Announcements, documents and the portals

A portal is a small website, separate from the bookkeeping screens, where one person signs in and sees only their own part of the books. BizBooks360 has two: the tenant portal, for the people on a lease, and the owner portal, for the owners of a managed property. Both start at the same sign-in page, headed Tenant and owner portal; what a person sees after signing in depends on the access they were given.¹

Three design decisions shape everything in this chapter.

• Nobody gets in without an invitation. There is no "sign up" button. The office invites a person, the person opens a one-time link and chooses a password, and only then can they sign in. A person decides every invitation: nothing invites anybody by itself.
• The portal reads; the office decides. A tenant can read a balance but not pay it on the site (the portal shows the office's own words on how to pay). An owner can ask for a draw, but the request is a task for the office and no money moves until the office pays it. A request from either portal becomes a task.
• One switch for the books. The portal is either on or off for the whole set of books. Off closes both portals at the next click and keeps every access, so switching it on again lets everyone back in.

The portal's settings live on a card at the bottom of Settings → Property Management → Tasks and inspections → Inspections (the page's menu has two rows: six sections, then the pages of the chosen section), below the inspection lists and the inspection app switch. (The tab's own subtitle says so: "the inspection app switch, and what the tenant and owner portals show, with their on and off switch".) Before Summit's change the card read The portal is off, and Communication → Portal access answered "The portal is off: nobody can sign in, and every access is kept."

1. 1

   Choose the pages

   Pages are the tenant's: Payments, Requests, Announcements, Documents, Contacts and Insurance, all ticked by default. Owner pages appear only on books with a managed property: Ledger, Statements, Financials, Rent roll, Work orders, Documents, Requests, Announcements, Contacts and Tax forms. Untick a page and it disappears from the portal's menu. Summit keeps them all.

2. 2

   Name the contact and write the wording

   Contact is the member whose name the portal shows under Contact us; Summit picks Alex Morgan, the bookkeeper. Show the balance owed on the tenant's home page stays ticked. Welcome text greets every user on the home page; until you type your own, the box shows a grey example that names your books and speaks to tenants and owners. How to pay is shown on the tenant's Balance page, because "no payment is taken on the site".

3. 3

   Click Save portal settings, then Turn the portal on

   The two buttons are separate: saving the wording does not open the portal. Before the switch the card reads The portal is off, "Off closes the portals at the next click and keeps every access.", with the button Turn the portal on. The switch answers "The portal is on. People with access can sign in." and the chip turns green. The same button, now labelled Turn the portal off, closes it again.

A property can differ from the books. Its own Settings tab has a Portal card with Use the books settings ticked; untick it to give that property its own pages, contact and welcome text. The on and off switch stays on the books' card.

Communication → Portal access lists "who may sign in to the tenant and owner portals of these books", with chips for All, Invited, Active and Revoked, a Kind filter (Everyone, Tenants, Owners) and a search by name or e-mail. With the portal on, the page shows a green band and, at the top right, the blue button Invite someone.

1. 1

   Click Invite someone and choose who

   "A tenant needs a lease, or a document waiting for their signature. An owner needs a share in force." The Tenant list holds the primary tenant of each current lease, with the property and unit beside the name; a cosigner or another person on a lease is invited from the lease's Tenants tab instead. Summit chooses Riley Chen (Galveston Building 2A).

2. 2

   Leave E-mail empty, or type another address

   This is "the address they will sign in with. Leave it empty to use the contact's." Riley's contact already holds riley.chen@mail.example, so Summit leaves the box empty. A different address here changes only the sign-in, not the contact.

3. 3

   Choose Hand them the link, then Invite

   Summit's sending switch is off (Chapter 13.6), so By e-mail is greyed out and the dialog says "Sending is off: hand them the link." Invite is the blue button at the right, after Cancel.

1. 4

   Copy the link before you leave the page

   The page answers with a card above the list, Hand this link: "It works once and for seven days. It is shown only now: copy it before you leave this page." The software keeps no copy you can bring back; reloading the list does not show it again. Summit texted the link to Riley's phone.

