Owner balances & payouts

If you manage properties for others, every rent payment you collect is mostly their money. Owner balances make that obligation explicit: Habitia tracks, per owner, what’s been collected on their behalf, what your management fee took, and what you’ve paid out — so “how much do I owe María right now?” always has an exact answer.

Open Owners and click any owner: the Balance & payouts section shows the amount owed and the activity behind it.

How the balance builds

This only applies to properties whose management mode is Managed (set per property, with a fee % and fee basis). For each rent or fee payment that settles:

• + Rent share — the owner’s percentage of the payment (gross — your fee shows as its own deduction line). Multiple owners split by their ownership percentages (unset percentages split evenly).
• − Management fee — your cut, per the property’s fee % and basis (rent only, rent + late fees, or all income). Non-commissionable money — e.g., late fees under a rent-only basis — passes to the owner in full.
• − Service charges — one-off owner charges (inspections, placements, …) reduce what you owe, matching how they deduct on statements.
• − Expenses — repairs, utilities, and other property expenses you paid on the owner’s behalf come out of their balance, matching the statement. If the property’s expense policy is billable only, only expenses marked billable to owner count.
• − Payouts — money you actually sent (below).

Deposits never appear — a security deposit is the tenant’s money held in trust, not the owner’s.

Balances update nightly automatically. Just recorded payments and want them reflected now? Click Refresh balances.

Note: Tracking starts the day the first sweep runs for your organization. History before that isn’t rewritten — statements still cover any past range if you need it.

Owner reserves

On a managed property you can set an owner reserve — dollars held back from payouts so there’s always money on hand for surprise repairs ($200–500 per property is typical). It’s advisory: payout suggestions subtract it and the screen warns when an amount dips into it, but nothing is hard-blocked.

Paying owners — the monthly run

Click Pay owners at the top of the Owners page for the disbursement ritual most managers run mid-month, after rent has settled: one row per owner with money on the books, showing their balance, reserve, and a suggested payout (balance − reserve). Adjust any amount, add reference numbers, pick the date and method, and record the whole run at once. Each row becomes its own payout with its own statement.

Recording a single payout

For one-off payments — bank transfer, check, ATH Móvil — open the owner and click Record payout: amount (pre-filled with the full balance), date, method, and an optional reference. The balance drops accordingly.

Two guardrails: paying out more than the balance is refused (record an adjustment first if an advance is intentional), and a mis-recorded payout can be voided, restoring the balance.

Adjustments

Sometimes the computed balance isn’t the whole story — you waived a month’s fee, recovered an advance, or need to fix a data mistake. Adjust (next to Record payout) records a signed correction with a required reason: owe more raises the balance, owe less lowers it. Adjustments change the balance only; if you keep double-entry books, mirror the correction with a manual journal entry so the Due to Owners account agrees.

The statement behind every payout

Each payout covers a window — the day after the owner’s previous payout through the payout date. The download icon next to any payout in the activity list produces the owner statement PDF for exactly that window: rent collected, your fee, expenses, service charges, net. That’s the document owners expect alongside their money.

Note: recording a payout tracks money you sent outside Habitia — it doesn’t move money. Automatic ACH payouts to owner bank accounts may come later.

The accounting side (if double-entry is enabled)

The books now tell the truth about managed rent: collected rent moves out of your income into the Due to Owners liability, your fee lands in Management Fee Income, and each payout clears the liability against the bank account. Your P&L shows only what you actually earned — the fee — instead of the owners’ rent inflating your revenue.

What’s next

• Owner statements — the period view owners receive; it now reconciles against real payouts. Download any owner’s statement — or the all-owners summary — as a PDF from Reports → Financial.
• Enabling double-entry accounting — where the liability lives.