A property management app for landlords keeps the evidence in the same place as the money.
A property management app for landlords earns its place on the day somebody disagrees with you. The lease says one thing, the tenant remembers another, and the only thing that settles it is a dated record with a photograph attached. Most landlord software is sold as a dashboard. What small landlords need is closer to a filing cabinet a phone can add to while standing in a hallway. The same records seen from the other side of the door produce tenant portal apps, which is why the two are usually built together.
This page covers the records a landlord app has to hold apart, what California now demands in photographs around a security deposit, why the tax treatment of a repair is not the tax treatment of an improvement, and what a maintenance request has to carry to be worth anything a year later.
See what a deposit deduction needsThe short version
Keep the unit, the tenancy and the money apart, and keep the photograph with the job.
Three records do most of the work. The unit, which outlives everybody. The tenancy, which is one set of people, one rent and one set of dates. And the ledger, which is a list of dated charges and payments, never a single balance you overwrite. Flatten those into one row per tenant and the app stops being able to answer a question about last year.
Everything else hangs off those three: documents on the tenancy, maintenance jobs on the unit, photographs on the job. The test of a rental property management app is not how it looks in month one. It is whether, eighteen months later, it can show what the kitchen looked like before the repair and what the repair cost.
A unit is not a tenancy, and a tenancy is not a tenant
Start with what does not change. A unit has an address, a meter, a boiler with a service date and a history that carries across tenants. A tenancy has a start, an end, a rent, a deposit and the people who signed. A person can appear in three tenancies across six years. Store the rent on the unit instead of the tenancy and the first rent increase quietly rewrites last year.
The ledger is what people get wrong first. Keep charges and payments as separate dated rows, each with an amount and a reason, and work the balance out from them. A single balance field can tell you that a tenant is behind. It cannot tell you why the number moved in March, and that is always the question that matters.
One more split matters if some of the units are not yours. Owners want statements and photographs of work done, not your job queue, and that is a different product sitting on the same data: a client portal app shows one owner only what belongs to them. Build the landlord side first and treat owner reporting as a read of the same records rather than a second set of them.
The deposit is a deadline with an evidence list attached
Deposit rules are state law and they are specific. In California, no later than 21 calendar days after the tenant has vacated, the landlord has to furnish an itemized statement showing the basis for and the amount of any security received and its disposition, and return whatever is left. Where the deduction is for repairs or cleaning, copies of the documents showing the charges go with it.
California also wrote photographs into the statute. Beginning April 1, 2025, the landlord has to photograph the unit within a reasonable time after possession comes back, before any repairs or cleaning that will be deducted from the deposit, and again after that work is done. For tenancies that begin on or after July 1, 2025, the landlord also has to photograph the unit immediately before, or at the inception of, the tenancy. Those photographs go to the tenant with a written explanation when a deduction is claimed.
Your state will set a different deadline and may say nothing at all about photographs, so read your own statute before you design the screen. The design consequence is the same everywhere. The app has to hold sets of photographs taken at four separate moments, each tied to a unit and a tenancy, with a date nobody typed in by hand. A camera roll cannot do that. It sorts by when the button was pressed, not by which unit you were standing in.
California Civil Code 1950.5, security deposits
Try it
What a deposit deduction has to carry
California rules. Set the deposit, the days since the tenant moved out, and what you plan to withhold.
Return $1330 of $1800
12 days left of the 21. Anything withheld for cleaning or repair travels with the photographs and a copy of the charge.
A repair and an improvement are not the same money
Rental income and expenses land on Schedule E of Form 1040, and where a cost goes depends on what it was. IRS Publication 527 is blunt about the record keeping. Separate the costs of repairs and improvements, and keep accurate records, because you will need the cost of improvements when you sell or depreciate the property.