1. 5

   Invite the owner the same way

   Choose An owner, then the owner. The list holds the active owners, and the dialog's rule applies: "An owner needs a share in force." At Summit that is Dana Whitfield alone. Summit invited Dana by hand to dana.whitfield@mail.example and handed over that link too. (Invite to the portal... in the More menu of the owner's page, Chapter 13.11, opens this same dialog; it leaves that menu once the owner has access.)

Each row of the list ends with a Send a new link button and a More button (...). Send a new link makes a new code: "The old link stops working. It also lets someone who forgot their password back in." Use it when a link expires (the row then says Link expired: send a new one) or is lost. Revoke access..., in the More menu, asks for a reason, such as Moved out, lease ended: the person is signed out at their next click, the record stays, and Restore on a revoked row invites them again with a new link. Each invitation also becomes a row on the Deliveries tab of the documents register (Section 5), recorded as a hand delivery with the event Portal invite, so the register shows who was given a link and when.

Riley opened the link that evening on a phone. The claim page, Set up your portal account, proves the link before it shows anything, then names the person, the landlord and a masked e-mail, so Riley can tell the invitation is meant for them without the page revealing the whole address. Riley chooses a password: "At least 10 characters, and not your e-mail."

Riley's thumb slipped on the second box. The page refused: "The two passwords are not the same." Nothing was created and the link was not spent; both boxes were emptied so the passwords could be typed again from the start.

With the two passwords the same, the page answered "Your account is ready. Sign in below." on the sign-in page. A claim never signs a person in by itself: they sign in once with the new password, which proves they know it. On Portal access Riley's row turned Active with a last sign-in date.

If the same e-mail already has a portal account (a tenant in two of your buildings, or a tenant who is also an owner), the claim page asks for the password they already use and the button reads Add this account; after signing in they choose between their accounts. Five failed sign-ins from one browser stop the form for fifteen minutes.²

After signing in, Riley lands on Home. Its cards summarize the other pages, each with its own link at the right of the card's head, and the menu across the top reaches them. The figure shows Home as it read on November 6, after the rest of this chapter's story.

The $250.00 is the same figure the office sees on Riley's lease. The Balance page lists it line by line: the $275.00 roof repair chargeback (work order WO-0004, Chapter 13.8), the payment that came back from the bank, the $25.00 returned-payment fee, and the $50.00 service-inconvenience credit (both Chapter 13.5): $275.00 + $25.00 − $50.00 = $250.00. (On the evening of November 5, before the credit, Home read $300.00.) Under the lines sits Summit's How to pay text and the sentence "Payments are not taken on this site." The Texts card at the bottom of Home (pin 8) is the tenant's own consent to text messages about the lease: Text me, at the right of the card, records it ("We will text you about your lease."), Do not text me takes it back, and the number on file is changed only by the office.

1. 1

   The tenant fills in New request

   On Requests, Riley chooses what it is about. The list is the books' task categories offered on the portal (Settings → Property Management → Tasks, Chapter 13.10): General inquiry, Maintenance request, Complaint and Other. Subject and Tell us more are required. The tenant may also say whether the office may enter when nobody is home, give the best times, and attach up to five photos. Riley clicks Send request, the button at the right under the form; the page answers "Your request is sent. You can follow it here." and shows it as In progress.

1. 2

   The office finds it on Tasks

   The request became a task at once: on Property Management → Tasks a row Kitchen faucet drips appears with the chips Resident request and Maintenance request, on Unit 2A, assigned here to Alex Morgan. The Kind filter separates Resident requests and Owner requests from the office's own to-dos. Open the row.

2. 3

   Answer in Reply to the requester

   The box From the portal: Riley Chen repeats the request. A reply typed below it is shown to the tenant: "The tenant sees this on the portal. Comments below are not shown to them." Summit typed when the plumber would come and clicked Send the reply. The reply then sits in the box with the writer's name and time, the reply box is empty again for the next message, and the History records Replied to the requester. Above the box, the drawer's only button is Done; Edit, Assign..., Comment..., Make a work order, Block... and Skip... are in its More menu (...).

