Contract dates
Four different dates, and which one drives which decision.
A tenancy carries several dates that are easy to conflate and that drive different things. Getting the wrong one is the most common cause of an invoice that looks inexplicable.
| Date | What it is | What it drives |
|---|---|---|
| Move-in date | Contract start. | Billing, occupancy, the contract itself. |
| Override move-in date | A corrected contract start. | Everything the move-in date drives. It replaces it. |
| Arrival date | When the resident physically turns up, if that differs. | The condition-report window and its reminders, the calendar event, admin display. Never billing. |
| Contract end date | When the agreed term finishes. | Notice period, penalties, when month-to-month begins. |
| Move-out date | When they actually leave. | The final month's proration, settlement. |
Override move-in date is financial
The override move-in date is not a display convenience. Wherever the system asks "when did this tenancy start?", the answer is the override if one is set, otherwise the move-in date. Changing it changes what is billed.
Treat it like editing an amount, because that is what it does.
Arrival date is not financial
The opposite is true of the arrival date. A resident whose contract starts on the 1st but who physically lands on the 20th still owes rent from the 1st — the room was theirs.
What the arrival date does change is the move-in condition report: someone who walks in three weeks late must document the room they actually walked into, not the room as it was on the contract start. So the report window and its two reminder emails anchor on arrival.
Billing, occupancy and the e-signature flow never read it.
The move-in invoice is not one month
This surprises people regularly, and it is deliberate.
A resident moving in after the 15th gets a move-in invoice that bundles two periods: the partial move-in month and the whole month after it. Regular monthly rent then starts a month later than you might expect.
So for such a resident:
- There is no separate rent entry for the move-in month, or the one after it.
- The first ordinary rent entry appears in the third month.
- A recurring discount applies across both bundled periods. Reading only the move-in month understates a mid-month campaign discount by its entire second slice.
Before concluding that a resident's early months are under-billed, check what the move-in invoice actually covered. A missing rent row in month two is usually the invoice having already collected it.
Contract end, and what comes after
The contract end date decides the notice period and whether leaving counts as an early exit. It does not end the tenancy on its own — a resident who stays rolls into month to month.
There is an override for contract end too, and it behaves like the move-in override: it replaces the value everywhere.
The rule of thumb
Never classify a month by doing arithmetic on its amount. "This is less than a full month, so it must be a proration" is wrong often enough to cause real billing errors — a short month can be a prorated final month, a prorated first month, a post-contract-end stub, or a month with a discount. Read the dates and the invoice coverage, not the number.
See also Proration, Pricing snapshots and The tenancy lifecycle.