Leasing & Tenants
Tenants
A tenant is the person you lease a unit to. The tenant record holds their contact details, links to all of their leases, and powers their resident portal login. You'll find tenants under Tenants in the main navigation, at /admin/tenants.
The Tenants list
The Tenants page shows every active tenant with their unit/property, lease count, monthly rent (tenant portion), and outstanding balance. Three summary stats sit at the top:
- Total tenants — all active tenants.
- Prospective tenants — tenants with no active lease yet.
- Tenants with portal access — tenants who have a portal login.
You can search by name, email, phone, property address or unit number, and filter by portal status (Active, Invited, Not Invited), monthly rent range, and outstanding balance.
Add a tenant
- Click Add tenant (or create one inline while creating a lease).
- Enter the tenant's name, email, and optionally phone and household members.
- Choose whether to send the portal invitation now.
- Save.
Note
Email is required when adding a tenant. It's the key that links the tenant to their portal account, so it has to be unique — you can't reuse an email that already belongs to another tenant or user.
Tenants are shared across organizations
A tenant record is global. When you add a tenant whose email already exists, RentAxis links the existing tenant to your organization instead of creating a duplicate — no data is overwritten. If they're already in your organization, you're simply taken to their page.
Edit a tenant
Use the Edit tenant dialog (available from the Tenants list and a tenant's page) to update details.
- Name and phone can always be edited.
- Email can only be set while it's still blank. Once an email is saved it's locked — the dialog disables the field with the note "Email can't be changed once set — it's the tenant's portal login."
Important
The email lock protects the shared record: the same tenant may be linked to several organizations, and the email is their portal login. Filling in a blank email is mainly for tenants imported from QuickBooks by name only — adding the email closes that gap and lets you invite them.
When you add an email to a tenant that didn't have one, you can tick Send portal invitation now in the same step to invite them right away.
Portal invitations
The resident portal lets a tenant view their lease, see invoices, and pay rent online.
- When creating a tenant, leave Send invitation checked to email them an invite immediately.
- A tenant's portal status shows as Not Invited, Invited (invitation sent, not yet accepted), or Active (account created).
- If an invitation wasn't sent or expired, use Resend invitation from the tenant's page. Invitations expire after 7 days.
Tip
Uncheck Send invitation when importing historical tenants you don't want to give portal logins to. You can always add an email and invite them later.
A tenant's page
Open a tenant to see everything tied to them:
- Header stats — properties, units, total monthly rent, outstanding balance, security deposit and lease status.
- Leases — every lease (active and past) with unit, term, duration, rent, lease type and program.
- Invoices — the tenant's rent invoices (tenant portion) with status and balance.
- Payment statistics — totals paid, paid on time, partial and late payments.
- Documents — files attached to the tenant or a specific lease.
- Activity log — a history of changes on the record.
Removing and archiving tenants
Deleting a tenant detaches them from your organization rather than wiping the global record. If the tenant no longer belongs to any organization, the record is then soft-deleted. Removed tenants appear under Tenants → Archive.