Every week someone rings us about a tenant ledger. An owner who has read “part payment” on their statement and thinks the tenant is short. A solicitor doing a settlement adjustment who wants to know which of two dates to use. A property manager looking at an arrears report that says seven days, for a tenant who is $20 behind.
They’re all asking a fair question. Paid-to dates, effective paid-to dates, part payments and rent cycles are simple once you see how they fit together. The trouble is that nobody ever sits you down and explains them. So here it is in one place, with worked examples. Send it to an owner if it helps.
The short version
- Rent is charged in fixed periods, and the tenancy start date sets where each one begins and ends. Paying on a different day doesn’t move the period.
- The paid-to date is the last day the tenant has paid for in full. It moves a whole period at a time, and it isn’t the date they last paid.
- A part payment is money that didn’t complete a period. It’s a credit towards the next one, not a shortfall.
- The effective paid-to date turns that credit into days at the daily rate. Use it for settlement adjustments and before you chase arrears.
- A calendar month is not four weeks. Weekly rent × 52 ÷ 12 is the monthly figure.
Rent runs in periods, and the periods don’t move
Rent is charged in blocks of time, and the tenancy start date fixes where every block begins and ends.
Say a weekly lease started on Tuesday 1 September 2026. The rent weeks run Tuesday to Monday for the life of the tenancy: 1 to 7 September, 8 to 14, 15 to 21, and on it goes. Each week’s rent falls due on the Tuesday. A monthly tenancy that started on the 15th runs from the 15th to the 14th, every month. That’s a rent month whatever the calendar says: 28 days in February and 31 in March, for the same rent.
The period doesn’t care what day the tenant gets paid, and that’s where a lot of “chronic” arrears come from. Picture that Tuesday tenant, who gets paid on Thursdays and pays the rent the same day. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning the ledger shows them a couple of days behind. Every Thursday afternoon they’re paid up. Nothing is wrong with the tenant. The rent cycle and the pay cycle are out of step.
There are two fixes. The tenant pays one extra week, once, so the Thursday payment always lands before the Tuesday it covers. Or the agency realigns the rent period to start on a Thursday, with a one-off short period to bridge the gap. Either way the ledger stops crying wolf and the real arrears stand out.
The paid-to date
The paid-to date is the last day the tenant has paid for in full. Paid to Monday 14 September means every rent day up to and including the 14th is covered, and the period starting Tuesday the 15th is not.
Three things about it trip people up.
It only moves in whole periods. A weekly tenant’s paid-to date jumps seven days at a time. A monthly tenant’s jumps a month. Money that doesn’t complete a period doesn’t move it at all, which is what part payments are about.
It isn’t the last payment date. Owners ask “when did they last pay?” and get told the paid-to date. Different thing. A tenant who paid a year in advance last January has a paid-to date next January and a last payment date of eight months ago. The receipt history answers “when did they pay”. The paid-to date answers “how far are they covered”.
Rent in advance is not a buffer. A tenant who pays two weeks’ rent at the start of a lease is paid to the end of week two. That’s all it means. It isn’t a deposit held for the end of the tenancy, and it doesn’t sit beside the rent as a cushion. Each later payment moves the paid-to date forward from wherever it is. Pay a week late and you’ve used up a week of the advance. A tenant is in arrears once today’s date is past the paid-to date, and not before.
A month is not four weeks
This one costs tenants real money. A weekly rent of $600 is not $2,400 a month. There are 52 weeks in a year and 12 months, so a calendar month is 4.33 weeks. The monthly figure is $600 × 52 ÷ 12, which is $2,600.
A tenant who sets up a $2,400 monthly transfer against a $600 weekly rent is $200 short every month. After six months they’re $1,200 behind, two whole weeks, without ever missing a payment. Fortnightly rent converts the same way, × 26 ÷ 12.
Under the period sits the daily rate. Weekly rent ÷ 7. Fortnightly ÷ 14. Monthly rent × 12 ÷ 365. That’s how PropertyMe works it, and most other systems do the same. The software uses the daily rate whenever it has to charge for part of a period: a vacate mid-week, a rent increase mid-period, or a part payment.
Part payments: a credit, not a shortfall
A part payment is any money received that doesn’t complete a rent period. The software allocates it to rent, holds it against the next period, and leaves the paid-to date where it was.
So when a PropertyMe ledger or owner statement says “Paid to 14/09/2026 with part payment of $300.00”, it means two things. All rent to 14 September has been paid. And on top of that, $300 has been received towards the period starting on the 15th. The tenant is ahead, not behind.
Solicitors misread this line often. A settlement adjustment comes across our desk with the question “was only part of the month received, and which date applies?” It’s the opposite. The full period was paid and the $300 is carried on top.
Part payments come from all sorts of ordinary places:
- Two names on the lease, two transfers. Each co-tenant pays their share. The first half shows as a part payment until the second half lands.
- Paying weekly against a fortnightly or monthly cycle. Centrepay, payroll deductions and “I just pay every payday” all do this. On a fortnightly cycle every second payment completes a period. In between, the ledger shows a part payment.
- Rounding. A tenant pays $2,170 a month against a rent of $2,166.67. The $3.33 sits as a part payment and grows a little every month. A couple of years on, the effective paid-to date is a day ahead of the paid-to date and someone asks why.
- A credit from the previous agent. When a management changes hands, the tenant’s credit should come across with the paid-to date. Often it doesn’t. More on that below.
Where’s the money? In most systems it isn’t sitting in your trust account. The whole receipt, part payment included, posts to the owner’s ledger as rent and goes out at the next disbursement. The part payment is a position on the tenant’s ledger: a record that they’ve paid ahead by that much.
