Ritzy One • User Manual

Real Estate

Let and manage property from Ritzy: hold your buildings and their units, sign tenants onto contracts, raise the rent automatically every month or quarter, take the money in, recharge electricity and maintenance, see at a glance what is full, what is empty and who owes you — and send a prospect the photos of what you have to let. Five phone apps extend it into the building: the tenant’s own portal, the technician’s job sheet, condition reports, field letting and rent collection.

Applies to Ritzy One (web)  |  Audience: Property, Leasing & Accounts users  |  Licensed add-on module RE

1 What is the Real Estate module?

Real Estate is the property-letting side of Ritzy. Where Accounts records the money, the Real Estate module records what you own, who is in it and what they owe — and turns that into invoices, receipts and ledger postings without re-keying anything.

It posts straight into Accounts
Every invoice, receipt and credit note writes a normal double-entry voucher — the same vouchers the Accounts module produces. Rent appears in the Trial Balance, the tenant appears on a Statement of Account, and nothing needs re-entering.
A licensed add-on
Real Estate is a separately licensed module. If the menu group is missing, either the module is not installed in this company database (a DBA can add it from DBA Console → Modules) or the subscription does not include it yet.

2 The letting cycle at a glance

Every unit goes round the same loop. Set-up happens once; the middle three steps repeat for as long as the tenant stays.

1 · Property & units 2 · Tenancy Contract 3 · Invoice Generation 4 · Receipt & allocation 5 · Vacate or renew

The contract is the hinge. It sets the rent, the pay mode and the next invoice date; generation bills everything whose next invoice date has arrived and then moves that date forward. Nothing is billed twice, and re-running a batch is always safe.

The unit’s status follows the contract
You never set a unit to “occupied” by hand. Checking a tenant in marks it let, vacating marks it free again, and a reservation marks it reserved — so the vacancy reports and the dashboard cannot disagree with the contracts.

3 Set-up: settings & masters

Open the Realestate group from the side menu. Two things are worth doing before the first contract.

3.1 Module settings

Tools → Realestate Settings. One row per company; it decides where the module posts.

SettingWhat it does
Receipt Debit A/CThe account a rent receipt debits — normally cash or bank.
Electricity / Telephone / Credit-card A/CWhere each recharge credits, when its switch below is on.
Post … charges to the ledgerThree switches. With one off, that charge is recorded against the unit but raises no voucher.
Auto contract numberNumbers each contract <property code>00001 automatically instead of asking you to type one.
Post accrued income monthlySpreads non-monthly rent over the months it covers — see §13. Leave off unless your accountant asks for it.

3.2 Masters

Under Masters. Only Charge is needed before you can bill; the rest are lookups you can fill in as you go.

Charges, categories, amenities, facilities, agents, nationalities and credit cards can be loaded from a spreadsheet with Import CSV on their screens, or from Tools → Import (CSV) — see Importing Masters from CSV. Tenants come in through the Customer master’s import.

MasterWhat it holdsUsed by
ChargeWhat can appear on a rent invoice — Rental Income, Service Charge, Water and so on — each pointing at an income account and an optional tax code.Every invoice line.
CategoryA free grading for units (Deluxe, Standard, Studio…).Unit record, property reports.
AmenitiesFurniture and equipment handed over with a unit — TV, air conditioner, music system.Unit stock, transfers, hand-over lists.
FacilitiesWhat the building offers — lift, pool, gym, parking.Property record.
AgentLetting agents and their commission terms.Contracts, commission refunds.
NationalityNationality list for tenants and agents.Contracts.
Credit CardCards that rent may be collected on.Receipts.
TenantOpens the shared Customer master — a tenant is an Accounts customer, so their ledger, statement and ageing work exactly as any other customer’s.Contracts, invoices, receipts.
You may not need to create the rent charge
If generation finds no charge head pointing at a property’s rental account, it creates one called RENTAL INCOME for you and uses that. Set your own up first if you want a particular name or a tax code on it.

3.3 Departments

A new company created without the Cargo module starts with a single department, ADM – Administration; your properties add their own departments as you save them (§4). An existing company that carries departments it does not use can delete them in the Department master.

4 Properties & units

Masters → Premises → New. A property and all of its units are one record, saved together.

  1. Give the property a code and a name, and pick its type — Building, Compound, Complex, Plot or Other.
  2. Set the Rental A/C: the income account this property’s rent credits. This is required — a property without one cannot be billed.
  3. Tick the facilities the building offers.
  4. In the Units grid add one row per lettable space: unit number, type, category, rent, rooms, bathrooms, floor, area, and the amenities that come with it.
  5. Save.
Premises — Marina Tower
MARINA
Building
Marina Tower
41010001 — Rental Income
Units
UnitTypeCategoryRoomsArea m²RentStatus
101FlatDeluxe292.00450.00Occupied
102FlatStandard161.50320.00Vacant
G01Shop—140.00700.00Occupied
Add UnitSave
A property and its units are one record — saved, and mirrored into Accounts, together.

Availability

Each unit carries an availability flag separate from whether it is currently let. Use it to take a unit off the market without inventing a contract for it.

Active — lettable  In-Active  Reserved — set by a reservation contract  Sold Out  Maintenance

Deleting a unit
A unit that a tenancy contract has ever pointed at cannot be deleted — the save is refused and names the unit. Mark it In-Active instead; the history stays intact. Likewise a whole property cannot be deleted while any contract, booking, invoice, receipt, electricity charge, maintenance job or amenity transfer still refers to it; the delete is refused and says where it is still used.
Each property becomes an Accounts department
Saving a property creates a matching department, and each unit a job, in Accounts. That is what makes rent, costs and profit reportable per building and per unit without any extra bookkeeping.

