The Landlord's Year: A Month-by-Month Tenancy Calendar
Most tenancy problems are calendar problems in disguise. Here is the year laid out, and how to make the dates come to you.
Talk to landlords who have been doing this for twenty years and you hear the same thing: the tenants were rarely the problem. The dates were. The inspection that slipped. The certificate that lapsed. The rent review that nobody raised until eleven months after it was due.
Here is a working calendar for a single let, and a way to stop carrying it in your head.
The recurring dates
- Rent due — monthly, and the one date you already remember.
- Rent review — usually annual; needs notice served weeks in advance.
- Gas safety check — annual, with a certificate to keep.
- Electrical inspection — periodic; the interval depends on your jurisdiction.
- Smoke and CO alarm tests — at the start of each tenancy and on a schedule after.
- Routine inspection — quarterly or six-monthly, with notice to the tenant.
- Insurance renewal — annual; easy to forget because the insurer reminds you until they don't.
- Tenancy end / renewal decision — the date that determines whether you serve notice, offer a renewal or let it roll.
- Deposit return — a statutory window after the tenancy ends.
Putting the year into the case
In Herarx each of those is a date field or a row in a dated table on the tenancy case. Mark them as tracked and they appear on the calendar automatically — one calendar for every unit you manage, filtered by property, with the case one click away.
The rent review is the classic. A template rule can watch the tenancy start date, calculate the next review, and a set number of weeks before it either create a task, send you an email, or — since this autumn — ask you to decide: raise, hold, or remind me later. The decision is recorded on the case, not in your inbox.
Repeating rows for repeating money
Rent periods sit best in a table: period start, period end, amount, paid on, balance. Totals roll up automatically, and because each row can carry a generated document, the receipt for October is one click on October's row. The same table feeds the statement of account when the tenant asks for one.
The two-way calendar
Nobody wants a second calendar. Herarx publishes yours over CalDAV, so the tenancy dates appear in Apple Calendar, Outlook or whatever you already use — and events you create there flow back. Settings → Calendar devices gives you a one-tap profile for iPhone.
The goal is simple: no date should depend on you remembering it. Put it on the case once, and let the case remind you.