Unallocated or held funds are a different thing again. That’s a tenant deposit in PropertyMe or held funds in Property Tree, and it is still in trust. It hasn’t been applied to anything, so it hasn’t moved the paid-to date either.
The effective paid-to date
The paid-to date and the part payment are two halves of one answer. The effective paid-to date puts them together: the paid-to date plus however many days the part payment buys at the daily rate.
Take a monthly rent of $2,000, paid to 14 September with a part payment of $300. The daily rate is $2,000 × 12 ÷ 365, which is $65.75. Divide $300 by that and you get 4.56 days. Software rounds down, since nobody is paid to a fraction of a Friday. Four days after the 14th is Friday 18 September, and that’s the effective paid-to date.
Now the co-tenant version. Fortnightly rent is $1,400, a tidy $100 a day, and the tenancy is paid to Monday 14 September. One tenant pays $700 on the Tuesday. The ledger now says paid to 14 September, part payment $700, effective paid to 21 September. The other tenant pays $700 on the Friday and the paid-to date moves to 28 September.
Between the Tuesday and the Friday, an arrears report that runs off the paid-to date lists this tenancy as behind. The effective paid-to date says they’re covered to the 21st, which is ahead of today. Nobody needs a letter.
PropertyMe shows it as “Eff. paid to” on the tenancy. Property Tree carries both dates too. Here’s which one to reach for:
| The question | Look at |
|---|---|
| Which rent period is unpaid? | The paid-to date |
| How much do they owe? | The dollar figure in arrears, not the number of days |
| Are they far enough behind to act on? | The effective paid-to date and the dollars, before anything goes out |
| Settlement rent adjustment on a sale | The effective paid-to date, and confirm nothing is held in trust past it |
| Final rent on a vacate | The daily rate from the effective paid-to date to the vacate date |
| ”When did they last pay?” | The receipt history, not either date |
When the paid-to date lies about arrears
Rent increases are where the whole thing goes wrong most often.
Say the rent goes from $600 to $620 a week and the tenant’s automatic transfer stays at $600. The next payment arrives: $600 against a $620 period. The period isn’t complete, so the paid-to date doesn’t move. Your arrears report starts counting days on this tenant, and by the next payment it says seven. The dollar column says $20. The effective paid-to date, at $88.57 a day, shows them six days into the week, one day short.
The week after, another $600 arrives. There’s now $1,200 against the period, which completes it with $580 left over. The paid-to date moves one week and the part payment shows $580. From then on the paid-to date runs a week behind while the part payment shrinks by $20 a week. The report keeps saying seven days. The truth is $40, then $60, then $80. Chase the difference by all means. Just don’t send a notice for a week’s rent the tenant has mostly paid.
The second trap is the date on the increase. We saw one in September on a Melbourne rent roll. Rent went from $1,000 to $1,060 a month on a tenancy paid to the 14th. The increase was dated the 14th, the last day of the old period, instead of the 15th.
The software did what it’s built to do and pro-rated the split period by the day. Thirty days at the old daily rate plus one day at the new one came to $1,021.15, against the $1,000 the tenant had already paid. So $21.15 fell due, a rent invoice went out for it, and a tenant who was a month in advance was asked to top up. Only $1.97 of that was the one day at the new rate. The rest was 31 days of a monthly rent charged by the day.
The rule: date a rent increase on the first day of a rent period, never the last day of the old one. If the rent month runs 15th to 14th, the increase starts on the 15th. And if a tenant who is well in advance suddenly shows a few dollars owing after an increase, look at the increase date before you look at the tenant.
Changing agents: don’t drop the credit
When a management moves to you, the previous agent’s ledger will say something like “paid to 14 September with part payment of $1,300”. That $1,300 is the tenant’s money, paid ahead, and it has to come across with the date.
If the tenancy is opened in your system as paid to 14 September and nothing else, every receipt from then on lands $1,300 short of where it should. We had one recently: a fortnightly tenant who’d carried nearly a full fortnight of credit with the old agent. The new office keyed the paid-to date and left the part payment blank. Four months later the tenant was showing eight days in arrears, on rent they had already paid.
Adding up the receipts settles it, every time. Take every rent receipt since the tenancy started, on the old ledger and the new one, leaving out reversals. Compare the total with the rent due from the start date. The difference is the tenant’s real position, and it’s the figure you correct to. Our software migration article covers the same problem at portfolio scale, because paid-to dates and part payments are the first things to break when a whole rent roll changes systems.
Reading a ledger in thirty seconds
Five things, in this order, and the ledger explains itself.
- Rent and frequency. Which cycle, and what one period is worth.
- Paid-to date. The last day paid for in full.
- Part payment. Money towards the next period, so the tenant is ahead.
- Effective paid-to date. The paid-to date plus the part payment as days.
- Today’s date. Past the paid-to date means a period is unpaid. Past the effective date means it’s unpaid even after the credit.
Then the answers write themselves.
- To an owner: the tenant is paid to the 14th and has $300 towards next month.
- To a solicitor: rent is paid to 18 September and we hold nothing beyond that.
- To the Thursday tenant: your rent week starts on a Tuesday. Pay before then and you’ll never hear from us about arrears.
Where that leaves you
Most of the arrears arguments we get pulled into come down to two dates and a dollar figure that nobody explained. Get the receipting right every day, keep the paid-to dates honest, and the reports do their job.
We receipt and reconcile trust accounts daily for more than 60 agency portfolios, on PropertyMe, Property Tree and the rest. If a ledger on your rent roll is telling a story that doesn’t add up, get in touch and we’ll work out which date is telling the truth.
This article is general information about how property management ledgers work, not legal advice. Arrears thresholds and notice rules differ by state; check the tenancy legislation where you operate before acting on an arrears figure.