5 Property photos & sharing

Letting is the one part of this module that faces outward. Photos live with the property and its units rather than in a folder on somebody’s laptop, so everyone shows a prospect the same thing — and a link puts those photos in front of that prospect without giving them a Ritzy login.

Others → Property Photos, or the camera button on any tile in Property View, which opens straight onto that unit.

5.1 Adding photos

Pick a property, then what the photos are of: The property itself — the building, the entrance, the pool — or one of its units. Each is a gallery of its own.

  1. Add Photos and choose one or more files. JPG, PNG, GIF and WebP are accepted.
  2. Type a caption under any photo. Captions show on the shared page, so they are worth writing.
  3. Order them with the arrows, and star one as the cover.
Photos off a phone are fine
Large pictures are shrunk in your browser before they are sent — a camera file of several megabytes arrives as a few hundred kilobytes. That matters: photos are stored inside the company database, and the database is backed up whole, every night.

The cover is what appears on the unit’s tile in Property View and what leads the gallery when you share it. Delete the cover and the next photo takes its place, so a unit with any photos always has one.

5.1a Videos

Under the photos, Videos takes a link to where the video lives: a YouTube or Vimeo walk-through, a clip in Google Drive (shared with anyone who has the link), or a virtual tour such as Matterport. Paste the address, give it a title and Add video. YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive and Matterport play in place; any other link opens in a new tab. Ritzy stores the link, not the file, so the company database and its nightly backup stay small. Unlisted YouTube videos work and do not appear in YouTube searches. Videos need upgrade script 093_re_unit_videos.sql on a company that had Real Estate before this release.

A share link (5.2) carries the videos of the galleries on it as well as the photos, unless you switch off Include videos when creating it. The prospect plays them on the page; links to other sites open in a new tab. Like the photos, a link keeps the videos it was sent with: one added later does not appear on it. A holiday-homes unit’s link shows its rate per night when Show the rent is on.

5.2 Creating a share link

On the Share links tab, tick what this prospect should see. The list is every property and unit that has photos, so one link can carry a shortlist — three flats in two different buildings, if that is what you are showing them.

Property Photos — Share links
What to share
MARINA — Marina Tower (3 galleries)
The property itself · 4 photos
Unit 101 · 6 photos
Unit 203 · 5 photos
PALM — Palm Court (2 galleries)
Unit G02 · 3 photos
Marina Tower · Unit 101 — 5 of 6 photos
Living room
Kitchen
Balcony
Bedroom
Bathroom
View
Three flats near the marina
Letting office — 1700 0000
30
Yes
AllNoneCreate link
Tick the units, untick any photo you would rather not send, then create the link.

Everything you tick comes with all of its photos included. Untick any you would rather not send; All and None do a whole gallery at once. Then fill in a headline and the contact details you want them to call, choose how many days the link should last, and press Create link.

You get a web address and a QR code. Paste the address into WhatsApp or an email, or let someone scan the code from your screen.

A link is a snapshot
It carries the photos you picked, as they were when you picked them. A photo you add to that unit next week does not appear on a link you sent today — create a new link when you want them to see more.

5.3 What the prospect sees

A plain photo page, and nothing else. For each property or unit on the link: the photos with their captions, the property name and address, the unit’s size and layout, the facilities the building offers, and your contact details. Where the link carries more than one, an index at the top lets them jump between them.

They need no Ritzy login. They see no tenant, no contract and no balance — nothing about the company beyond what is listed above. The rent appears only if you ticked Show the rent when you made the link.

5.4 Keeping track, and pulling a link

ColumnWhat it tells you
CoversWhat is on the link. This is how you tell two links for the same flat apart.
Status Live   Expired   Revoked
ViewsHow many times the page has been opened, and when it last was. A link nobody opened is worth a follow-up call.

Every link expires on its own. Revoke kills one immediately for everyone holding it. Neither is a delete: a dead link keeps its view count and what it covered, so the record of what was sent to whom survives.

The link only works where your server is reachable
A prospect’s phone has to be able to reach your Ritzy server. On an install that lives only on the office network, the link will open in the office and nowhere else. Ask your administrator whether the server is published to the internet before you send links to the outside world.
Who can do this
Photos and links are governed by their own permission, Property Photos, granted per user group in the User Manager — so you can let someone maintain photos without letting them issue links, or neither.

6 Tenancy contracts

Transactions → Tenancy Contract → New. This is the record everything else follows from.

