Landlord help centre

Tenarize is a web platform for private landlords in England who want to run a rental portfolio properly without hiring a letting agent. It covers the whole life of a tenancy rather than one slice of it.

• Compliance — structured checklists for vetting, safety certificates, move-in and move-out, each explaining the legal duty behind it.
• Tenancy agreements — generated from a maintained template and e-signed by both parties.
• Rent — Direct Debit collection, automatic monthly charges, arrears tracking and statutory late-payment interest.
• Maintenance — tenant-reported issues, a searchable supplier database, costs and invoices.
• Records — a document vault with expiry reminders, a per-tenancy audit trail, and reports you can hand an accountant.

Your tenants get their own portal where they review and sign documents, pay rent, report problems and see their own paperwork. See everything it does or what it costs.

Tenarize is built for landlords who manage their own properties rather than paying an agent a percentage of rent to do it. That includes the accidental landlord letting one inherited or previously-lived-in property, and the self-managing landlord running fifteen or twenty.

The product's centre of gravity is UK legal compliance. If your main worry is that you might unknowingly be breaking a rule — an expired gas certificate, an unprotected deposit, an unlicensed HMO, a property below the minimum EPC rating — that is the problem Tenarize was built around.

It is less of a fit if you already use a letting agent for full management, or if you need commercial-property or student-halls-scale features.

Tenarize is England-only. Scotland's Private Residential Tenancy regime, Wales's Renting Homes Act and Rent Smart Wales registration, and Northern Ireland's rules are genuinely different legal systems — the checklists, notice periods and tenancy agreement in Tenarize would be wrong for them, not merely incomplete.

Rather than let you record a property the compliance engine can't advise on, the app checks the address when you add or edit a property and rejects one it can identify as being outside England. Where Google's address data is available that check uses the country Google returns; otherwise it falls back to postcode areas that are unambiguously outside England.

Worth knowing: Border postcode areas that contain genuine English addresses are deliberately not blocked on the postcode check alone, so a real English property is never rejected by mistake.

1. Click Get started and register with your name, email and a password. You'll need to tick the box accepting the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy — that acceptance is recorded against your account.
2. Choose a plan. Every route in the app except the billing page stays behind a choose a plan screen until you have one, so this is the first real step rather than something to put off.
3. Add your first property, with its address, type, number of bedrooms and furnishing status.
4. Start a tenancy against it — that creates your vetting checklist and the workflow takes over from there.

You can add properties and walk the checklists straight away. Nothing reaches a tenant until you explicitly invite them or send an agreement for signature.

Next to Start new tenancy on any property page there's Import existing tenancy. It runs through the same pipeline as a new let, with three deliberate differences:

• The vetting checklist gets a Mark all as already done button, so you're not re-recording reference checks for a tenant who has lived there for years.
• The compliance checklist is *not* skippable — those certificates are exactly the paperwork an import exists to capture, and each one still wants its document.
• No move-in checklist is created. The move-in already happened outside Tenarize, and generating a checklist would imply Tenarize verified something it never saw.

You then set the real terms — including a start date in the past, which is accepted — and activate the tenancy against the agreement you already have signed. See activating a tenancy with your own agreement.

Worth knowing: Imports are one tenancy at a time by design. There's no CSV bulk importer — on a compliance product, silently mass-creating records nobody has checked is a bigger risk than the typing it saves.

A tenancy in Tenarize moves through five statuses, and you can't skip one. The point is that the order matches the order the law expects things to happen in.

1. Vetting — right to rent, ID, income, credit check, references, guarantor. None of these require a document upload, but each one signposts where to actually carry the check out.
2. Compliance — gas safety, EICR, EPC, alarms, the Renters' Rights Act information sheet, Legionella, insurance, deposit protection paperwork, and furniture fire safety if the let is furnished. Most of these do require the document.
3. Awaiting tenant — you set the proposed start date, rent and deposit, invite the tenant to their portal, and send the agreement for signature.
4. Active — both parties have signed. The move-in checklist appears, rent collection becomes available, and the real start date, rent and deposit are locked in.
5. Ended — you've recorded the end date and reason. A move-out checklist is created automatically.

Completing the last item on a checklist advances the tenancy on its own — there's no separate 'submit' step.

You can add a property and start a tenancy against a placeholder tenant to see the whole workflow. Nothing is sent to anyone until you explicitly invite a tenant or send an agreement for signature — both are deliberate button presses, not side effects.

A tenancy can be deleted while it is still at the Vetting stage, so an exploratory one is easy to clear up afterwards. See deleting a property or tenancy.

Worth knowing: Don't use a real person's details as a placeholder. Once a tenancy leaves Vetting it can no longer be deleted until it has ended, and their data is then part of a compliance record you're expected to keep.

1. From Properties or the map, choose New property.
2. Start typing the address. Picking a suggestion fills the address lines, postcode and map position for you, and tells Tenarize which country the property is in.
3. Set the property type, number of bedrooms, and — importantly — the furnishing status.
4. Add licensing details if the property needs an HMO or selective licence, and any notes.

Worth knowing: Furnishing status is required when you create a property because it decides whether the compliance checklist includes the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 item. Leaving it wrong quietly under-states a real legal duty.

Bedrooms matter too if you let the property room by room — see letting a property room by room.

Google occasionally returns a UK postcode split across two parts, which used to leave the postcode field empty. That's fixed, but the field has always been editable, so if it's ever blank you can simply type it.

Worth knowing: If you hand-edit the postcode after picking a suggestion, the country information from that suggestion is deliberately discarded — a postcode you typed can't be vouched for by an address you picked earlier. The England-only check then falls back to reading the postcode itself.

Set a property's letting type to By room. A whole-property let is limited to one live tenancy at a time; a by-room property can run several at once, each with its own tenant, room label, rent, deposit, agreement and checklists.

