Onboarding a new tenant

Once a tenant has signed a lease, the Tenants → New flow turns them into a billing customer in the system.

What you need before you start

• Tenant’s full legal name (individual) or registered company name + reg number (entity).
• Contact email and mobile.
• The unit they’re leasing (so add the property and unit first — see Create your first property).
• Rent amount, escalation, lease start and end dates.
• Deposit amount (held separately on the ledger).

Before your first tenant communication goes out, set up your branded sender email under Settings → Notifications. See Setting up your branded sender email. It’s optional but highly recommended — once configured, every lease, demand letter and KYC reminder goes out from your address instead of South PropMan’s, and replies land in your inbox.

The flow

1. Tenants → + New tenant. Pick the property and unit.
2. Lease terms. Enter rent, escalation, start, end. The system generates the rent schedule for the entire lease automatically.
3. Deposit. Capture the amount and the date received. This posts to the deposit liability account, not income.
4. Save. The lease’s rent schedule is now in the system. From the 1st of the next billing month, Invoices will show a “Monthly billing run is due” banner — one click commits the consolidated rent + CAM + utilities invoice for every active tenant in the property. (Fully unattended cron-driven runs are on the post-1.0 roadmap; v1.0 keeps a human in the loop.)

Giving the tenant portal access

Portal access is a separate, deliberate step — you decide when (and whether) the tenant gets self-service. From the tenant detail screen click Provision portal access:

1. Enter the tenant’s email address and a temporary password (the modal can generate one).
2. Confirm. The system creates an authenticated portal account and forces a password change on first sign-in.
3. The modal then displays the email + temporary password once. Copy both and share them with the tenant via the channel you trust — WhatsApp, in-person, or your own outbound email.
4. The tenant signs in at southpropman.com/login, picks Tenant, enters the credentials, and is required to set their own password before reaching the portal.

v1.0 note: South PropMan does not currently send an automated invite email — the credentials hand-off is intentionally manual so the landlord stays in control of how their tenants are introduced to the portal. Automated invitations are on the post-1.0 roadmap.

What the tenant sees

• A clean portal with their balance, lease document, payment history, and an “Upload POP” button.
• Mobile-first — works on a basic mobile browser.
• Their own password from sign-in #2 onwards (the temp password is for one use only).

Common mistakes

• Capturing the deposit as a rent receipt — it’s not, it’s a liability. The deposit field on the lease form posts to the right account automatically.
• Backdating the lease start to “catch up” arrears. Don’t — invoice the arrears as a separate journal so the audit trail is clean.
• Forgetting to copy the temporary password from the provisioning modal before closing it. Once closed it cannot be retrieved — you’ll need to provision again with a new temp password.