FieldWhat to put in it
Property & UnitThe unit being let. Only lettable units are offered.
Contract NoFilled in for you as MARINA00001 when auto-numbering is on; otherwise type your own. The auto number on a new form is a preview: the number is taken from the property’s series when you Save, so if a colleague saved a contract on the same property first, yours gets the next one. A number already used by a hand-typed contract is refused with Contract No … is already used.
TenantThe Accounts customer the rent is billed to. The occupant’s own name, ID, passport, contact details and nationality are recorded separately — a company may rent for a named occupant. With the New right on Customers, the + beside the field creates a new tenant on the spot; agents, nationalities, amenities and charges have the same button. Properties and units do not: set those up first (§4).
Tenant TypeResidential or Commercial. Only commercial lets attract tax on the rent.
Start & End dateThe term. The end date drives the expiry warnings.
RentAlways the monthly figure, whatever the pay mode. A quarterly contract of 400 bills 1,200.
Pay ModeMonthly, Quarterly, Half-yearly, Yearly, Weekly, Fortnightly or Daily.
Next Invoice DateWhen the next rent falls due. Set once; generation moves it forward from then on.
DepositAmount, voucher number and remarks, held against the contract.
Agent & commissionThe letting agent, the commission paid and the number of periods it covers — used to work out a refund if the tenant leaves early.
Electricity allowanceWhether electricity is included, the allowance, and whether that allowance is per month or for the whole contract. See §12.
Amenities are suggested, not re-typed
Choosing a unit offers the amenities that unit holds, so the hand-over list starts from what is actually in the flat. Adjust it if something is not being handed over.

7 The contract lifecycle

A contract is never deleted once it has been billed. It moves through states, and the unit follows it.

StateMeansUnit shows as
ActiveLive and billable.Occupied
ReservedHeld for a tenant who has not moved in. Not billed.Reserved
In-activeSuspended — skipped by generation but still on file.Occupied
VacatedEnded. The unit is back on the market.Vacant

The four actions

Agent commission refunds
If you paid an agent for a year and the tenant leaves after five months, the unexpired part of the commission is refundable. Vacating calculates it from the commission paid, the periods it covered and the actual stay, and shows it on the contract and the Agent reports.

Every contract carries a History view — every renewal, suspension, rent change and vacate, in order, with who did it. The same information is printable as the Tenancy Contract History report.

8 Invoice Generation

Transactions → Invoice Generation. This is the run that raises the rent. It is the module’s busiest screen and the one worth understanding properly.

  1. Set the From and Prepare dates — the window of due dates to bill. To bill March, run from 1 March to 31 March.
  2. Optionally narrow to one property or one contract.
  3. Click Preview. Nothing is written — you see exactly which contracts would be billed, for how much, over which period, and why any contract has been left out.
  4. Check the list, then Generate.
Invoice Generation — preview
01/03/2026
31/03/2026
All properties
ContractPropertyUnitTenantModePeriodAmount
MARINA00001Marina Tower101Meridian Trading LtdMonthly01–31 Mar450.00
MARINA00004Marina TowerG01Lakeside Retail LtdQuarterly01 Mar–31 May2,100.00
PALMS00002Palm VillasV3L. PetrovaMonthly01–31 Mar900.00
Skipped: MARINA00007 — no rental account on the property  •  PALMS00005 — reservation, not yet checked in
PreviewGenerateRegenerate
Preview first: what would be billed, and why anything is being left out.

What a run does per contract

Running it twice is safe
Each invoice is written in one transaction with the contract’s new next-invoice date, so a contract already billed for the period is simply no longer due. If a run stops part-way, everything billed before the failure stays posted — just fix the cause and run again.
Month ends behave
A contract billed from the 31st settles onto the month end and stays there: 31 Jan → 28 Feb → 31 Mar, not 28 Feb → 28 Mar. Leap years are handled.

Printing and emailing the run

After Generate, the Last run list shows every invoice just raised. Each row has its own Print and Email (to the tenant) buttons, and above the list:

Sub-monthly contracts

The ordinary monthly run leaves Daily, Weekly and Fortnightly contracts alone, so a daily letting is not swept up by a month-end batch. Switch the run to include every mode when you want them.

Regenerate

Regenerate restates invoices already raised in a date range — use it when a rent was corrected after billing. It rewrites the invoice and its voucher from the contract as it now stands. Invoices that have been paid or credited are left alone.

9 Manual invoices

Transactions → Manual Invoice for anything generation would not raise by itself — a one-off service charge, a make-good, a recharge.

  1. Pick the property, unit and tenant, and the period the invoice covers.
  2. Add lines. Choosing a charge fills in its income account and tax code; you can still override the amount.
  3. Save — it posts the same way a generated invoice does.

Generated and manual invoices live in one list and share one number series; the Type column tells them apart. Cancelling an invoice reverses its voucher rather than deleting it, so the audit trail survives.

Allocated invoices cannot be edited
Once a receipt or credit note has been allocated to an invoice — even part of it — the invoice is locked against editing: Receipts or credit notes have been allocated to this invoice, so it cannot be edited. Remove those allocations first. Un-allocate the receipt (§10) or credit note (§11), make the change, then allocate again. The same message appears if money was allocated by someone else while you had the invoice open.

Emailing an invoice

Every row on Rent Invoices has an Email button. It sends the invoice to the tenant email on the tenancy contract; if the contract has none, Ritzy asks you for an address first.

10 Receipts & allocation

Transactions → Receipt → New. A receipt can carry several payment lines — part cash, part cheque — and each line can be spread across several invoices.