• Room tenancies use a different tenancy agreement template — one that grants the room plus shared use of the common parts, rather than the whole property. It isn't a variant of the standard agreement; the grant clause is genuinely different.
• If you've set the number of bedrooms, Tenarize caps concurrent room tenancies at that number.
• Meter readings, the property list, the map and the property page all show per-room occupancy rather than assuming one tenant.

Worth knowing: Room labels aren't currently checked for uniqueness, so it's possible to record two tenancies against the same label as long as you're under the bedroom cap. Worth a glance when you set a second room tenancy up.

Mark the building itself as a container property and attach each independently-let unit to it as a child. The two behave differently on purpose:

• The container holds nothing but building-wide paperwork — a communal fire risk assessment, a block insurance policy. It never carries a tenancy of its own.
• Each child unit is a complete property in its own right: its own address details, its own licensing, its own documents, its own tenancies and compliance checklists.

Worth knowing: You have to delete or detach the child units before the container itself can be deleted. That rule is enforced by the app rather than the database, so it won't stop you halfway.

Operating an unlicensed HMO where a licence is required is a criminal offence, so licensing is tracked as real data rather than a file you might forget to look at.

• Licence type, reference and expiry date are structured fields on the property.
• Status pills appear on the property page and portfolio-wide badges on the property list, so a missing or expiring licence is visible without opening anything.
• A licence conditions free-text field records the specific conditions the licensing authority attached — occupancy limits, fire door requirements, minimum room sizes — which the licence's existence and expiry alone never capture. It's shown prominently on the licensing card, not buried.
• Approaching expiry and outright absence both generate notifications.

Worth knowing: Whether a property needs a licence depends on your local authority's own scheme. Tenarize tracks what you tell it; it doesn't look up your council's designation for you.

The map is the landlord home screen. Every property is plotted with its occupancy and any compliance warnings, and your suppliers can be overlaid with the catchment areas they cover.

It's most useful when a portfolio is spread out — seeing at a glance which properties have no gas engineer covering them, or which cluster of flats is coming up for renewal at the same time, is hard to do from a table.

Every property has its own photo gallery. You can upload as many as you like, drag them into the order you want, and set one as the primary banner photo for the property page.

Worth knowing: If you delete the photo currently set as the banner, the banner simply clears rather than pointing at a missing file.

Room-by-room condition photos belong somewhere else — see the walkthrough tool, which keeps them attached to the inventory report rather than loose in the gallery.

Deletion is deliberately slow, because a landlord is expected to be able to produce historical compliance and vetting records if they're ever challenged.

• A tenancy can only be deleted while it is at Vetting or after it has Ended — never mid-tenancy. Requesting deletion zips every document on that tenancy, emails the tenant a link to download their copy, and locks the tenancy so nothing can change underneath it.
• A property can only be deleted once no tenancy references it at all, and — for a building container — once its child units are gone.
• Both are then permanently deleted 30 days later by a background job, along with their files.

You can cancel a scheduled deletion at any point in that window. For a tenancy, cancelling also deletes the stored zip and emails the tenant to say the old link no longer works. A property can also be deleted immediately with Delete now if you don't want to wait — that option isn't offered for a tenancy, because there's a tenant on the other end who may still need their download link.

Everything currently in the grace period is listed together on the Pending deletions page, reachable from a banner on the map.

Six items, all landlord-only — your tenant never sees this checklist.

• Right to Rent check completed — verifying immigration status under the Immigration Act 2014.
• Proof of identity verified — passport or driving licence checked against the applicant.
• Proof of income / employment verified — payslips, an employer reference, or an accountant's letter for the self-employed.
• Credit check completed.
• Previous landlord reference obtained.
• Guarantor details obtained (if applicable).

None of them force a document upload, because not every check produces paperwork worth keeping — a reference taken over the phone, for instance. Each one offers an optional upload if it does. Each item also explains the duty behind it and points you at where to actually carry the check out.

Where a tenant's right to rent is time-limited, the law expects a follow-up check. Missing it is how a landlord loses the statutory excuse that protects them from a penalty.

Set the follow-up date on the tenancy and Tenarize raises a notification before it's due, with a link straight to the tenancy where you can record the re-check.

Worth knowing: Tenarize reminds you to do the check. It doesn't do the check — that's still a gov.uk Right to Rent verification, or a share code, carried out by you.

Invites go out once a tenancy reaches Awaiting tenant, because before that there's nothing for the tenant to look at. Pressing Invite generates a one-time code and emails the tenant a link that takes them straight to the sign-up page with the code applied.

• The tenant sets their own password. You never see it, and you never set one on their behalf.
• Invite codes expire after 14 days. An expired one gives a clear 'ask your landlord for a new one' message rather than looking broken — reissue it and a fresh email goes out.
• If the tenant already has a portal account — a renewal, say — no new invite is needed.

A tenant doesn't strictly need a portal account for the tenancy to run, but they do need one to e-sign, to pay rent through Tenarize, or to report maintenance in the app.

Try the simple route first: the tenant login page has a Forgot password link that emails them a reset. That handles most cases and doesn't need you at all.

If the problem is the email address itself — they've lost access to the mailbox, or it was recorded wrong — use Reset portal account, available from your tenant database and from a link on the tenant's own tenancy page. It deletes the old login, unlinks it from the tenant record, and issues a fresh invite code, which is emailed out automatically.

Worth knowing: Both changing a tenant's email address and resetting their portal account are written to the tenancy audit trail and emailed to the tenant, so there's always a record of who moved their account and when.

Your profile has an optional tenant-facing contact block — name, email and phone. Setting the contact email switches tenants over to it, so your personal address stays out of the tenant portal and out of the emails Tenarize sends them.

This is worth doing if you're letting through a limited company, using a managing contact, or simply don't want your personal mobile number in a tenant's phone forever.

Tenants see a deliberately narrow slice, and the restriction is enforced on the server, not by hiding things in the interface.

