They are deducted.
• Management fee - worked out from the owner’s management fee. If your books show a different figure for the month, type it; Use that goes back to the worked-out one.
• Owner payout this month - income, less the fee and the owner’s charges. Check it against the owner’s statement from your books.

If a lease has months confirmed before the owner’s side was worked out, the form says how many and offers Fill in the owner’s months. It writes each of those months’ owner side from its tenant lines and the owner’s fixed charges, and never changes a month that already has one. An owner charge whose amount changes each month can’t be known, so the months it applies to are named for you to check.

The current month isn’t replayed: its live invoice counts towards the owner’s invoice while the lease is still onboarding, as it will after go-live.

Stopping part-way

Click Exit to leave the form. Exit saves nothing: a month is only recorded when you click Confirm month (or Save changes on a month already entered). If you have typed something you haven’t saved, Exit asks first - choose Stay to go back and save it.

A lease can’t go live while a month inside its replay is still empty. Going live only happens from the lease’s own page, behind a confirmation, so a half-entered onboarding can’t go live by accident.

Changing the start date or opening balance

Picked the wrong month to start from? While the lease is still onboarding, open it on Leases and click Edit Lease. The onboarding form opens again with everything you entered when you created it, including Replay from and Balance brought forward.

• A later start removes the months before it - everything the form entered for them, including deposit entries and the owner’s invoices and payouts.
• An earlier start adds months in front, to enter before going live. They should close on the balance you brought forward before.

Click Review changes first. Domi Vera shows what goes, and lists every month you’ve already entered with its closing balance before and after. If the balance brought forward matches your books, none of them change. If one does, check the figure before you save.

What the accrual date does

Domi Vera bills and accrues interest from that date only. It does not invent invoices for months you did not manage.

Interest never accrues before the accrual start date. Arrears carried in as an opening balance do not retroactively grow interest for a period you were not managing - which is correct, and what the previous agent’s records already account for.

Enter the opening balance as at the accrual date, not as at today. If payments have arrived since, record them as payments so the account tells the true story.