  1. Pick the property, unit and tenant. The Open Items panel lists that tenant’s unpaid invoices with what is still due on each.
  2. Add a payment line: Cash, Bank, Credit Card or Telegraphic Transfer, with the cheque or card details where they apply.
  3. Allocate it — tick invoices and enter amounts, or click Auto allocate to settle oldest first. Clear Allocation removes the line’s allocations.
  4. Save.
Receipt — Meridian Trading Ltd
04/04/2026
Bank — chq 481203
900.00
Open items
InvoiceDateAmountBalanceAllocate
✓72101/02/2026450.00450.00450.00
✓76401/03/2026450.00450.00450.00
80101/04/2026450.00450.00—
Auto allocateClear AllocationSave
Money is matched to bills, not dropped on a balance.
Post-dated cheques
Tick PDC on a payment line and the cheque is held rather than treated as cleared. The PDC List report shows what is sitting undeposited and when each one matures.
You may receive more than you allocate
An over-payment or an advance is fine — leave part of the receipt unallocated and apply it to a later invoice. The unapplied part shows as the receipt’s balance.
Only invoices dated on or before the receipt
A receipt lists and accepts only invoices dated on or before it, and the list follows the date as you change it. An invoice the receipt already settles stays listed while the date is unchanged; if you then move the date before the invoice, saving is refused (Invoice … is dated after this receipt, so it cannot be allocated here. Remove that allocation and save again.). A doorstep collection in Ritzy Collect puts a later invoice’s share on account instead.

11 Credit notes

Transactions → Credit Note. Use one to reduce what a tenant owes — a rent-free month, a billing correction, a goodwill allowance.

A credit note is built like an invoice: pick the tenant and unit, add lines against charge heads, then allocate it to the invoices it relieves. It posts the mirror image of an invoice’s voucher and reduces the outstanding balance immediately.

Credit note or cancel?
Cancel the invoice if it should never have existed. Raise a credit note if the invoice was right at the time and you are now giving something back — the second keeps both documents on the tenant’s statement, which is usually what an auditor wants to see.

12 Electricity, maintenance & amenities

12.1 Electricity charges

Transactions → Electricity Charge. Record the utility bill for a unit — meter, period, units consumed, electricity and water amounts. The live tenancy and the unit’s meter are picked up for you.

Many contracts include electricity up to an allowance. Ritzy shows the working rather than deciding behind your back: click Bill excess and you see the allowance, what has been charged so far, what has already been invoiced and what is over. Only the excess is billed, and only once.

On the contractEffect
Electricity not includedNothing is absorbed — the whole bill can be recharged.
Included, allowance per monthThe allowance resets each month; only that month’s excess is billable.
Included, allowance per contractOne allowance for the whole term, consumed cumulatively.
A bill that has been invoiced on is protected
Once its excess has been charged to the tenant, an electricity record cannot be cancelled or reduced below what was invoiced — that would leave an invoice with nothing behind it.

12.2 Maintenance jobs

Transactions → Maintenance Job. Log work on a unit: what is wrong, who is doing it, when it started and finished, with a running work log.

Each job creates a matching Accounts job (MT-00001) under a MAINT department, so the invoices and payments for the work can be booked against it and the true cost of the job is reportable. Closing the maintenance record closes the Accounts job. Deleting one keeps the Accounts job if anything has been posted to it — the costs are never orphaned.

12.3 Amenity transfers

Transactions → Inventory Transfer moves furniture and equipment between units — a television from 101 to 102. Pick the source unit, the destination and the items; the stock on each unit is adjusted.

Edits and cancels put the stock back
Correcting a transfer reverses the original move before applying the new one. A transfer made in error is cancelled, not deleted: Cancel on its row returns the items to the unit they came from, and the transfer and its lines stay in the list marked Cancelled (in red) as the record of what was moved. A cancelled transfer can no longer be edited. The quantities cannot drift, however many times you edit.

13 Accrued income

Optional, and off unless your accountant asks for it. Switch it on in Realestate Settings.

A quarterly, half-yearly or yearly invoice collects several months of rent in the month it is raised. Left alone, that month’s profit looks enormous and the following months look empty. With accrued income on, the months not yet earned are moved into an accrued income account and released one month at a time, so each month carries only its own rent.

MonthJournalEffect
Billed (Mar)Dr Rental Income 800, Cr Accrued Income 800Two of the three months taken back out of March.
AprDr Accrued Income 400, Cr Rental Income 400April earns its month.
MayDr Accrued Income 400, Cr Rental Income 400May earns its month; the accrual is now clear.
  1. Give the property an Accrued A/C alongside its rental account — nothing is spread without it.
  2. Switch Post accrued income monthly on.
  3. Generate invoices as usual. The journal for the run’s month is posted automatically.

The Accrued Income Months panel under Realestate Settings lists every month, its net amount and the journal behind it. Two actions sit beside it:

After a Regenerate
Restating an invoice changes a figure the accrual was worked out from. Ritzy tells you the year needs rebuilding rather than quietly posting a journal that no longer matches the invoices — click Rebuild year when you are ready.

The Accrued Income Posting report (§15) shows, for any month, how each non-monthly invoice splits between income earned now, income earned from an earlier invoice, and what is still carried.

14 Dashboard, Quick View & Property View

14.1 Real Estate Dashboard

The portfolio and the money on one page, for a date range and optionally one property.

Read the two halves together
High occupancy with a poor collection rate is the situation worth catching — full buildings that are not paying. That is why the portfolio and the money are on one page rather than two.

14.2 Quick View

One row per property: units, occupied, vacant, reserved, live contracts, rent roll, what is outstanding and the let percentage. Click a row to open its Property View.

14.3 Property View

One property, every unit as a tile, colour-coded and labelled. Each tile carries the unit’s size and rent, and — where it is let — the tenant, the contract dates, the pay mode and what that tenant owes.

A unit with photos shows its cover at the top of the tile, and the camera button opens that unit’s gallery — see §5. It is the quickest way in when a caller asks what is free in a building.