• They can see — their tenancy's status and terms, documents relevant to them (safety certificates, the agreement, the inventory report), meter readings, their rent payment history, and any maintenance requests on their tenancy.
• They cannot see — the vetting checklist and everything on it, any document marked landlord-only, your private notes, your supplier database, what a repair cost you, or any invoice you've attached to a maintenance request.

Worth knowing: Repair costs and invoices are stripped out of tenant responses on the server before they're ever sent, rather than simply not rendered. A tenant can't retrieve them by any route.

Every tenancy gets the same compliance checklist, with one conditional extra:

• Gas Safety Certificate (CP12) — annually where there are gas appliances. Only a Gas Safe registered engineer can carry out the check.
• Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR) — at least every five years.
• Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) — valid ten years, minimum rating E.
• Smoke alarm(s) fitted — at least one on every storey used as living accommodation.
• Carbon monoxide alarm(s) fitted — in any room with a fixed combustion appliance other than a gas cooker.
• Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet provided — given to the tenant before the tenancy is agreed.
• Legionella risk assessment completed — best-practice check of the water systems, per HSE guidance.
• Landlord insurance in place — not a legal requirement, but usually a mortgage condition, and ordinary home insurance rarely covers a let property.
• Deposit protection certificate — confirming you have the scheme's prescribed information ready.
• Tenancy agreement drafted.
• Furniture meets fire safety regulations — added automatically when the property is furnished or part-furnished.

Most of these require the document to be attached before the item can be ticked. Legionella and the furniture check don't, because neither usually produces a formal certificate.

Worth knowing: The alarm items here confirm alarms are *fitted*. Testing them with the tenant present on the day the tenancy starts is a separate legal duty, and it's tracked separately on the move-in checklist.

Every document can carry an expiry date. Tenarize scans for approaching and passed expiries and raises a notification against the property or tenancy it belongs to, with a link that takes you straight to where you can act on it.

Compliance-flavoured notifications also trigger an email the moment they're first raised, rather than waiting for you to notice the bell. Anything still outstanding is repeated in a weekly digest email on Monday mornings.

The same applies to licences and to supplier certifications — see supplier certifications.

You don't need to wait for a renewal or start anything new. Upload the replacement against the same item from the property page or the tenancy's compliance checklist at any point.

The previous document is archived, not deleted — it's marked as superseded and stays visible under document history. That matters: if you're ever asked to show the property had a valid gas certificate in a particular month, you need the old one as much as the current one.

Record the EPC rating alongside the certificate and Tenarize will flag an F or G rating with a warning badge everywhere that document appears.

Under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards, letting a property rated below E without a registered exemption is unlawful and can attract a fine. The badge is a prompt to either improve the rating or register an exemption — Tenarize doesn't decide which applies to you.

There are two separate things here, and conflating them is the classic way to miss the deadline:

• The compliance checklist item confirms you have the scheme's prescribed information ready to give the tenant. It can be ticked before the tenancy even starts.
• The Deposit Protection card on an active tenancy records what actually happened — the date you received the deposit, which scheme it went into, the scheme reference, and the date it was protected.

Tenarize measures the protection date against the 30-day statutory deadline from receipt, reminds you before it falls due, and reports a status of Protected late (breach) rather than a plain 'protected' if it slipped. That distinction matters if a tenant later challenges it.

Worth knowing: There's also a cap on how much deposit you can take — see the deposit cap.

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 caps a tenancy deposit at five weeks' rent, rising to six weeks where the annual rent is £50,000 or more.

When you set the tenancy terms, Tenarize calculates the cap from the rent you've entered and refuses to save a deposit above it. That check runs on the server, so it applies however the terms are submitted — it isn't a client-side warning you can click past.

Worth knowing: Changing the rent later can bring an already-stored deposit above the cap. Tenarize re-checks the pair together, so a rent reduction that would break the cap is rejected too.

Any document can be marked landlord-only. Mortgage paperwork, correspondence with a solicitor, vetting evidence and your own notes all belong in that category.

The flag is applied when documents are fetched from the database, so a landlord-only document is never included in a response to a tenant request in the first place. Walkthrough room photos are always landlord-only automatically — the tenant only ever sees the finished inventory report.

Once a tenancy reaches Awaiting tenant and the terms are set, Generate and send builds the agreement as a real PDF from the master template, the optional clauses you've chosen, and any free-text addendum you've added.

1. The document goes out for signature. You sign first, then your tenant — the order is fixed.
2. Your tenant is emailed the moment your signature lands and it becomes their turn.
3. When both signatures are in, the executed PDF is stored against the tenancy, the status flips to Active, the start date, rent and deposit are finalised, and the move-in checklist appears.

Both the draft and the fully-executed PDF are kept as separate documents, so there's a record of exactly what was sent as well as what was signed.

Worth knowing: The agreement is an assured periodic tenancy, not an assured shorthold tenancy. ASTs were abolished by the Renters' Rights Act from 1 May 2026, and there is deliberately no fixed-term or length field anywhere in Tenarize.

The generated agreement is not solicitor-reviewed for your specific tenancy, and it doesn't pretend otherwise — a disclaimer appears on page one and again at the signature block, stating that the document is produced automatically from a template and the details entered, and is used entirely at the reader's own risk.

The clauses were written as original prose against reference material — a model periodic tenancy template and the applicable Written Statement regulations — for topic coverage. They are kept current with English law as it changes, but that is not the same thing as advice about your circumstances.

If your letting is unusual — a company let, a lease with restrictive covenants, an arrangement with a guarantor structure you've been advised on — have a solicitor look at it, or use your own agreement instead.

Worth knowing: Nothing in Tenarize, including this FAQ, is legal advice.

Before sending, you choose which optional clauses to include and can add a free-text addendum for anything the template doesn't cover. Mandatory clauses — and the disclaimer — are always present.

Some clauses appear conditionally rather than by choice. A late payment of rent clause is always rendered, worded to match whatever interest rate you've configured (or to say plainly that no interest applies). A shared-building clause covering common parts and superior-lease obligations appears only for property types that genuinely sit inside a larger building.

