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). Percentages must be given to every owner or to none, and must add up to 100; the split is done in whole cents so the owners’ shares always add up to the payment, with any leftover cent going to the largest holder.
− Management fee — your cut, per the property’s fee % and basis (rent only, rent + late fees, or all income). Non-commissionable money passes to the owner in full.
Late fees — by default they are yours: they stay in your income and never reach the owner’s balance or statement. If your agreement gives them to the owner, set Late fees go to → the owner on the property; they are then swept like rent, with your fee taken only when the fee basis includes late fees. Changing the setting re-materialises the owner’s rows on the next refresh.
− 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: a payout can never exceed the owner’s balance, to the cent, and an owner with a zero or negative balance cannot be paid at all (use a PM advance if you mean to pay ahead of collections); 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.

If double-entry accounting is on, the form also asks what the adjustment is — a waived management fee, a waived service charge, a cost you absorb, or a PM advance settled outside the balance — and posts the journal entry for you against the matching account, so Due to Owners always agrees. There is deliberately no “error correction” option: if the balance is wrong because a payment or expense is wrong, fix that row and the owner’s rows follow on the next refresh. Without double-entry, the adjustment changes the balance only.

Contributions and PM advances

Two more actions live next to Adjust:

Contribution — the owner sent you money: a reserve top-up, or funding for a repair bigger than the rent on hand. It raises their balance (and, with accounting on, books the cash into the trust or operating account).
Record PM advance — shows only when the balance is negative, which happens when an expense on the owner’s property cost more than the rent collected. Recording the advance says you covered that gap from your own money: the balance rises toward zero, and the amount is booked as Due from Owners (account 1250), a receivable the owner now owes you. It is recovered automatically: each nightly refresh takes as much of the owner’s new positive balance as is needed and books it against the receivable, as Advance recovered rows on the owner’s activity, so rent does not flow out to the owner until you have been repaid. With trust accounting on, this also moves the cash from operating into trust so the trust account is whole again, and it clears the PM advance required alert. Reports → Accounting → Owners shows the advances still outstanding against account 1250.

Both can be voided from the activity list.

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.

Where the figures come from. For any period that starts on or after the day owner-balance tracking began, the statement is read straight from the owner ledger: the rent share, fee, expense and service-charge rows the nightly refresh wrote, at the fee rate in force on each payment. So the statement, the owner’s balance and the Due to Owners account agree to the cent, and changing a property’s fee later does not rewrite past statements. A period that starts before tracking began has nothing swept to read, so Habitia shows a preview computed from payments at the property’s current fee and says so on the page; pick a start date on or after the tracking date to get the ledger figures.

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.

With trust accounting turned on, that bank account is the trust account rather than operating, the Owners page shows how much of the trust balance is your sweepable fees, and a payout is refused when the trust account holds less than it owes to all owners and tenants combined.

The reserve and the replacement forecast

The Owner reserve on a managed property is the fixed amount held back from payouts for surprise repairs. Next to that field, the property form shows what the replacement forecast suggests per month for that property — the next twelve months of expected replacements divided by twelve — with a one-click Use to adopt it. Owners see the same figure on their portal’s Upcoming replacements card, with their share by ownership percentage, the past-due backlog and a PDF, so the reserve is a number you both looked at rather than one you picked.

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.
Trust accounting — keep owner money and deposits in a separate account the books can prove.
Enabling double-entry accounting — where the liability lives.