Property View — Marina Tower
101Occupied
Meridian Trading Ltd · to 31/12/2026
Rent 450.00 · Outstanding 450.00
102Vacant
Flat · 1 room · 61.5 m²
Rent 320.00 · vacated 14/02/2026
G01Occupied
Lakeside Retail Ltd · to 28/02/2027
Rent 700.00 · Outstanding 0.00
201Occupied
Tenant · to 30/06/2026
Rent 450.00 · Outstanding 0.00
202Maintenance
Flat · 2 rooms · 92 m²
Rent 450.00 · off the market
203Vacant
Flat · 2 rooms · 90 m²
Rent 440.00 · no live contract
What is full, what is free, who is in it and what they owe — on one screen.

14.4 Income Analysis

A pivot over every invoice line. Drag property, unit, unit type, charge, tenant, pay mode, source and month onto rows and columns and total by amount or tax. It opens on property by month, which is the comparison most people come for.

15 Reports

All under Reports → Real Estate. Each runs to screen, and can be printed or exported to Excel or PDF.

ReportAnswers
Property ListEvery property and unit with type, category, rent and status.
Vacant PropertyWhat is available to let right now, and what it would earn.
Occupied PropertyWhat is let, to whom and until when.
Tenant InformationTenant and occupant details, contact and identity, per contract.
Tenancy ContractsContracts by status, term, rent and pay mode.
Tenancy Contract HistoryEvery renewal, suspension, rent change and vacate.
Invoice ListRent invoices raised, with what each has been paid and what is open.
Receipt ListReceipts in the period and how each was paid.
Daily CollectionWhat came in on a day, by payment type — the cashier’s reconciliation.
Credit Note ListCredits issued and what they were applied to.
PDC ListPost-dated cheques held and when they mature.
Tenant OutstandingWho owes what, bill by bill.
Tenant AgeingThe same debt in ageing buckets — the chasing list.
Statement of AccountOne tenant’s invoices, receipts and credits in order, with a running balance.
Accrued Income PostingHow each non-monthly invoice splits between earned and carried income.
Electricity ConsumptionUnits and amounts per unit and period, and what was recharged.
Maintenance JobsJobs open and closed, with the cost booked against each.
Amenities by Property / by UnitWhere the furniture and equipment actually is.
Amenity Transfer ListWhat moved, from where to where, and when.

16 Notification alerts

Ritzy can watch the portfolio for you and raise an alert without anyone opening a screen. Set it up under Tools → Realestate Notification Alert.

AlertFires when
TenancyA contract is approaching its end date.
InvoiceRent invoices are overdue.
UnbilledA contract is past its next invoice date and has not been billed.
VacantUnits have been standing empty.

Each alert has its own threshold and recipients, and arrives in the in-app inbox and the Notify phone app. The full detail is in the Notifications — Realestate manual.

17 The tenant portal

A tenant can see their own bills, receipts and statement on their phone, and report a fault, without telephoning you. The app is Ritzy Tenant; these are the two screens you run it from.

17.1 Giving a tenant access

Others → Tenant Portal. Find the tenancy and press Invite. The tenant gets a link; opening it once activates their access, and after that they sign in with a code sent to their mobile or e-mail. They never have a password and never appear in your user list.

Check the ledger account before inviting
Access is granted to a ledger account, not to a person, because that is what the bills and receipts hang off. Where two tenancies share one account — a company that rents several flats, a family account — whoever you invite will see all of it. The screen warns you when that is the case and makes you confirm; read the warning rather than clicking through it.

17.2 Access ends by itself

You do not switch a tenant off. The portal works while there is a live contract on the account and closes the moment there is not:

What you do to the tenancyWhat happens to the portal
Vacate itCloses immediately.
Suspend itCloses, and re-opens by itself when the tenancy goes active again.
Reserve a unitNo access until the tenancy becomes active at check-in.
Renew onto a new contractNothing — the tenant stays signed in throughout.

Revoke ends access by hand when you need to, and Devices shows where a tenant is signed in.

17.3 Tenant Requests

Others → Tenant Requests is the inbox of faults tenants have reported, with their photographs. Answer with an office note, and where the fault is real, press Raise a job.

Raising a job is the ordinary route, not a second one
Raise a job creates the maintenance job exactly as you would on the Maintenance Job screen — same department, same cost record in Accounts — and then records which job answered the request. There is still only one way a maintenance job is ever created in Ritzy, which is why a tenant pressing a button on a phone cannot post anything into your books.

18 Field work from the desk

Three phone apps do work in the building — Ritzy Jobs, Ritzy Inspect and Ritzy Letting. Each has a screen here that feeds it or reads what it produced.

18.1 Maintenance Board

Others → Maintenance Board — open work, who is carrying it and what is late. Assigning a job is what puts it on a technician's phone; until then it is on nobody's.

Assign a technician, an expected date and a priority. The board shows how many jobs each person is carrying and flags anything overdue.

The technician marks work done; you close the job
Done comes from the phone and means the work is finished. The job stays open until somebody closes it on the Maintenance Job screen, because closing it also closes its cost record in Accounts. Parts and labour are costed before that happens, not after.

Assignment writes only the assignment. It deliberately does not go through the maintenance job save, which would re-derive the job's tenant from the unit — and would therefore re-attribute a job whose tenant has since moved out.

18.2 Unit Inspections

Others → Unit Inspections — every condition report, as it was signed. Open one to see each item, what the check-in said about it, what changed, the photographs, the signature, and the times it was carried out and received.