The clause selections and addendum text are stored against the signature request itself, so the record of what was sent survives even after the template is later updated.

Before signing, a tenant can raise a free-text change request against a pending agreement rather than being forced to either sign or decline. You're emailed and it appears on the tenancy page.

Accepting a request doesn't edit the document by itself — it's a prompt for you to toggle a clause or amend the addendum and press Generate and send again. Re-sending automatically supersedes and revokes the old envelope, so there is never more than one live document to sign.

A tenancy parked at Awaiting tenant can't be deleted — deletion is only available at Vetting or after the tenancy has ended — so there's a dedicated way out.

Revert to compliance puts the tenancy back to the Compliance stage and revokes any open signature request. Re-completing the checklist advances it forward again naturally, at which point you can change the terms, invite a different tenant, or send a revised agreement.

Nothing forces you to use Tenarize's template. Next to Generate and send there's Or activate with your own signed agreement.

• You attach the signed agreement you already have and explicitly confirm it has been signed by both parties.
• The tenancy goes Active immediately — the same start date finalisation and move-in checklist creation as the e-signature route, sharing exactly the same code so the two paths can't drift apart.
• For an imported tenancy, the document comes from the compliance checklist's 'Tenancy agreement drafted' item instead, which stays document-gated for imports.

Worth knowing: This route skips Tenarize's own dual-signature audit trail — there's no record of who signed what and when, because Tenarize never saw it happen. The modal says so before you proceed, and the late-payment charge section will warn you that Tenarize can't vouch for what your own agreement says about interest.

When a property's letting type is By room, Tenarize generates a different document, not a variant of the standard one. The grant clause is scoped to the room and the shared common parts, and the obligations around communal areas are written accordingly.

Everything else works the same way — optional clauses, addendum, landlord-then-tenant signing, and the same disclaimer.

The move-in checklist is created automatically the moment a tenancy goes Active. It records the physical move-in, as opposed to the paperwork that came before it.

• Deposit received — after which the 30-day protection clock starts.
• Property inventory completed — a full condition report, signed by both parties.
• Meter readings recorded — electricity, gas and water, with serial numbers and photos.
• Smoke alarm(s) tested and Carbon monoxide alarm(s) tested — with the tenant present. This is the actual legal duty; the compliance checklist only confirmed the alarms were fitted.
• Full property tour completed — boiler, stopcock, fuse box and anything else they'll need.
• Keys handed over.

Worth knowing: Imported tenancies don't get a move-in checklist. The move-in happened before Tenarize was involved, and generating one would imply Tenarize checked something it never saw.

Rather than producing an inventory in some other app and uploading it, you can walk the property with your phone and build it as you go. The walkthrough screen is deliberately full-screen with no sidebar, so it's usable one-handed.

1. Add a room, write notes on its condition, and add up to eight photos — the photo picker opens the camera directly on a phone.
2. Repeat for each room. You can stop and resume later; nothing is finalised until you finish.
3. Press Finish and Tenarize generates a report PDF, attaches it to the right checklist item, and — for a move-in or check-out inventory — sends it to you and your tenant for e-signature.

It works for three things: the move-in inventory, the check-out inventory, and a periodic inspection. A check-out walkthrough automatically pulls in the move-in report as a baseline and shows matched rooms side by side, before and after.

Worth knowing: The manual route still exists everywhere the walkthrough does — if you'd rather upload one flat document, nothing stops you. The walkthrough is offered alongside it, never instead of it.

It depends on where the document came from, and the difference is technical rather than arbitrary:

• Generated by the walkthrough tool — sent for proper e-signature, landlord then tenant, exactly like the tenancy agreement. Tenarize controls that PDF, so it can place real signature fields in it.
• Uploaded manually — uses the older in-app dual sign-off, where each party confirms in the portal. An arbitrary uploaded file can't reliably carry signature fields, so this path is kept unchanged.

Either way your tenant is emailed when it's their turn, and the fully-signed version replaces the draft on the checklist item.

Worth knowing: If your tenant hasn't claimed their portal account yet, e-signature quietly isn't attempted and the report falls back to the manual sign-off. Nothing errors and nothing is lost.

A tenant reviewing a pending inventory report can raise a structured query rather than only being able to sign or decline. They can point it at the report generally or at one named room.

• Dismiss — you must write a response explaining why. The tenant is emailed it. The document is unchanged.
• Edit and re-send — this reopens the walkthrough, unlocks the room notes for editing, and revokes the outstanding signature request. When you finish it again, the PDF is regenerated and sent afresh to both of you, and the query is marked resolved with an optional note.

Worth knowing: A query can only be marked resolved as a side effect of actually re-sending a corrected report — there's no button to mark it resolved without having changed anything.

Inspections are landlord-only records of a property visit, attached to the tenancy. There are two ways to log one:

• The original quick log — a date, free-text notes and any files you want to attach.
• A walkthrough of type Inspection, which produces a proper room-by-room report PDF.

Set an inspection interval on the tenancy and Tenarize will remind you when the next one falls due. An inspection report is never sent for signature — it's yours.

Meter readings sit against both the property and the specific tenancy, so a reading taken at move-in stays associated with the right tenant even after several lettings.

Record the reading, the meter serial number and a photo of the meter itself. Readings are visible to your tenant read-only — which is the point, since a disputed opening reading is a common source of friction with an energy supplier.

On a room-by-room property, readings are shown per tenancy rather than collapsed into one.

Section 21 no longer exists as a route for any tenancy. Section 8, using statutory grounds, is the only landlord-initiated way to end an assured periodic tenancy.

Tenarize reflects that: 'Landlord notice (Section 21)' is not selectable as an end reason. Tenancies that ended under it before abolition keep a legacy label rather than being silently reinterpreted as something else.

