Rooms, rent and rates
Every room carries its own rent, its own internet charge and its own per-unit rates. The defaults you set during setup fill a new room in for you; anything unusual gets overridden on the room itself.
What a room holds
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Room number | How the room is identified everywhere — on the home screen, on the bill, in the export. Anything you like: 301, A2, Front shop. |
| Tenant name | Optional. Left blank, the room number stands in for it on the bill. |
| Contact | The tenant's handle on LINE, WhatsApp, WeChat, KakaoTalk, Zalo or Telegram, so a finished bill can be sent straight to them. |
| Rent | The fixed monthly amount. It appears on every bill whether or not the meters have been read. |
| Internet | A second fixed monthly charge. Set it to zero for a room that does not pay it. |
| Electricity rate | What you charge per unit. Multiplied by the units the meter shows were used. |
| Water rate | The same, per unit of water. |
| Opening readings | What the two meters read the day the room starts in Doorbook. |
Changing a rate later
Edit the room and change the figure. The new rate applies to the bill you have not closed yet — it does not reach backwards and rewrite months you have already closed, which is exactly what you want: last March's bill should still say what you actually charged last March.
Correcting an opening reading
If you typed an opening figure wrong, edit the room and correct it. Doorbook bills the difference between the two readings, so a wrong opening figure inflates or deflates exactly one month and then corrects itself — but it is far less painful to fix before you close the cycle than after.
The same edit handles a meter that has been replaced or has rolled over past its last digit. Set the opening reading to whatever the new meter starts at.
Grouping rooms into buildings
If you own more than one property, you can group rooms into named buildings so the home screen and the analytics separate them. Creating a building is a Pro feature; every landlord who has not created one simply has a single unnamed group, which is what most people want.
Removing a room
Deleting a room removes it and its history. If the tenant is leaving but the room is not, do not delete it — move the tenant out instead, which keeps the room, its meter readings and its billing history intact and files the tenancy away for the record.
Read next
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.
NextReading 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.