Print report produces the same document the inspector shares from the phone, so the copy in the tenant's hand and the copy in your file cannot differ. Open the check-in jumps to the inspection a check-out was compared against.

Nothing on this screen can be edited
A submitted inspection is evidence. A mistake is corrected by carrying out a new inspection, which supersedes the old one — and both stay readable. Tick Include corrected to see superseded ones; they are marked so nobody mistakes history for the present state of the unit.
Damage figures are an opinion
Where a check-out shows deterioration, the inspector's estimate appears beside it. Nothing has been charged. Any deduction from a deposit is decided by you and raised separately through Receipts and Credit Notes.

18.3 Letting Holds

Others → Letting Holds — units an agent has taken off the market for a prospect who has decided.

A hold is not a reservation
It has changed no unit, no contract and no ledger. The unit still reads as vacant on every report, and that is correct. This screen is where somebody with the signed terms and the deposit turns it into a tenancy — raise the contract on the Tenancy Contract screen as usual, then press Contract here to record which contract came from the hold.

Holds expire on their own, so nothing stays off the market because a job nobody wrote never ran. Tidy lapsed marks the ones that have run out, which is bookkeeping rather than a change of state, and Release puts a unit back immediately.

19 Rent collection

Where somebody goes door to door for the rent, Ritzy Collect puts the round on their phone and takes the payment at the door. Two screens run it.

19.1 Before anybody collects: the collectors

Others → Collection Rounds → Collectors. Give every collector their own cash-in-transit account from your chart of accounts.

Why each collector needs an account of their own
Money taken at a door is in somebody's pocket for the rest of the day. Posting it straight to the bank makes the bank reconciliation wrong until it is actually banked, and removes the control point this is bought for. Instead a collection debits the collector's own account, and the hand-in moves it to the bank. The trial balance then answers what is this person carrying from the books, rather than from anybody's word for it. A collector with no account set up cannot take money at all — the app refuses and says why.

19.2 Making up a round

Make up a round lists who owes what, one line per ledger account — a collector knocks on a door, not on an invoice — with the ageing against each. Tick the calls, pick the collector and the date, and send it.

What each tenant owes is frozen into the round as the figure the collector quotes. Their phone also shows the live balance beside it, so a payment taken in the office an hour ago is visible before they knock.

19.3 Watching the round

The board shows how far through each round its collector is, what has come in, and what happened at the doors where no money did: promised to pay, refused, nobody in.

19.4 Collections that did not reach the ledger

This is the one thing on these screens to act on today
A collection that could not be posted is money somebody took for which no receipt exists. It is listed at the top of the Collection Rounds screen with the reason, and again in full on the Collections screen. Deal with whatever stopped it — usually a collector with no cash account, or money taken in an accounting period that has since closed — then press Post it. Where it can never be posted, Write off records why; that stops it being posted and does not undo the payment, which still has to be accounted for.

19.5 Handing the money in

Hand in on a round moves the money out of the collector's cash-in-transit account and into the bank or the till, as a contra voucher in the ordinary accounts. Enter what was actually counted; where that differs from what was collected, Ritzy asks what happened to the difference before it will post, and keeps the answer on the round.

A round cannot be handed in while any of its collections is still stuck, because the transfer would be balanced against money the ledger has never seen.

19.6 The Collections register

Others → Collections — every payment taken at a door and what became of it.

A collector showing a negative figure
That means more has been handed in from their account than was ever collected into it — usually a hand-in posted twice, or posted against the wrong collector. It balances, so nothing else in Ritzy complains about it. The screen flags it because somebody has to notice.

19.7 What the tenant is handed

Every payment produces a numbered collection slip at the door. The slip is your acknowledgement that the money changed hands; the receipt is the voucher in the accounts, and it carries the slip number so the two always name each other. Where a collector is out of signal the phone issues the slip number itself and the payment reaches you when the phone does — so a tenant always leaves with a real number, and a payment is never sitting on a phone without somebody being told.

Is a slip enough where you trade?
In some markets the paper handed over at the door is itself a regulated document, and an acknowledgement that is not the tax receipt may not satisfy that. If that is true of your market, take payments only where there is a signal — the receipt is then raised while the collector is still standing there — and ask Ritzy to switch the offline behaviour off.

20 Holiday homes (daily rentals)

Apartments, units and villas let by the night — through Airbnb, Booking.com, Trip.com, Agoda and Trivago, agents and referrals — are kept completely apart from tenancy contracts. This is the back office: the manager keys in each booking from the portal’s notification and blocks or reopens the dates on the other portals by hand, and Ritzy keeps the register, the checklist that makes sure the portals are updated, and the accounts.

20.1 Setting a property up

  1. Real-estate → Masters → Property, open the property and set Use for to Holiday homes (daily rental).
  2. The units grid now asks for a Rate / night instead of a monthly rent. It is the usual rate; a booking can carry the portal’s own price.
  3. The property’s Income A/C is where stays post unless setup names another.

A holiday-homes property never appears on Tenancy Contract, in invoice generation or in Ritzy Letting. Ritzy will not switch a property to holiday homes while it has an active or reserved tenancy contract, nor back to tenancy while it has open bookings.

