Residents → /residents
A resident is a person the platform knows about in relation to a unit: a tenant, a unit owner, a next of kin, or another contact. Residents are the identity layer under billing, communications and the tenant portal — a wrong phone number here means a reminder that never arrives, and a missing link to a lease means an invoice with nobody to send it to.
What a resident record holds
| Group | Fields |
|---|---|
| Identity | First name, last name, full name, national ID, passport, birthday, occupation, company |
| Legal identity | Legal type, registered name, KRA PIN — how the resident is billed and filed |
| Contact | Primary phone, primary email, secondary phone, secondary email, other phones, other emails, address |
| Association | Company (organisation), property (branch), block, unit, role, status, start date, end date |
| Extras | Vehicles and licence plates, comments, notes, documents |
Role is the resident's relationship to the unit — tenant or owner are the two roles that carry paying responsibility; other roles (such as next of kin) are contacts only.
Status reflects whether the association is current. Start date and end date bound it, so a resident who moved out remains on the record with a closed period rather than being deleted.
Legal identity
These three fields decide how an invoice is legally addressed and what reaches KRA on an eTIMS filing. They belong to the counterparty an invoice is issued to, not to the person's login.
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Legal type | Individual, company, trust, joint owners, non-profit, government, or other. |
| Registered name | The name the entity is registered under, when that differs from the person's name. |
| KRA PIN | The tax PIN carried onto filings. Validated on entry, and again on the server. |
The resident's summary shows the KRA PIN and registered name, and shows the legal type only when it is something other than an individual.
The residents list
The list is a full grid: filter, sort, group, choose columns, and export.
Columns available include Id, Company, Property, Block, Unit, First/Last/Full name, Email, Phone, Other emails, Other phones, Company, Vehicles, Licence plates, Occupation, National Id, Birthday, Address, Comments, Role, Status, Start date, End date, and the audit columns (Created by / at, Updated by / at).
Adding a resident
Open the form
From Residents, click Add.
Capture identity
Name and national ID are what other staff will search on. Capture the ID at onboarding — it is much harder to collect later.
Capture contact details
Phone and email drive every notification the platform sends. Enter the phone in the format your organisation uses consistently, and use the secondary fields for alternates rather than overwriting the primary.
Set the association
Choose the block and unit, set the role (tenant, owner, contact), and set the start date.
Save
The resident is now selectable when you create or edit a lease.
The duplicate check, and its two strengths
The platform checks whether it already knows this person, and it acts differently depending on how sure it is:
| Match | What happens |
|---|---|
| Strong — the same phone, email or national ID | The save is refused. You pick the existing record, or change what you entered. |
| Name only | The save goes through, and a warning appears on the new record afterwards. |
A name is not enough to refuse on — one organisation holds six live people called Mary — but it is enough to be worth a look. So the advisory warning sits on the record itself, not in a tab, and says what differs as well as what matched: told "same name, different phone" you can see that +254705265086 and +254705365086 are one digit apart, which "same name" alone would never prompt you to check.
Each row on the warning offers Not the same person, which dismisses it, and Open their record, which takes you to the other one so you can decide.
Importing many residents at once
Use Import residents from the list, or Admin → Bulk Upload with the Residents type. The importer maps your spreadsheet columns to resident fields, validates before committing, and records the run in the upload history with a per-row outcome (created / skipped / failed and why). See Bulk upload.
Viewing and editing a resident
Open a resident to see their profile: contact information, address, birthday, occupation, company, licence plates, comments, notes and documents.
From the profile you can:
- Edit identity and contact details.
- Manage documents — attach IDs, signed agreements, KYC files.
- See linked leases and units — current and historical.
- Open the tenant's statement to see what they have been billed and what they have paid.
Residents and leases
- A lease names the resident who is responsible for it. Billing, statements and collections all resolve the person through the lease.
- A resident can be linked to several leases — a current one and historical ones, or several units at once.
- Ending a tenancy does not delete the resident. Set the end date and status; the history stays intact so statements and audits remain correct.
See Managing leases for the lease side of this relationship.
When a resident is also a landlord
A resident who owns a unit as well as renting one can be promoted from the residents grid: use the Make owner row action. It appears on residents whose role already reads as an owner.
The action is additive — the resident keeps their existing role and tenancy, and gains an owner record on top. From there they behave like any other owner: see Owners & landlords.
Residents and the tenant portal
Residents with a valid email can be given access to the tenant portal, where they see their own bills and statements, pay, raise service requests, and book amenities. Portal access is per person, and it inherits the units they are associated with — so a resident who holds two units sees both.
Screening
Where enabled, the resident record carries a screening section used during onboarding to record background and reference checks before a lease is signed. It sits alongside lease applications, which handle the wider intake workflow.
Common problems
| Symptom | Cause and fix |
|---|---|
| Resident does not appear in the lease form | The resident is in a different branch, or has no active association. Check branch context and status. |
| SMS reminders are not arriving | The phone number format is wrong or the number changed. Check the profile, then confirm the outcome in the Delivery Tracker. |
| The same person appears twice | Two records were created (often one by import, one by hand). Merge by moving the association to the correct record and closing the duplicate — do not delete a record that has billing history. |
| Statement shows units the resident no longer holds | The old association has no end date. Set it, and the historical period closes cleanly. |