Rentara - Rental Property Manager

The problem

If you manage a handful of rental units, you're stuck between two bad options. Spreadsheets don't tell you who's late, when a lease expires, or which unit is empty — and they certainly don't post rent charges, compute late fees, answer tenants' "what do I owe?" calls, or produce the monthly statement your property's owner wants. Hosted property-management platforms do all of that — for a recurring monthly fee, often priced per unit.

What Rentara does

Rentara is a self-hosted PHP web app you install once on your own server or shared hosting. It runs the *operations* of a portfolio you already manage — and as of 1.1 it automates the three most tedious parts:

- Automatic rent posting — no cron needed. Each lease bills itself, monthly or quarterly, anchored to its start day (a lease that starts on the 15th is due on the 15th). Missing periods post the moment you open the dashboard, rent roll or a lease. Every posting is keyed on lease + period and backed by a database unique index, so re-runs and concurrent requests can never double-post. Clear ledger labels: "Rent 2026-07". - Automatic late fees. Set a grace period plus a flat fee and/or a percentage of overdue rent. One labelled fee ("Late fee — Rent 2026-06") posts per overdue period — exactly once, ever, even if the tenant pays months later. - Tenant self-service portal. Give each tenancy a private link (`/t/{token}`) — no tenant accounts or passwords. The tenant sees their lease terms, full ledger and current balance, and can submit maintenance requests with an optional photo. Requests land in your maintenance queue flagged "tenant-submitted". Regenerate or revoke any link in one click; the public form is protected by a honeypot and a per-IP rate limit. - Owner statements. A printable (print → save as PDF) income statement per property or per owner for any date range: rent collected, late fees, maintenance costs, net to owner — plus CSV export. Maintenance costs flow in automatically from the cost you record on resolved tickets. - Per-lease document storage. Keep the signed lease PDF, inspection reports and photos attached to the lease. Uploads are content-verified (never trusted by file extension), stored under random names, and served only to logged-in staff.

Plus the full operations core:

- Dashboard — occupancy %, collected vs. due, overdue balance, open tickets (tenant-submitted highlighted), leases expiring soon. - Properties & units (with owner name/email per property), tenants, and leases (create / renew / end, auto occupancy flips, active / upcoming / ended). - Rent roll with arrears the instant a due date passes, and an arrears report with days overdue and tenant contact details. - Maintenance tickets: open → in progress → resolved, priority, assignment, cost. - CSV exports throughout (rent roll, arrears, statements), formula-injection-safe.

Your data lives in your database on your server. No monthly fee, no per-unit pricing.

Who this is for

- Independent landlords and small property managers with roughly 5–50 units - Managers who run units *for owners* and owe them a monthly statement - Anyone tracking rent in spreadsheets who wants a real tool without a subscription

Who this is NOT for

- Landlords who need to *market* units and screen new applicants (Rentara runs the units you already manage — it is not a listings portal) - Full accounting / general-ledger needs (export CSV and import into your accounting tool) - Online rent collection / payment processing (Rentara records payments; it doesn't collect them) - Very large portfolios (hundreds of units) without a custom setup

Objections answered

"How is this different from a hosted property-management platform?" Hosted platforms are excellent and full-featured — and billed monthly, often per unit. Rentara is a one-time purchase you host yourself, focused on what small landlords touch daily: the ledger, the tenants, the owners, the maintenance queue. *(If you compare against a specific platform in your marketing, verify its current pricing at the source first.)*

"Do my tenants need accounts?" No. Each lease gets a private link. Tenants bookmark it, see their own balance and ledger, and submit maintenance requests. You can rotate or kill any link instantly.

"Will this run on my hosting?" Almost certainly. Rentara needs PHP 8+ with PDO — present on virtually all cPanel/Plesk hosts — and either MySQL or SQLite. Installation is a two-minute web installer.

"I already installed 1.0 — do I lose data?" No. Drop the new files over the old install (keep `config.php` and `data/`); the database upgrades itself in place on the next page load. Existing leases stay on manual billing until you enable auto-billing per lease, so nothing back-posts by surprise.

"Is my data safe?" Everything is stored in your own database on your own server. Config and data directories are `.htaccess`-protected, every form is CSRF-protected, uploads are content-verified and served with `nosniff`, and the public portal is rate-limited.

Skeptic FAQ

"I could just use a spreadsheet." You could — until you're re-typing the same rent rows every month, working out late fees by hand, fielding "what do I owe?" calls, and assembling owner statements from three tabs. Rentara does all four automatically.

"What happens if the seller disappears?" You own the full source code and it runs on your server. There's no cloud dependency to switch off.

Honest limitations

Features

• Properties, units, tenants and lease tracking in one register
• Auto-posted monthly rent with configurable late fees
• Rent roll with running balances per lease
• Tenant portal via private token links - no tenant accounts needed
• Owner statements and maintenance tracking with tenant-visible flags
• Branded printable statements and CSV exports
• Installable mobile app (PWA), dark mode
• REST API with OpenAPI spec, webhooks, 2FA, roles + audit trail
• MCP endpoint - works with AI assistants under the same role guards

Requirements

PHP 8.0 - 8.4, MySQL 5.7+/MariaDB (SQLite also supported), Apache or Nginx. Runs on ordinary cPanel/Plesk shared hosting. No Composer, no Node, no build step.

Instructions

Upload the zip and extract it on your host, then open the site in a browser - a 2-minute web installer asks for database credentials and creates your admin account. QUICKSTART.txt and a full README ship in the package. An offline test suite is included so you can verify the build.