Worth knowing: This is a description of the law as Tenarize implements it, not legal advice about your situation.

When you record a notice, you select the Section 8 grounds you're relying on from a list of sixteen relevant to an ordinary private residential landlord. Each carries its statutory minimum notice period.

Tenarize calculates the earliest valid notice expiry date from the grounds you've selected and pre-fills it, editable if you need a longer period. A Notice card records a served notice independently of actually ending the tenancy, and drives a reminder if the tenant hasn't left by the expiry date.

Worth knowing: Choosing the right ground and serving notice correctly is a legal decision with real consequences if you get it wrong. Tenarize records what you've done and reminds you about dates; it does not advise you on which ground applies.

1. Open the active tenancy and choose End tenancy.
2. Record the actual end date, the reason, any notes, and the Section 8 grounds if the tenancy is ending on a notice you served.
3. The tenancy status becomes Ended and a move-out checklist is created: check-out inventory, final meter readings, keys returned, forwarding address obtained.
4. Complete the check-out inventory — either by uploading one or by running a check-out walkthrough, which pulls in the move-in report as a baseline for a side-by-side comparison.
5. Record the deposit return once it's settled.

Ending a tenancy also stops rent being chargeable through Tenarize — the server refuses a rent charge against a tenancy that isn't Active.

The tenancy carries deposit return fields alongside the protection fields: the date returned, the amount, and a record of any deductions. If a return looks overdue after the tenancy has ended, you'll get a reminder.

Where you're deducting for damage, the check-out inventory is the evidence — which is why the check-out walkthrough puts the move-in and move-out photographs of each room next to each other in one report.

For a full picture of what happened and when, the tenancy audit trail exports as a PDF you can take to a scheme adjudication.

Renew tenancy on an active tenancy ends the current one with a reason of 'Renewed' and creates a fresh, linked tenancy. The chain between them is kept, so the history is traceable.

• Vetting is skipped — you already vetted this tenant.
• Compliance documents that are still valid are carried forward as independent copies, so replacing one later doesn't reach back into the old tenancy's records.
• No move-out checklist is created for the tenancy being renewed — nobody is moving out.
• The new tenancy still needs its own terms and its own fresh agreement, signed again. That isn't a formality; it's a new tenancy.

Worth knowing: An imported tenancy that you renew produces an ordinary, non-imported tenancy. The renewal itself happened inside Tenarize, so the import flag isn't carried forward.

Three one-off setup steps, then it runs:

1. You connect a payout account. Tenarize creates a Stripe account in your name and you complete a short onboarding form — your identity or company details, and the bank account you want rent paid into.
2. Your tenant authorises a Direct Debit. From their portal they're sent to Stripe's own hosted page to enter their sort code and account number and set up a Bacs Direct Debit mandate under the Direct Debit Guarantee.
3. Rent is charged — either by your tenant pressing 'Pay rent now', or automatically each month if they've switched auto-pay on.

The charge is created directly on your own Stripe account. You are the merchant of record, the money settles into your balance and pays out to your bank on Stripe's schedule. Tenarize takes no percentage of rent.

Worth knowing: Rent collection also needs an active Tenarize plan — see what a lapsed subscription does.

Tenarize does not take a percentage of rent. Your subscription is the whole of what you pay Tenarize.

Because the charge is created on your own Stripe account, Stripe bills you its Bacs Direct Debit fee directly, the same way it would any other merchant. That fee comes out on Stripe's side, not through Tenarize, and it appears on your own Stripe statement.

Stripe has to verify whoever is receiving money. What that takes depends on how you let:

• As an individual — your name, date of birth, home address, phone number and email, plus the bank account for payouts.
• As a company — the company's registered details including its Companies House number and a phone number, plus a representative and every director, every owner of 25% or more, and every senior executive as named people with their own dates of birth, addresses and email addresses. You also tick to confirm that the people listed are the complete set.

If Stripe still needs something, the outstanding items are shown by name on the payments page — including which person they relate to — so you can see exactly what's blocking you.

Worth knowing: Phone numbers need to be in international format. The fields start with '+44 ' and a typed '07…' straight after it is corrected automatically.

Bacs Direct Debit is not instant. Stripe confirms success or failure in up to 7 business days when a mandate has just been collected, and around 4 business days once the mandate is already active. Payout to your bank then follows Stripe's own schedule.

During that window the payment shows as Processing, and Tenarize treats the month as paid so nothing double-charges and no arrears entry appears. A notice on the tenancy page reminds you of the timing whenever a tenant has a mandate linked.

Worth knowing: A brand-new mandate also needs 2–3 business days to be lodged with the tenant's bank. A collection attempted inside that window can fail against a mandate that is otherwise perfectly good.

You set the rent due day on the tenancy — either when you set the terms, or at any time afterwards if it needs correcting. Your tenant then switches auto-pay on themselves from their portal.

Auto-pay is the tenant's decision, not yours, because they own the Direct Debit mandate. Once it's on, a daily sweep charges each due tenancy on its due day.

• A tenant can still press Pay rent now with auto-pay on — Tenarize checks whether the month has already been paid rather than the source of the payment, so nobody is double-charged.
• A failed attempt schedules an automatic retry four days later, then another four days after that. Only once those are exhausted does the month count as a real failure.
• Two failed months in a row switches auto-pay off and emails both of you. It switches back on automatically if the tenant then links working bank details.

A failure is never silent.

• You and your tenant are both emailed as soon as Stripe reports it.
• The month goes back to unpaid, so it reappears in the arrears view and can be charged again.
• If it was an auto-pay attempt, a retry is scheduled four days out — which is precisely the window in which your tenant can fix a stale mandate using Change bank details.

If the tenant's bank cancels the mandate entirely, Tenarize is told by Stripe and clears the saved payment method and switches auto-pay off straight away, rather than waiting a month to find out at the next charge.

The Arrears card at the top of the Payments page answers 'who should I be chasing today'. For each entry it shows the property, tenant, days overdue, amount and whether auto-pay is on, and links straight through to the tenancy.

