RentLedger Rent, bills, staff and taxes for whole buildings, one ledger

01The problem

The owner collects rent and maintenance mostly in cash, calculates sub-metered electricity by hand, pays utilities, staff, vendors and government taxes in person, and keeps records in handwritten books plus Excel. Tenant turnover means repeated KYC, agreement and deposit paperwork, and the CA needs every bill and receipt at year end. Indian landlord apps handle rent but are thin on staff, AMCs and taxes; society apps are built for committees.

02Who it is for

Owners of whole rental buildings in India, their admins and caretakers (mobile-first, often Telugu-speaking), and tenants via a portal.

03Features

• Phone + password + OTP login for staff; phone + OTP for tenants
• Four roles (Super Admin, Admin, Caretaker, Tenant) with a central permission engine scoped by building
• Append-only audit log on every change (database blocks edits and deletes)
• Records archived, never hard-deleted
• English and Telugu per user, ₹ 1,00,000 grouping, DD-MM-YYYY dates
• Building settings: tax, electricity and water connection numbers, area basis, common-area share
• Maintenance formula: (unit area + common share) × ₹ rate per sq ft + amenity charges
• Electricity rate history with effective-from dates (₹11 per unit default)
• Live dashboard counts: buildings, units, occupancy, vacancies, pending verifications
• Tested billing library: sub-meter charges, anomaly flags, pro-rating
• Installable PWA; Docker Compose deploy with Postgres, S3 storage, Caddy HTTPS and encrypted backups
• Planned (SRS): tenants & KYC vault, leases, monthly billing runs, payments & receipts, expenses, staff/vendor registers, tax calendar, reports

04Pages & screens

• Login (phone, password, OTP)
• Dashboard (role-aware)
• Settings: buildings, electricity rate, billing defaults
• Building detail / edit (maintenance settings, amenities)
• Users (Super Admin)
• Audit log
• Tenant portal
• Mobile caretaker dashboard (Telugu)

05Stack

06How I built it with AI

Built with AI tools from a plain-language brief. Srini described the problem as an owner (I own 3-4 apartments, rented all the flats, currently every month i collect the rent by cash...) and asked the AI to analyze such software/websites that can address all these issues and, before coding, to let me know your understanding, ask all of your questions, suggest me of the things that i missed. The AI returned a market check, personas, modules and a list of missed items (security deposit ledger, police verification, rent hikes, AMC renewals, HRA receipts, TDS), then a signed-off Project Plan & SRS v1.0 with numbered requirements (FR-xx) and phases. Phase 0 code was generated against that SRS, with every permission-matrix row and billing rule unit-tested.

07Design highlights

08Gallery

Screens from the working build; click any image to zoom. Names, contacts and figures in the screens are demo content.