Everything Doorbook does, in order
Doorbook is a rent ledger for a landlord who reads their own meters. This manual follows the same order as the work: set the building up once, then walk it once a month. Start at the top if the app is new to you; jump straight in if something specific is not behaving.
Set it up once
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Set the building up once
Set up your building in Doorbook: choose how you get paid, set your default electricity and water rates, and add your first room with its opening meter readings.
5 min read -
Bringing an existing building in
Move an existing building into Doorbook mid-year: today's meter readings as the baseline, arrears on the first bill, and what history can be back-filled.
4 min read -
Rooms, rent and rates
How to add rooms in Doorbook, set rent, internet and per-unit electricity and water rates, override the defaults for one room, and group rooms into buildings.
4 min read -
More than one property
Name buildings in Doorbook to separate rooms on the home screen and in analytics. Creating one is Pro; without one, every room sits in a single implicit group.
3 min read -
Tenants, leases and documents
Moving a tenant in and out in Doorbook, recording lease start and end dates, photographing the signed lease, and the warning before a lease expires.
5 min read
The monthly round
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Reading the meters
How Doorbook turns meter readings into billable units: type the counter value on the meter face, and the app subtracts last month's figure and multiplies by your rate.
5 min read -
How the bill is worked out
What goes into a Doorbook bill: rent, internet, metered electricity and water, a one-off discount or surcharge, and anything left unpaid from last month.
5 min read -
Getting paid
Doorbook puts a payment QR on every bill: PromptPay in Thailand, VietQR in Vietnam, KHQR in Cambodia, or a photograph of your own bank QR anywhere else.
4 min read -
Money that has not arrived
How Doorbook tracks money still owed: partial payments, outstanding balances, brought-forward lines after closing the month, and why you mark payments yourself.
4 min read -
Closing the month
Closing a cycle in Doorbook files the month into history, turns this month's meter readings into next month's baseline and carries any unpaid balance forward.
5 min read
What it keeps
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What the numbers tell you
What Doorbook's analytics show: billed against collected each month, collection rate, which rooms use the most power, and each room's own 24-month history.
4 min read -
On a bigger screen
Doorbook on iPad and Apple Silicon Mac: the sidebar layout, keyboard shortcuts for metering, and how your book syncs between your own devices through iCloud.
3 min read -
Sync, backup and a new phone
How Doorbook syncs between your own devices, what Pro's iCloud backup keeps, and how to restore your rooms and lease scans onto a new iPhone.
5 min read -
Export to Excel
Doorbook Pro exports the whole book as one .xlsx file: the room roster, this month's bills, every closed month per room, the cycle summary and past tenants.
3 min read
Everything else
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Free, Pro, and managing the subscription
Doorbook is free for up to 18 rooms. Pro adds unlimited rooms, buildings, iCloud backup with 10 restore points, and Excel export. Managed entirely through Apple.
4 min read -
Language and currency
Change Doorbook's language without reinstalling, pick a currency independently, and see which messenger the app suggests for sending bills in each language.
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When something is not right
Answers to the things that go wrong in Doorbook: a reading it will not accept, a bill that looks wrong, rooms missing on a second device, and restoring after a lost phone.
5 min read -
Where everything lives
No Doorbook server and no account — where rooms, bills and lease scans live, what syncs through iCloud, and why a lost phone with no backup cannot be recovered.
4 min read