It's deliberately a different thing from the two reporting views next to it: the rent report is a fixed historical date range, and the Late badge on a payment row is a per-payment fact about one charge. Arrears is the live picture.

Worth knowing: A payment still processing counts as paid for arrears purposes, so a Bacs payment in flight doesn't put a tenant on the list.

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 permits interest on late rent, capped at the Bank of England base rate plus 3 percentage points, and only chargeable once the rent is more than 14 days overdue. Arbitrary flat late fees are not permitted.

Turn it on per tenancy and set your annual rate. Tenarize enforces the cap twice: it refuses to save a rate above the current cap, and it recalculates the cap again every time interest accrues or is charged. If the base rate falls after you set your rate, the charge is automatically reduced to the legal maximum rather than continuing at a rate that has since become unlawful — and you're shown a warning so you know.

• The base rate is fetched from the Bank of England's own published figures and refreshed weekly.
• Interest accrues from the due date, and only becomes chargeable once the 14-day threshold is crossed.
• Your tenant settles it as a separate payment, never bundled with rent and never taken by auto-pay.
• You can waive what's accrued for a cycle without turning the charge off.

Worth knowing: The generated tenancy agreement always states the position — your configured rate, or that no interest applies. If you activated the tenancy with your own agreement, Tenarize can't know what yours says, and will warn you accordingly.

The accrued-charge banner on the tenancy has a Waive this charge button. It forgives the amount currently accrued for that billing cycle only — the charge stays configured and starts accruing again as normal on any future late payment.

Tenarize keeps showing the real accrued figure alongside the waiver rather than resetting it to zero, so your own record reads 'accrued but waived' and you can see what you forgave. Your tenant is refused if they try to pay it. The waiver is written to the tenancy audit trail.

Worth knowing: The waiver applies to one cycle. It doesn't carry into next month — a fresh cycle simply isn't covered by it.

This is the one genuinely uncomfortable property of Bacs, and it's worth understanding before you rely on it. Under the Direct Debit Guarantee a payer can ask their bank to reverse a Direct Debit. There is no time limit, and the bank's decision is final — it cannot be appealed by you or by Tenarize, and there is no evidence to submit.

Because rent is charged on your own Stripe account, a reversal is taken from your Stripe balance. If your balance doesn't cover it, Stripe recovers the shortfall from the bank account you linked for payouts. Nothing is owed to Tenarize and nothing is withheld from other rent.

• The payment moves to a Disputed status, which reopens that month as unpaid — so it reappears in arrears and can be charged again.
• You're emailed when it happens, and every reversal is listed in a Reversals panel on the Payments page with the amount, date, reason in plain English, and a link to the tenancy.
• Chasing the rent itself is then between you and your tenant, exactly as it would be with any other unpaid month.

Worth knowing: The Reversals panel is read-only on purpose. Offering a 'challenge this' button on a decision that cannot be challenged would be worse than offering nothing.

On a Direct Debit, the name your tenant's bank shows is the name of whoever collects the payment. Rent is collected through Stripe, so the statement line reads as Stripe — not you, and not Tenarize.

It isn't a setting you can change, and it's the same for every landlord collecting rent through Tenarize.

Your name and the property are carried where they're more use anyway: in the payment reference, and in the rent emails Tenarize sends. Stripe also emails your tenant to confirm the Direct Debit when it's set up, and again ahead of each payment.

Worth knowing: Worth telling your tenant up front — an unexplained 'Stripe' line is the most common reason a first Direct Debit gets queried.

The Payments page has a rent report card. Pick a property or the whole portfolio, pick a date range, and choose PDF or CSV.

• Presets cover this and last month, this and last calendar year, and this and last UK tax year (6 April to 5 April), with the actual dates shown in the label so you can see what you're about to export.
• The PDF shows collected totals, payment and late counts, and an itemised table with late rows highlighted.
• The CSV is machine-readable for importing into accounting software, with ISO dates and plain decimal amounts.

The CSV carries both date initiated and date paid for every payment, deliberately. Which one is right depends on whether your accountant works on the cash basis or the accruals basis, and a Bacs payment started on 2 April but settled on 9 April falls on different sides of the tax year end depending on the answer.

Worth knowing: The equivalent for money going out is the maintenance expense report.

Pricing is by number of properties, not by tenant, and there is no setup fee.

• Starter — £15/month, 1 to 5 properties.
• Growth — £35/month, 6 to 10 properties.
• Portfolio — £75/month, 11 to 20 properties, then £1/month for each property beyond 20.

Paying annually costs 20% less than twelve months at the monthly rate — £144, £336 and £720 a year respectively. You can switch between monthly and annual whenever you like, from the billing page.

There's no per-tenant charge and no commission on rent. See the pricing page for the full comparison.

New accounts get a one-month free trial of the full product. You add a card to start it and nothing is charged until it ends. Stripe emails you before the trial expires, and Tenarize emails you three days out naming the amount that will be charged.

• You can tick Skip the free trial to be billed immediately instead.
• The trial is once per account, not once per subscription — cancelling and resubscribing later doesn't produce a second free month. If you've already had yours, the billing page says so up front and the skip-trial option disappears rather than promising something that won't happen.
• Rent collection specifically needs a plan selected before it switches on, even during the trial.

Two different things can happen, and they aren't the same mechanic:

• Crossing a tier boundary — adding a sixth property on Starter, say. You get an in-app prompt and a 30-day grace period to upgrade yourself, with prorated billing. If you haven't by then, Tenarize moves you up automatically and emails you about it, so rent collection is never interrupted by a limit.
• Going past 20 on Portfolio — not a tier change at all. The extra properties are added to your subscription as a quantity at £1 each, automatically, with no prompt and no grace period.

You can also upgrade ahead of need, or downgrade, at any time — see changing plan.