20.2 Setup

Real-estate → Realestate → Holiday Homes, tab Setup (needs the Real Estate Settings edit permission):

20.3 The screen

New takes the unit and dates, where it came from and the portal’s reference (the same reference cannot be entered twice for one portal), the guest, the rate or the portal’s total, discount, extras, commission, and whether the channel collected the money. Bill to is worked out for you — the channel when it collects, otherwise the walk-in guest account — and can be changed (a company paying for its staff, say). Close dates takes a unit off sale for an owner’s stay or maintenance. Overlapping dates are refused with the clash named.

20.4 What posts to Accounts

WhenVoucherEntries
A payment is takenReceiptDr bank/cash, Cr the bill-to account. Held on account until the invoice exists, then allocated to it.
Check out & invoiceInvoiceDr the bill-to account; Cr rent income (less discount) and extras income, plus tax. Earlier payments are allocated to it.
Check-out, with commissionPurchaseDr commission expense, Cr the channel’s account.
Cancel or no-show with a feeInvoiceThe fee alone.
An expense is savedPayment or purchaseDr the expense account, Cr the cash/bank account or the supplier (section 20.6).

When the channel collects, the invoice and the commission land on the channel’s own account, so what it still owes is exactly the payout; record the payout as a payment (Portal payout) when it arrives. When the guest pays you, the commission is a bill from the channel to pay as usual. Every voucher carries the property as department and the unit as job, so the department and job reports show holiday income beside rent.

Payments taken before check-out — a deposit, or the full amount on arrival — are allocated to the stay’s invoice the moment it is posted, oldest first, and so is a payment taken before a cancellation or no-show fee is invoiced. Only a payment taken against a different account than the invoice’s bill-to stays on account.

Undo check-out (needs Delete permission) asks Undo the check-out?, then takes the payments off the invoice (they go back on account) and cancels the invoice and commission vouchers in Accounts — they stay there under their numbers, marked cancelled, with their ledger effect reversed. The stay can then be corrected and checked out again, which posts a new invoice. It is refused when the invoice has been settled from Accounts or submitted for e-invoicing.

Withdrawing a payment (needs Delete permission) likewise cancels its receipt voucher in Accounts rather than deleting it: the receipt stays there marked cancelled, and any invoice it had paid reopens.

20.5 Calendar sync with the portals (iCal)

Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com keep each other’s calendars in step by iCal: each portal publishes an export address for a listing and can import addresses from elsewhere. Ritzy joins in the middle, so a reservation on one portal blocks the dates on all the others without anyone typing it twice. Open Holiday Homes → Calendar sync (needs upgrade script 094_re_holiday_ical.sql). Tick iCal against each portal on the Setup tab first; Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com start ticked.

  1. Ritzy → portal. For each unit and portal, Copy address and paste it into that portal’s Import calendar (Airbnb: Calendar → Availability → Connect calendars; Booking.com: Rates & Availability → Sync calendars). Each portal gets its own address, which leaves out that portal’s own reservations. The address lists the nights only, as “Not available”: no guest, price or booking number.
  2. Portal → Ritzy. Copy the portal’s Export calendar address for the same listing and paste it into the unit’s row, then Save. Ritzy reads it straight away and then every 30 minutes.

From then on:

The portals must be able to reach Ritzy
Airbnb and Booking.com fetch the calendar from the internet. Open Ritzy on its public HTTPS address before copying the links; an address such as http://192.168.1.10 works in the office but not for them. Portals re-read calendars every few hours, so a reservation made minutes before another portal’s can still overlap: that is the double booking case above. New makes a fresh address for a unit if one has leaked; give it to every portal again.

20.6 Cleaning and maintenance expenses

Every turnover costs money: the cleaner, the laundry, guest supplies, a repair. Enter each against the unit it was for — or against the whole property when it is shared, such as the pool, the lobby or a building-wide pest treatment — and it posts to Accounts as you save it. Open Holiday Homes → Expenses (needs upgrade script 095_re_holiday_expenses.sql) and click New:

PaidVoucherEntries
Paid nowPaymentDr the category’s expense account (and input tax), Cr the cash or bank account.
Supplier’s billPurchaseDr the expense account (and input tax), Cr the supplier. Pay it from Accounts as any other bill.

Like stays, each voucher carries the property as department and, for a unit, the unit as job, so the job report shows a unit’s costs beside its rent. Changing an expense rewrites its voucher under the same number. If the change needs a different kind of voucher (from Paid now to Supplier’s bill, or the reverse) or moves it into another financial year, the old voucher is cancelled in Accounts and a new one is raised. Cancel expense (needs Delete permission) cancels the expense and its voucher: the voucher stays in Accounts under its number, marked cancelled, with its ledger effect reversed. A supplier’s bill that has already been paid in Accounts cannot be changed or cancelled here until that payment’s allocation is undone.

A stay’s own costs — the clean after it — are added from the booking: the drawer has a Costs card with Add cost, which fills in the unit and the booking. The Summary tab now shows each unit’s commission, costs and net (revenue less commission and costs), the shared costs per property, and costs by category.

On the Setup tab: each category’s expense account (a category with none uses the fallback Expenses A/C), and Expenses paid from, the cash account offered for an expense paid on the spot.

20.7 Photos, videos and details on the phone

The Homes tab of Ritzy Holiday Homes lists every unit with its cover photo. Opening one shows its photos (the unit’s own, then the building’s), its videos, and its details: bedrooms, bathrooms, area, floor, furnishing, the usual nightly rate, who is in now or next, the building’s facilities and the unit’s amenities. These are the same photos and videos as Property Photos (section 5), and the same facilities and amenities as the Property master. Anyone who can see bookings can see them; adding or removing photos and videos from the phone needs the Property Photos add and delete permissions.

