A property manager's spreadsheet usually has a column for each month and a cell for each tenant. It works until a lease is renewed mid-year, a deposit is partly deducted, or two people invoice the same month.

Leasing replaces the grid with a few records that enforce the rules.

One lease per unit at a time

A unit can have only one active lease for any overlapping dates. This is not a form check. The database refuses the second one. Draft leases are free to overlap while you negotiate.

A lease moves from Draft to Active, then to Expired or Terminated. Activating it creates the whole rent schedule and marks the unit Occupied. Terminating returns the unit to Vacant and cancels scheduled periods that start after the termination date.

The schedule is the unit of billing

Activation creates one schedule row per billing period. If the term is not a whole number of periods, the last one is pro-rated by days. A row is keyed by lease and period start, so generating the schedule twice, or invoicing it twice, cannot create a duplicate.

Invoicing due rent takes the periods due in a window you choose and creates a draft invoice per lease, with a line per period, up to 200 periods per run. Run it again while it says there are more. The invoice then goes through the normal Finance path, so it is issued, paid and aged like any other, and the schedule row follows it from Scheduled to Invoiced to Paid or Overdue.

VAT on rent differs by country and by residential or commercial use. The lease stores the category you choose and, for non-standard rates, the reason code you enter. Circumz does not hard-code a tax authority's list.

Deposits are a ledger

A security deposit is a sequence of entries: received, refunded, deducted. The balance is the sum, never a stored field, and entries are never updated or deleted. A refund or deduction can never exceed the balance.

When you terminate a lease that still holds a deposit, the form asks you to confirm that you will refund or deduct it. The ledger stays open afterwards so the settlement can be recorded. With Accounting on, each entry posts against a tenant deposits liability.

Renewal

Renewing creates a new draft lease pre-filled from the old one, with an optional escalation percentage. You edit, then activate. The old lease stays as history.

Maintenance

Requests are raised per unit and move Open, In progress, Completed or Cancelled. A vendor can be named from your suppliers, and the cost is recorded on completion and shown on the unit and the property.

Behaviours to know

  • Occupied means the unit has an Active lease, including one that starts in the future. There is no nightly job flipping units.
  • Ended leases are closed with a "Close ended leases" action, not by a scheduler. Until it runs, an active lease past its end date shows an Ended badge.
  • Rent invoicing skips leases in a currency other than the company's, with the reason shown.

Not included

Owner statements and payouts, a tenant portal, online rent payment, utility metering and government registry integrations such as Ejar. If you manage on behalf of owners, plan to produce owner statements outside the system.