Rent roll vs tenant ledger, and how to stop rebuilding owner reports every month

What is a rent roll?

A rent roll is a list of every unit in a property as of one date. Each row is a unit. It shows who occupies it, what they owe each month, and where the lease stands. Buyers and lenders usually ask for one during a sale or a refinance, because it summarizes the rent in place and who owes what.

A useful rent roll has these columns:

• Unit and unit type, including vacant units
• Tenant name, or "Vacant"
• Lease start and end dates, and month-to-month status
• Monthly rent and any recurring charges such as parking, pets or utilities
• Security deposit held
• Balance due as of the rent roll date
• Market rent, if you track it, to show the gap to current rent

The rent roll date matters more than people expect. A rent roll run on the 1st and one run on the 5th can show very different balances for the same property.

What is a tenant ledger?

A tenant ledger is the transaction history for one tenant or one lease. Each line is a charge, a payment, a credit or an adjustment, with a date and a running balance. It answers the question "how did this balance get here?"

Ledgers carry the detail that a rent roll leaves out: late fees, partial payments, concessions, returned payments, and payments applied to the wrong month. When a balance is disputed, the ledger is the record people go back to.

Rent roll vs tenant ledger at a glance

Why the two disagree, and how to tie them out

The balance column on a rent roll should equal the sum of the ledger balances on the same date. When it does not, the cause is usually one of these:

• Different dates. The rent roll was run on one day and the ledgers were read on another.
• Unapplied payments. Money was received but not yet applied to a charge.
• Prepaid rent and credits. Some rent rolls show credits in a separate column or leave them out, while a sum of the ledgers nets them against amounts owed.
• Manual adjustments. A concession or write-off was entered on the rent roll spreadsheet but not on the ledger, or the other way round.

The fix is a fixed "as of" date and one source. Pull the rent roll and every ledger from the same system on the same date, then check that the totals match before anything goes to an owner.

What should a monthly owner report include?

Owners want to know what came in, what went out, what they were paid, and what is at risk. A clear monthly report usually has:

• Income and expense statement for the month and year to date
• Management and leasing fees, shown separately
• Owner distribution and the reserve held back
• Rent roll as of month end
• Delinquency summary: who owes what, how old it is, and what action is under way
• Vacancy and lease expirations in the next 60 to 90 days
• Notes on repairs or capital items above an agreed amount

How to stop rebuilding owner reports every month

Most teams rebuild the owner report by hand because the pieces live in different places: rent and ledgers in the property management software, bills and bank activity in accounting, notes in email. Copying them into a spreadsheet each month is where the time goes and where the errors come in.

1. Pick one "as of" date for every number in the report.
2. Pull from the source systems, not from last month's spreadsheet.
3. Tie out before you format. Rent roll balances must equal ledger totals, and cash must reconcile to the bank statement.
4. Keep the layout fixed so owners can compare month to month.
5. Automate the pull and the tie-out. A person should review exceptions, not copy numbers.

This is the kind of work Simple Cipher automates: the pull, the tie-out and the report, with every figure traced back to its source document.

Common questions

This guide is general information about property management reporting. It is not legal, tax or accounting advice.