Today we're announcing the release of a small but powerful addition to the Edit Lease screen, one that was requested by our user base.
Previously, you were able to 'other' non-rent charges to a tenant's statement on the Edit Lease screen - these included things like fees, deposits, and other items that either were billed regularly or on a fixed date.
The most common charges our users would add were of the recurring variety - either they were set to recur "each time rent is due", or they were set to recur "monthly, on a specific date". The problem with these, especially if you added them well after you set up the original lease, is that they would appear retroactively on the tenant's statement, so you were forced to back-collect these, even if this didn't reflect reality. Sometimes, you just want to add a charge that starts "now", going-forward.
Another scenario was that you often might have a charge that changes over time - for example, let's say that you have a fee that is $125 for Jan 1 to July 31, and then $200 from Aug 1 to Dec 31. You couldn't be this specific before today - the charge would go on as long as the lease was valid for the $100, and the only way to get around this was to create multiple (often many!) single manual date charges - for example, one for June ($100), July ($100), etc and then one for Aug ($200), and so on - this was time consuming and error prone.
Now, we've added From - Until date range selectors so you can be really specific about when a specific charge is valid1. We should emphasize that this feature is only relevant and available to charges that either recur each time rent is due, or monthly on a specific date. They aren't relevant to one-time charges. You'll now see these selectors on the Lease Edit --> Other Charges & Credits screen:
If you don't need a specific validity period for the charge, just leave them blank, which means the charge will be valid from the first rental period (which is derived from the 'First Payment Due On' date on the lease), all the way until the end of the lease (so the charge won't expire until the lease does).
1 Note that the date ranges you select affect the periods of the lease - the due dates - not today's date. So even though today's date might be valid between your From and Until date selection, 123Landlord compares this date range to the due date of each period, so make sure your lease "First Payment Due On" date and end date fall within the ranges you want.