The billing page shows all three tiers with a switch button on each. Moving in either direction is prorated by Stripe, so you're credited or charged for the remainder of the period rather than paying twice.

The only restriction is arithmetic: you can't downgrade into a tier that doesn't fit your current property count. The button is disabled with an explanation rather than failing after you press it.

Switching between monthly and annual billing is a separate button and can be done independently of changing tier.

Two routes, and which one you get depends on how far in you are.

• Ordinary cancellation — available any time from Manage billing. Your subscription ends per its terms. No refund.
• Cancel with a full refund — self-service, no support ticket, refunding every payment you've made under the subscription. Available once per account, while you're within three months of the subscription starting and have no active tenancy.

The active-tenancy condition exists because refunding and cancelling out from under a live tenancy would leave a tenant's Direct Debit pointing at an account that can no longer collect. End the tenancy first, or use the ordinary cancel.

Worth knowing: The three-month window runs from when the subscription actually started, so changing tier along the way doesn't move it. The refund itself is one per account: if you subscribe again later you can still cancel any time from Manage billing, but a second full refund isn't available.

A card decline doesn't cut you off immediately. Once your subscription leaves trialing or active, a 7-day grace period starts and everything keeps working. You're emailed at the point the grace period begins, naming the date access pauses, and again the day before.

After seven days the app locks. That applies to your tenants too — they're emailed separately, since they lose access to their own documents over a billing relationship they aren't party to.

• The billing page stays reachable throughout, so you can always resubscribe.
• Download my data stays available to both you and your tenants while locked — a full export of everything, including the actual document files.
• Nothing is deleted. Resubscribing restores access to it all.

Every subscription payment produces a finalised invoice, emailed to you automatically and available from Manage billing, which also holds your full payment history and lets you update your card.

The advertised prices are the total you pay. VAT is not currently added on top of them.

Worth knowing: Your Tenarize subscription is an ordinary business expense against your rental income. The maintenance expense report covers property spend, not this.

A maintenance request belongs to a property and, usually, a tenancy. It records who reported it, a category, an urgency and a status of Open, Assigned, Resolved or Cancelled.

• Your tenant reports issues from their portal. You get an in-app notification and an email.
• You can log one yourself from the property page or the maintenance list — a boiler service you've noticed is due, damage found at an inspection.
• Assigning a supplier moves the request to Assigned automatically. That's also the point at which Tenarize stops chasing you about it in the weekly digest, because you've clearly acted on it.

You can record what the work cost and attach the invoice — see tracking repair costs.

Suppliers are yours, not a shared marketplace. Each one records contact details, a category, and — where it matters — their certification body, certification number and expiry date.

You can also search for new suppliers to add by name, area and category. That search uses real Google Places data, showing each result's star rating and review count, so you're picking from actual businesses rather than typing details in blind.

Suppliers can be assigned to maintenance requests and are plotted on the map alongside your properties.

Draw a supplier's coverage area directly on the map. Tenarize then tests each property's position against that shape, so you can see which of your properties a given supplier actually covers — and, more usefully, which have no cover for a category at all.

Worth knowing: A supplier with no catchment drawn is treated as covering everything, so you don't have to draw one for a national firm.

Record the certification body, number and expiry date against a supplier and Tenarize raises a notification when one is missing or approaching expiry, with an immediate email as well as the in-app entry.

This matters more than it looks: only a Gas Safe registered engineer can issue a valid CP12, and a certificate from an engineer whose registration had lapsed is not a valid certificate.

Each maintenance request takes a cost figure (VAT-inclusive) and one attached invoice. Re-uploading replaces the previous file rather than building up a list.

Worth knowing: Both are landlord-only, and enforced on the server: the cost and invoice fields are removed from tenant responses before they're sent. A tenant cannot learn what you paid for a repair by any route.

Getting it all back out in bulk is the expense report.

The Expense reports card on the maintenance page produces a zip rather than a bare document, because an expense's evidence is the invoice and a summary without them is half the deliverable.

• maintenance-expenses.pdf — an itemised table with a short reference against each row.
• invoices/ — the invoice files, each prefixed with the reference that appears in the table.
• maintenance-expenses.csv — optional, for importing into accounting software.

It defaults to the current UK tax year. By default it includes only requests that have a cost recorded, dated by when the work was resolved (or when it was raised, if it's still open). Optional filters narrow by status, category or supplier, or widen it to include unpriced requests as a general maintenance log — and whatever you selected is printed on the PDF itself, so a saved or emailed copy always states its own scope.

Worth knowing: Cancelled requests carrying a cost are included by default. A call-out fee on a job that was later cancelled is still money out.

Files are held in Cloudflare R2 object storage, organised under your landlord account by property, tenancy and category. They're served through authenticated links rather than public URLs — a document link is not guessable and doesn't work for anyone who isn't entitled to it.

You can download any file individually, download all documents for a property or tenancy as a zip, or take a complete account-wide export — see exporting your data.

Document lists lead with the document's type and expiry ('Gas Safety Certificate · Expires 08/06/2027') rather than the filename, so an oddly-named upload can't obscure what it actually is.

Both property and tenancy pages offer a download all documents button. The zip is built on demand from whatever is currently on file and grouped into folders by category.

The same button appears in the deletion confirmation flow, so you always have a way to take a copy before anything is removed. When you request a tenancy deletion, your tenant is separately emailed their own single-use download link — which matters most for a tenant who never claimed a portal account.

Every action worth showing in a dispute is recorded against the tenancy: status changes, checklist completions, document uploads, changes to terms, deposit and notice details, agreement send/sign/decline/activate events, inventory sign-offs, rent and late-fee payment outcomes, auto-pay changes and deletion requests. Each entry records who did it — you, your tenant, the system, the e-signature provider or Stripe — and when.

