RentLedger Rent, bills, staff and taxes for whole buildings, one ledger

The owner collects rent and maintenance mostly in cash, calculates sub-metered electricity by hand, pays utilities, staff, vendors and government taxes in person, and keeps records in handwritten books plus Excel. Tenant turnover means repeated KYC, agreement and deposit paperwork, and the CA needs every bill and receipt at year end. Indian landlord apps handle rent but are thin on staff, AMCs and taxes; society apps are built for committees.

Owners of whole rental buildings in India, their admins and caretakers (mobile-first, often Telugu-speaking), and tenants via a portal.

• Phone + password + OTP login for staff; phone + OTP for tenants
• Four roles (Super Admin, Admin, Caretaker, Tenant) with a central permission engine scoped by building
• Append-only audit log on every change (database blocks edits and deletes)
• Records archived, never hard-deleted
• English and Telugu per user, ₹ 1,00,000 grouping, DD-MM-YYYY dates
• Building settings: tax, electricity and water connection numbers, area basis, common-area share
• Maintenance formula: (unit area + common share) × ₹ rate per sq ft + amenity charges
• Electricity rate history with effective-from dates (₹11 per unit default)
• Live dashboard counts: buildings, units, occupancy, vacancies, pending verifications
• Tested billing library: sub-meter charges, anomaly flags, pro-rating
• Installable PWA; Docker Compose deploy with Postgres, S3 storage, Caddy HTTPS and encrypted backups
• Planned (SRS): tenants & KYC vault, leases, monthly billing runs, payments & receipts, expenses, staff/vendor registers, tax calendar, reports

• Login (phone, password, OTP)
• Dashboard (role-aware)
• Settings: buildings, electricity rate, billing defaults
• Building detail / edit (maintenance settings, amenities)
• Users (Super Admin)
• Audit log
• Tenant portal
• Mobile caretaker dashboard (Telugu)

• Next.js 15 (App Router)
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS 4
• shadcn-style UI
• Prisma 6
• PostgreSQL 16
• Auth.js (NextAuth v5)
• next-intl
• Zod
• Vitest
• Docker Compose
• Caddy

Built with AI tools from a plain-language brief. Srini described the problem as an owner ( "I own 3-4 apartments, rented all the flats, currently every month i collect the rent by cash..." ) and asked the AI to "analyze such software/websites that can address all these issues" and, before coding, to "let me know your understanding, ask all of your questions, suggest me of the things that i missed" . The AI returned a market check, personas, modules and a list of missed items (security deposit ledger, police verification, rent hikes, AMC renewals, HRA receipts, TDS), then a signed-off Project Plan & SRS v1.0 with numbered requirements (FR-xx) and phases. Phase 0 code was generated against that SRS, with every permission-matrix row and billing rule unit-tested.

• Highlight 01 — Requirements first: a formal SRS with FR-IDs and phase exit criteria before any code
• Highlight 02 — Money stored as integer paise and percentages as basis points, so totals never drift
• Highlight 03 — Trust by design: append-only audit log and archive-only records for cash-heavy operations
• Highlight 04 — Bilingual from day one (English/Telugu with Noto Sans Telugu) for caretakers who work on phones
• Highlight 05 — Configuration over code: rates, billing day and maintenance formula are settings with history