1. 4

   The tenant reads the reply

   The next time Riley signed in, the request page showed the office's message under Messages. Riley can answer with Add a note, which lands on the same task.

Communication → Announcements holds "one message to every tenant or owner of a property, a group or the books, with a delivery record per person", with Draft, Published and Archived tabs. Its empty page even suggests the example: "Write one for a water shut-off, a holiday schedule or anything everyone must know."

1. 1

   Click New announcement and fill in the form

   Audience: Tenants, which means "the tenant and billing contacts of every lease active on the day"; Owners means the owners with a share in force. Scope: the whole books, one property or a property group; Summit picks One property, Galveston Building. Publish from 11/05/2026 and Publish to 11/10/2026, the day of the work: "A past day archives it by the daily run." The body keeps headings, lists, bold and links.

2. 2

   Click Save draft

   An announcement is a draft until it is published: "Draft saved: Water shut-off ...". A draft can be edited; a published one cannot.

1. 3

   Click Publish and choose the channel

   The dialog counts who it reaches: 2 people, Riley Chen (Unit 2A), Morgan Diaz (Unit 2B), with the reminder that holds and eviction cases are included, because "an announcement like a water shut-off must reach everyone." The channels are E-mail, Mail, Hand delivered and Portal only (no letter, no delivery). With sending off, the dialog opens on Mail and previews the letter under Summit's letterhead.

The mistake: a letter with no approved template

The bookkeeper wanted a letter in each door as well, kept Mail and clicked Publish. The software refused, and nothing was published:

Mail and hand delivery make one letter per person from the template Announcement letter, and the module never prints a letter whose words nobody in the books has approved. Summit's books had no approved version of it. The check runs before anything is written, so no draft letter, no delivery and no half-published announcement was left behind.

The fix had two parts. For tonight, the bookkeeper published the announcement with Portal only; the dialog's summary changed to "Published for the portal only." and the page answered "Published for the portal only: no letter, no delivery." The announcement moved to the Published tab, with Deliveries 0, and appeared under News on Riley's home page and on the Announcements page of the tenant portal; Dana's owner portal, outside the audience, still says "There are no announcements right now." For the paper copy, approving the letter template belongs to Settings → Property Management → Templates (Chapter 13.6); once it is approved, Publish again by mail or by hand records one delivery per tenant, and "a second publish skips the people already delivered."

On the announcement's page the state chip sits beside the title, Publish (which reads Publish again once published) is the blue button, and Archive... is in the More menu (...). An announcement leaves the portal in two ways: Archive... ("Hides it from the lists and the portal. Its deliveries are kept."), or the daily run once its Publish to day has passed. Summit's will archive itself after November 10.

Dana claimed the owner link the same evening, in another browser, exactly as Riley had: the claim page named Dana Whitfield, landlord Summit Outfitters Inc., e-mail d***@mail.example. After signing in, Dana saw an owner's home page; the figure shows it with the welcome text as reworded below.

A second slip: one welcome text for two readers

On Dana's first visit the welcome card held Summit's first text, which spoke to residents and promised a maintenance request; the owner of a house read it too, because the Welcome text on the Portal card is shown on both portals. Nothing refused it: this is the kind of mistake only a reader catches. The bookkeeper reworded it for both readers and saved the card again: "Welcome to the Summit Outfitters Inc. portal. Tenants: check your balance, send a maintenance request and read the building notices. Owners: read your ledger, statements and financials." (A property with its own Portal card can carry its own text.)

The figures on Dana's pages are the same as on Dana's owner page in the office (Chapter 13.11), limited to Dana's share: "Figures are your share of the property."

The ledger adds up: $0.00 + $500.00 + $2,100.00 = $2,600.00. The other owner pages, as Dana saw them on November 5:

Two figures on Dana's pages differ from what the office knows, by design. The $240.00 storm-window bill is not on the ledger, which is on the cash basis, because the bill is not paid yet (Chapter 13.11); and the Statements page shows the statement Summit made, not a live total.