20.8 Permissions and the phone app

Holiday Homes (Real Estate) — View to see, Add to enter bookings and expenses, Edit to check in, check out, take payments, work the checklist and change expenses, Delete to withdraw payments, undo check-outs and cancel expenses. Expense categories and their accounts need the Real Estate Settings edit permission, as the rest of Setup. The same rights open Ritzy Holiday Homes on a phone; its install QR code is on this screen. See the Mobile Apps manual.

Existing companies: run the upgrade script
A company that had Real Estate before this release runs 092_re_holiday_homes.sql (094_re_holiday_ical.sql for calendar sync, 095_re_holiday_expenses.sql for expenses) from DBA Console → Upgrade Scripts. Until then the Use for choice is greyed out and the screen says the feature is not installed.

21 Printed documents & templates

Four Real Estate documents print from a template you can edit: the Rent Invoice, the Receipt, the Credit Note and the Lease Agreement. Each is a page of ordinary text and headings with placeholders where Ritzy fills in the figures, so you can write your own wording round them and keep the numbers correct.

21.1 Printing one

Every row on Rent Invoices, Receipts and Credit Notes has a printer button. It opens the document in a preview with Print and Close. Printed and emailed rent invoices show the tenant’s address, mobile and email as recorded on the tenancy contract. The lease prints from Tenancy Contract — Print contract, which first asks whether to include the tenant’s app invitation.

If a document type has no template yet, the screen says so rather than printing something unofficial. Add one under Tools → Report Templates.

The standard invoice, receipt and credit note print in the shared Ritzy look: your logo and company details at the top, the Tenant and Premises in boxes, and the balance due in a solid band. The lease keeps its own formal typeset layout. See Printed Documents & Reports.

21.2 Editing the wording

Tools → Report Templates, then pick the document under Real Estate. You get the template on the left and a live preview on the right, filled with sample figures so you can see the layout as you type. The panel beside the editor lists every placeholder that document understands — click one to drop it in at the cursor.

A placeholder is written in double braces. {{tenant.name}} becomes the tenant’s name; {{fmt contract.rent}} becomes the rent with two decimals; {{date contract.endDate}} becomes a date in your format. Anything outside the braces is your own text and prints exactly as written, so you can put a placeholder in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph and it reads as one line.

Placeholders you spell wrong print as nothing
They do not raise an error — they simply come out blank. If something is missing from a printed document, check the spelling in the template against the list beside the editor, and watch the live preview: a placeholder that is blank there will be blank on paper.

21.3 The lease agreement

The lease supplied with Ritzy is the same sixteen clauses as the lease the older Ritzy printed, in the same order and the same words, so a company moving across does not have to retype it. Four things were deliberately changed, because the old document had them fixed and they are not fixed in this one:

It is a starting point that matches what you used to print, not a contract anybody should sign without their own lawyer having read it. Edit it to suit your market.

21.4 Upgrades and your changes

The template Ritzy supplies is marked as a seed. While it is the only template for that document and you have not edited it, an upgrade quietly replaces it with the newer version, so improvements reach you without your asking. The moment you edit it, or add a second template of your own, Ritzy stops touching it. Your wording is yours from then on.

22 Tips & FAQ

A contract was skipped by generation — why?

Preview always says. The usual reasons: the contract is a reservation that has not been checked in, it is suspended, its next invoice date falls outside the window, or the property has no rental account.

I billed the wrong month. What now?

Cancel the invoices and set the contracts’ next invoice dates back, then run again. If the amounts were wrong rather than the dates, Regenerate over that date range is quicker.

Is the rent on the contract monthly or per period?

Always monthly. The pay mode multiplies it: a quarterly contract at 400 raises an invoice of 1,200.

How do I stop billing without ending the tenancy?

Suspend the contract. It stays on file, keeps its history, and generation steps over it until you reactivate it.

Can a tenant pay for two units on one receipt?

Yes — the receipt is against the tenant, and its allocations can reach any of that tenant’s open invoices.

Why does a unit still show occupied after the tenant left?

The contract has not been vacated. Open it and use Vacate with the date they left; the unit is freed and the agent refund, if any, is worked out.

Where does the rent show up in Accounts?

In the income account on the charge head, with the property as the department and the unit as the job — so the departmental and job reports show rent per building and per unit with no extra work.

Email All said some invoices were not sent.

Usually the tenancy contract has no email address. Add one to the contract and email those invoices again, or send them one at a time from Rent Invoices, which asks for an address.

Should I switch accrued income on?

Only if you bill quarterly or longer and your accountant wants each month’s profit to carry only its own rent. Monthly-only portfolios gain nothing from it.

I sent a link, then added better photos. Do they see them?

No. A link carries the photos you picked when you made it, so nothing you do afterwards changes what has already gone out. Make a new link and send that instead.

Someone outside the office says the photo link does not open.

Then your Ritzy server is not reachable from outside your network. The link is correct; it simply has nowhere to reach. Ask your administrator whether the server is published to the internet.

Can I stop a link I have already sent?

Yes. Revoke on the Share links tab kills it at once for everyone holding it. The row stays, with its view count, so you keep the record of what was sent.

Ask the assistant
The support assistant on every screen knows this manual. Ask it in your own words — “how do I refund an agent commission” — and it will answer and link you to the right section.