The dividing line has three named tests. An improvement is a betterment, which covers fixing a pre-existing defect, enlarging the property or increasing its capacity, strength or quality. Or a restoration, such as replacing a substantial structural part or rebuilding to a like-new condition. Or an adaptation, altering the property to a use that is not consistent with its ordinary use when you began renting it. A repair keeps the thing working. An improvement changes what the thing is.
Under the General Depreciation System, residential rental property carries a recovery period of 27.5 years, so an improvement is not one awkward month in the accounts, it is a figure you carry for decades. The design point for an app for landlords is small and dull: every spend needs a property, a date, an amount, a document and a repair or improvement flag picked at the time by the person who was there. Sorting that out in April, from a folder of photographs of receipts, is where deductions go missing.
A maintenance request without a photograph is just a note
A maintenance job has a shape: the unit, who reported it, when, what they said, a photograph, a status, who is doing it, what it cost, and a photograph afterwards. Most of that gets typed in the first thirty seconds by somebody standing in front of the problem. Ask for it later, from memory, and you get a line that says leak in bathroom, with nothing attached.
The photograph is the part homegrown tools drop. It has to belong to the job rather than to a phone, and it has to keep the date it was taken. Two photographs per job, before and after, is also exactly what the deposit statute above expects of repair work, so one feature covers two obligations. A scheduled walk through of a whole unit is a different record with its own template and its own history, closer to a property inspection app than to a repair ticket.
Can a builder like this actually keep a photo with the record? Here is what we saw, and what we did not. The documentation for Newly Backend lists file storage for things like photos and uploads, next to a Postgres database for each environment, and says apps keep their data on the device until they need accounts or sharing. We read that in the docs. We did not build a test app and watch a photograph travel from a camera to a maintenance row, so treat the end to end flow as documented rather than witnessed.
Two related things those docs do state plainly, and both change a build plan. Adding a native package that is not already installed, or changing app permissions, triggers a fresh native build. And there is no background queue, so a nightly job that emails rent reminders is not something you get for free. Keep the status list short and honest as well: reported, scheduled, done, with a date on every change.
What each approach gives a landlord with a handful of units
| Option | Photos stay with the record | Ledger per unit | Tenant can report a fault | Cost as units are added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet and the camera roll | No | one tab per unit | No | free |
| Paper file and a wall calendar | only if printed | Yes | No | free |
| Off-the-shelf property software | Yes | Yes | Yes | per unit, per month |
| Accounting software on its own | No | Yes | No | flat monthly |
| An app you build yourself | Yes | Yes | Yes | flat monthly |
Building one around your own units
Off-the-shelf property software is priced per unit per month and shaped for portfolios with staff. With four units you pay for owner portals, work order routing and accounting integrations you will never open, and you still cannot record the two or three rules that actually govern your week: the tenant who pays every two weeks, the unit where the water is split with next door, the contractor who only answers on Fridays.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe the app, including those rules, and it writes a real React Native and Expo project you own, runs it on a cloud iPhone or Android simulator while it builds, and uploads iOS builds to TestFlight through your own Apple Developer account. Android goes to Google Play internal testing from the Deploy tab, or out as a standalone APK you install directly. It costs $25 a month, there is no free plan, and there are no built-in payments, so rent collection stays wherever it is today. To take the code out, install the CLI with npm i -g @newly/cli and run newly pull with your project id.
Do not start with screens. Start with the three records and how they point at each other, because storing the tenant and unit records in a shape you can query later is the decision every screen inherits. Get that wrong and no amount of interface work rescues it.
Questions landlords ask about these apps
Four things, kept apart. The unit, with its address, meter and service history. The tenancy, with its dates, rent, deposit and the people who signed. The ledger, as dated charges and payments rather than one running balance. And the jobs, each with photographs before and after, a cost and a document. Everything a landlord is ever asked to prove comes out of those four.
Describe the units you actually own
Write down the rules your properties really run on, including the tenant who pays every two weeks and the boiler nobody can find, and build the app around them.
Start building