The draw request, as far as it goes today

The home page's Requests card links to it, and at the bottom of Requests, below the ordinary request form (with the same categories as the tenant's), sits Request a draw: "A draw request tells the office. No money moves until they pay it, and it then shows on your ledger." For Dana it shows no form at all, only the rule from Chapter 13.11.

Once Summit has reconciled November's trust bank, on or after December 1 (Chapter 13.12), the card offers a form instead: each property with its amount available today, an amount and a note, and Send draw request. The request is a task for the office, like any other portal request; the portal compares the amount with what is available but pays nothing, and there is no bank field and no online payment.⁴ The office then pays it with the owner's Draw button (Chapter 13.11).

Every statement, letter, notice and report the module generates is written into one register: Communication → Documents, "Every statement, letter and notice the module has generated: numbered, hashed, kept." Each document has a number (ST- for statements, N- for notices, D- for other documents), a kind, the unit or property it concerns, a state (Draft, Final, Sent, Signed, Superseded or Void), how many times it went out, the day it was generated and the day it is kept through. Its page holds a fingerprint, a hash of the PDF, so anyone can later prove that a copy is the document as it was made. On November 5 Summit's register already held documents from earlier chapters, among them ST-000001 for Dana (its row names Owner: Dana Whitfield) and D-000001, the condition report of Riley's unit. Each row ends with Send and Download buttons and a More menu (...).

The second tab, Deliveries, is "Every delivery: what went out, to whom, how, and what came back." E-mail is sent by the system; mail, hand delivery and texts are recorded, because they say what a person did. Summit's two invitations of this chapter are there, as hand deliveries with the event Portal invite. The Deliveries report (Chapter 13.15) prints the same list.

Putting a document on a portal

A document reaches a portal through its own Send card, on the document's page (the blue Send at the top right leads to it), with the channel Portal; the card opens on Mail, so click Portal. The card counts how many of the people on the lease have a sign-in and marks each recipient Has a portal sign-in or No portal sign-in. Sent this way, the document appears on the person's Documents page and the delivery is recorded like any other. The figure shows D-000001 set up for Riley; Summit left it unsent in this chapter.

Files are different from register documents. A file uploaded to a lease's or a property's Files tab (a photo, a signed addendum) has a Share control with Tenant and Owner boxes; a shared file appears on the matching portal's Documents page. The PDF of a register document cannot be shared that way, so that every copy that goes out has a delivery on record: its row says Share it from Documents. Screening reports and applications are never shared.

Settings → Property Management → Documents and messages → Documents sets the retention of each kind of document, in years after it is made. Every kind not set below is 7 years; each kind may differ, and a screening report is kept 2 years "counted from the decision on the application". The column beside each box turns the years into a date: a statement made on 11/06/2026, the day of the picture, is kept through 11/06/2033.

The purge runs every Sunday with the daily run. It removes only the file of a document past its date; "the register row with its number and hash, the ledger and the deposit ledger are never purged." A document on legal hold, on a lease on legal hold or in an open eviction case is kept until that ends, and a document that was sent or signed is not removed by the machine: the Today board (Chapter 13.10) gets one item for a person to decide. Hold..., in the More menu of each row of the register, puts a single document on hold, with a reason (Lift hold ends it). Summit keeps the defaults.⁵

• [x] The Portal card's pages, contact, welcome text and how-to-pay text are set, and the welcome text reads well for tenants and owners alike.
• [x] The portal is switched on, by someone with edit access to Portals and Property settings.
• [x] Each invitation went to the right person and address; a hand link was copied before leaving the page and handed over directly.
• [x] Each new user's row on Portal access reads Active after their first sign-in; expired links were replaced with Send a new link.
• [x] Portal requests are found under Tasks (Kind: Resident requests, Owner requests) and answered with Reply to the requester; work that needs a vendor goes through Make a work order.
• [x] Announcements have the right audience, scope and window; anything that needs written notice also went by mail or by hand.
• [x] Documents meant for a portal user were sent with the Portal channel, so the delivery is on record.
• [x] Retention is set on purpose, and the purge list was read before shortening it.
• [x] When someone moves out or an owner leaves, their access is revoked with a reason.