Download audit trail on the tenancy page generates the PDF fresh each time. The same download is available for every past tenancy from the Audit trails section of the property page, so a property with renewals or several room lets lists each one separately with its date range.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is already live, mandated from 6 April 2026 for qualifying income over £50,000, dropping to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. Qualifying income is gross rent before expenses, so four properties at around £1,100 a month already crosses the first threshold — that's well inside the Starter tier.

MTD's requirement is that figures aren't re-keyed by hand, not that they travel over an API. A downloaded CSV imported into your accounting software is a valid digital link. Tenarize gives you both sides: a rent report CSV for income and a maintenance expense CSV for costs, both with UK tax year presets.

Worth knowing: There's no direct integration with Xero, FreeAgent or QuickBooks yet. The CSV route is deliberately the first step rather than a placeholder for one.

The notification bell carries anything outstanding that needs you. The main types:

• Documents and licences expiring, or missing entirely.
• Deposit protection due, or the 30-day deadline approaching.
• Inventory or check-out inventory awaiting a signature.
• Right to Rent follow-up checks falling due.
• Inspections due, and served notices reaching their expiry date.
• Supplier certifications missing or expiring.
• Rent payments processing, succeeding or failing; auto-pay retries, failures, disablement and re-enablement.
• A tenant raising a maintenance request or querying an inventory report; a tenant requesting a change to a pending agreement.

Every notification carries a link that takes you straight to the exact place you can act on it, often to the specific card on the page rather than just the page.

• Immediately by email — the first time a compliance- or move-in-flavoured notification is raised: an expiring document, a missing licence, deposit protection due, a supplier certification lapsing, a right-to-rent follow-up, an inventory awaiting signature.
• Their own dedicated emails — every rent, auto-pay, agreement, inventory and subscription event.
• A weekly digest — Monday mornings, covering everything still outstanding. If you have nothing outstanding, no email is sent; there is no 'all clear' message.

Worth knowing: The digest covers everything still on file, not just what you haven't clicked. Glancing at a notification isn't the same as dealing with it, and the digest deliberately doesn't treat it as such.

Notifications aren't a to-do list you tick off. Protect the deposit, upload the replacement certificate, sign the inventory, assign a supplier to the maintenance request — and the notification goes on its own.

Opening the bell marks items as read, which changes how they're styled and clears the unread count. It doesn't remove them, and it doesn't take them out of the weekly digest.

Two-factor authentication is opt-in and available on both landlord and tenant accounts, from your profile page. You can enable either method independently, or both:

• Authenticator app — scan a QR code with Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy or similar.
• Email codes — a one-time code sent to your account email at login.
• Backup codes — a set of single-use codes to get in if you lose access to both. Store them somewhere other than the device you authenticate with.

You're emailed whenever two-factor authentication is enabled or disabled on your account, so a change you didn't make doesn't go unnoticed.

Every security-relevant change emails you: changing your password, completing a password reset, changing your login email address, and enabling or disabling two-factor authentication.

Worth knowing: A change of email address notifies the previous address, with the new one partially masked. That's the only mailbox whose owner might not be the person making the change.

Failed logins are rate-limited per account as well as per address — five wrong passwords locks the account for fifteen minutes, and says so rather than repeating a generic error.

Changing your password invalidates every previously-issued session immediately, including any on a device you no longer have. The session you're changing it from stays signed in, so you aren't logged out by your own action.

There's also an explicit Log out of all devices button on your profile, next to the change-password section, if you want to end every session without changing your password.

A completed password reset does the same thing — a reset is itself a signal that an account may have been compromised, so it ends every session rather than just the one.

• Your tenant's bank details never reach Tenarize. The Direct Debit mandate is set up on Stripe's own hosted page. Tenarize only ever sees Stripe identifiers — a customer reference, a payment method reference, a mandate reference.
• Your payout account details pass through, but are not retained. They're collected on the Tenarize onboarding form and forwarded straight to Stripe. Nothing is written to the database, nothing is logged, and nothing is kept in the browser. There are no bank columns on your account record.

Whether the details on file at Stripe are still current is checked against Stripe's own masked values — the last four digits and formatted sort code — not against a local copy.

More detail on how data is held is on the security page.

Every sub-processor is listed with what it does in the Data Processing Agreement. In summary:

• Stripe — payments, both rent collection and your own subscription.
• BoldSign — e-signature for tenancy agreements and inventory reports.
• Google Maps Platform — address autocomplete and supplier search.
• Resend — transactional email.
• Cloudflare R2 — document and photo storage.
• Render — application hosting and the database, in the EU (Frankfurt).
• OpenFreeMap — map tiles. It receives only the map area being viewed, no account or tenant data.

For a landlord using Tenarize as a business, you are the controller of your tenants' data and Tenarize is your processor. That relationship is set out in the DPA, which is incorporated into the Terms of Service rather than needing a separate signature.

Download my data on your profile page gives you a zip containing `export.json` — properties, tenants, tenancies, suppliers and rent payments — plus the real document files, not just links to them.

Files are grouped into one top-level folder per property, named with the property name and postcode so two similarly-named properties in a portfolio don't collide, and by document category underneath.

This export stays available even if your subscription has lapsed and the app is otherwise locked.

Account deletion is on your profile page and is gated behind your password. It is refused, with the exact count, while you still have properties — delete those first, which itself runs through the 30-day deferred deletion so nobody loses records without warning.

Once your properties are gone, deleting the account removes your notifications, suppliers, tenant records and any portal logins those tenants had claimed, along with your own account. Tenarize also does its best to tidy up on Stripe's side: cancelling your subscription, closing your connected account and detaching departing tenants' saved payment methods.

Export first if you want a copy — deletion is not reversible. Tenants deleting their own accounts work differently, because their landlord's compliance records have to survive it.

There's a feedback button fixed to the bottom-right corner of every page in the app, including the login screen. Pick Bug or Feature, write what happened, and send — the page you were on is included automatically.

You can also email info@tenarize.com or use the contact form. Submissions feed directly into the development backlog rather than a ticket queue that goes nowhere.