JBS Property Handbook

How it all fits together

Five stages. Money enters at stage three and reaches the landlord at stage five. Almost everything else in this handbook is a detail hanging off one of these boxes.

Three things to understand before you start

01Set up once

Do this on a new system, then leave it alone. Fifteen minutes now saves a lot of correcting later.

Settings

Go to Property › Configuration › Settings. Five things to set:

Unit types

Under Property › Configuration › Unit Types. A unit type is more than a label — it decides which product a unit is billed through, and the product carries the tax. That is why a shop and a flat must not share a type: they are taxed differently.

The rest of Configuration

• Amenities — pool, lift, borehole. Tick-boxes for marketing and search.
• Document Types — title deed, ID, insurance. Each can have an expiry the system watches.
• Payment Plans — reusable instalment schedules for sales.
• Volume Discounts — rent discount bands by floor area, for large commercial lettings.

02Add properties & units

A property is the building, compound or plot. Units are the things you actually let or sell.

The property

1. Go to Property › Portfolio › Properties and click New.
2. Name it, and set the Owner / Landlord. Do this now — every unit you add afterwards inherits it automatically.
3. Fill in the address and assign a Property Manager.
4. Save.

The units

Add them from the Units tab on the property, or from Property › Portfolio › Units. For each unit set the name or number, the Unit Type, and the Asking Rent. Everything else — floor, area, bedrooms, amenities, photo — helps you find and market it later.

Why you can't set a unit's status

Property › Portfolio › Available Units is your letting list — everything free right now, with its owner and asking rent.

03Add tenants & owners

Everyone lives in one contact list. What changes is the role you tick.

Under Property › Contacts you'll find Tenants, Owners and Vendors — three views of the same contacts, filtered by role. One person can hold several roles: a landlord in one building can be a tenant in another, which is common in family portfolios.

On an owner's contact you can also set a Management Fee (%) — the share of collected rent you keep when paying them out.

04Create a lease

The lease is the heart of the system. Get it right and the billing looks after itself.

1. Go to Property › Leasing › Leases and click New.
2. Pick the Unit. The owner fills in, and a rent line appears using the unit's asking rent and the right product for its type.
3. Pick the Tenant, then set the start and end dates.
4. Choose the Billing Period — Monthly, Quarterly, Every 6 Months or Yearly — and whether it bills In Advance or in arrears.
5. Check the Charges table. Adjust the rent, and add lines for service charge, parking or utilities if the tenancy includes them.
6. Set the Deposit if you're taking one.
7. Click Confirm, then Start Lease.

What each button does

05Rent bills itself

This is the part that saves you the most time, so it's worth understanding what it does without you.

Every night the system looks at each Running lease, checks whether the next billing date has arrived, and raises the invoice if it has. Nobody has to remember. You'll find the results under Property › Leasing › Rent Invoices.

What ends up on the invoice

• Every recurring charge on the lease — rent, service charge, parking, utilities — priced for the period. A quarterly lease shows three months.
• Any one-off charges not yet billed. They appear once and are then marked as invoiced.
• The tax from each charge line, carried through to the invoice.
• The property's analytic account, so the books separate cleanly by building.

Part-months

A lease starting mid-period is prorated: the tenant is charged for the days they actually have. The invoice line says (prorated) and shows the dates covered, so the tenant can see why the first bill differs from the rest.

Filing with ZRA

Where the ZRA add-on is installed, posting a rent invoice also files it with Smart Invoice — under the landlord's TPIN, not yours. You manage many landlords from one system without switching company.

A landlord marked as not VSDC-registered is skipped: the invoice still posts and appears in your books, nothing is sent, and a note on the invoice says so. Rejections that look temporary are retried automatically overnight; ones that keep failing raise a to-do for a human.

06Getting paid & arrears

Registering money and chasing what's late.

Open the invoice and click Register Payment, exactly as you would for any other customer invoice — this is ordinary Odoo accounting, nothing special to property. The lease's outstanding balance updates immediately.

Where to look

Late fees

If you set a Late Fee percentage and grace period in Settings, overdue rent invoices are charged a fee automatically once the grace period passes. Each invoice is only ever charged once — it's marked so it can't be double-charged on a later run.

07Maintenance

Work orders and inspections, under Property › Operations › Maintenance.

Create a request, pick the unit, describe the problem. What happens next depends on whether anyone is living there.

Work orders move New → Assigned → In Progress → Done. Set a priority and the system works out a deadline for you; anything past its deadline shows in red and appears on the dashboard.

Move-in and move-out inspections are just work orders with the matching category, which keeps one timeline per unit rather than a separate inspection register.

08Sales & bookings

For units you sell rather than let. Property › Sales › Sales & Bookings.

A sale runs Draft → Reserved → Agreement Signed → Handed Over. Reserving takes the unit off the market straight away, so it can't be double-sold while paperwork is in progress.

Attach a Payment Plan and the instalments appear as milestones — deposit, stage payments, final balance. Each milestone is invoiced when it falls due, and the sale shows how much has been collected against the contracted price.

09Renewals & move-outs

Three ways a tenancy ends, and what each does to the deposit.

Renewing

Open the lease and click Renew. You'll be asked for the new dates and any rent increase, and a fresh lease is created ready to confirm. The old one closes off, so the history of what was charged when stays intact.

Property › Leasing › Expiring Leases shows everything inside your renewal notice window. The dashboard shows the same list as a pipeline.

Terminating early

Click Terminate and give the end date and reason. Billing stops at that date, and the unit returns to Available as soon as the tenancy is no longer live.

The deposit

A deposit moves through Not Invoiced → Invoiced → Held → Refunded. At move-out, use the refund wizard: it lets you deduct for damage or arrears and return the balance, keeping a record of what was withheld and why.

10Reports & owner pay-outs

Two kinds: live screens you filter and group, and printed PDFs you send out.

Live analysis

• Rent Roll — every unit, its tenant, rent and lease dates. The letting book in one screen.
• Revenue Analysis — what was billed, sliced by property, owner or period.
• Cost Analysis — maintenance and running costs the same way.
• Owner Statements — collected rent less fees and costs, per landlord.

Printed reports

From Property › Reporting › Print Reports, pick a report and a date range:

Your daily rhythm

What to look at, and how often. The dashboard answers most of it.

When something looks wrong

The handful of things that actually go wrong, and what to check first.

A tenant hasn't been invoiced

1. Is the lease Running? Draft and Confirmed leases raise nothing.
2. Has the next billing date arrived? A lease billing in arrears invoices after the period.
3. Look at the lease's message history — a failed run posts a note explaining itself.

A unit shows as occupied but nobody lives there

A lease is still Running on it. Terminate or expire the lease and the unit frees itself. Don't look for a status field — there isn't one.

An invoice has no VAT, or double VAT

The charge line's product has no tax, or two. Fix the product, not the invoice, or the next invoice repeats it. Two identical taxes charge the tenant double.

A landlord's statement looks too low

Almost always a unit with no owner set. Open Portfolio › Units, group by Owner, and look at the Unassigned group.

ZRA rejected an invoice

• Amount mismatch — a line has no tax. Check the products.
• Nothing was sent — the landlord is marked as not VSDC-registered on their profile.
• Repeated failures — a to-do is raised automatically with the error on it.

Words we use