Deposits
Held for the tenancy, carried across on a room change, settled at the end.
A deposit is collected at booking and held for the length of the tenancy. It is refundable — it belongs to the resident until settlement decides otherwise. It is not revenue while it is held, and it is not a pot to bill against during the stay.
A penalty is a charge, not a deposit deduction. It is billed to the resident and payable like anything else. If it is still unpaid at settlement it is netted off then — but until that moment it is a debt, not a deduction, and treating the two as interchangeable is how a resident ends up billed twice for one thing.
The held balance
At any moment the deposit balance is: what was collected, minus what has already been settled or transferred away, adjusted for anything the resident still owes or has overpaid.
Three things feed that last part, and each is counted exactly once:
- Unpaid rent and charges reduce the effective balance.
- Overpayments increase it.
- An arrears charge that collects an earlier month's shortfall neutralises that earlier month's own shortfall, so the same debt does not appear twice — once as the missed month and again as the charge chasing it. See The ledger.
The balance is always computed from the ledger, never stored as a field. A stored balance is a number that can quietly stop agreeing with the entries it was supposed to summarise.
Who has one
Not every occupant does. Rows imported from an external rent roll, owner residents, and short-stay guests booked through a check-in link are not residential deposit holders, and are deliberately excluded from deposit reporting. A large negative balance appearing against one of these is a classification problem, not a money problem.
An onboarding resident whose move-in invoice is not yet paid is also excluded, so that a not-yet-arrived resident does not show as deeply in debt.
Room changes and occupant changes
When a resident moves to another room, or the occupancy of a reservation changes, the deposit moves with them. It is transferred onto the new reservation as a paper transfer: the old reservation's held deposit closes, the new one opens, and no cash moves.
This matters when reading a balance. The old reservation showing no held deposit is correct — it was carried across, not refunded. The transfer is visible as its own ledger line on both sides.
Settlement
At move-out the deposit is settled: legitimate deductions are applied, anything the resident still owes is netted off, and the remainder is refunded. The move-out report is where that calculation is shown and agreed. See Move-out penalties for what may and may not be deducted.
Settlement and refund are separate steps on purpose. A settled figure is the agreed number; the refund is the act of sending it. Only a reservation whose refund has actually been sent counts as refunded — a settlement concluding that nothing is owed back is a zero refund, not a sent one.
Deposit forfeit
Forfeit is retired. New move-out notices never forfeit a deposit; the value is always zero. The field and its historical display remain so that old records still read correctly, but it is not a lever to reach for. If a resident owes money at move-out, that is a charge, netted at settlement — which is the same answer as everywhere else on this page.
See also The ledger and The tenancy lifecycle.