Occupants

What an occupant is

An occupant is a person staying in a unit under an existing lease. It's a deliberately light record: a name, and optionally a phone, email, and dates. Occupants are not tenants. They don't sign the lease, they aren't billed, and they don't get a portal login.

The distinction matters when the leaseholder and the occupant aren't the same. A company or government department signs one lease, but the employees who actually stay in the suite change from week to week. Rather than create a new lease every time someone new arrives, you keep the one lease and record each stay as an occupant under it.

The lease still belongs to the tenant

Occupants sit on top of the lease; they don't replace it. The organization or person who signed stays the tenant and keeps receiving the invoices. Occupants only answer a different question: who is physically in the unit, and when.

When to use occupants

Reach for occupants whenever the person on the lease isn't reliably the person in the unit:

Government and corporate housing — a department or company holds the lease and rotates staff through on postings that last a few days to a few weeks.
Furnished and short-term rentals — a suite where guests turn over often and the guest staying isn't the account holder.
Insurance and temporary housing — displacement or relocation stays booked under one account, with different people in the unit over time.

If the person who signs is always the person living there, you don't need occupants — the tenant record already covers it.

Adding an occupant

Open the lease from Rentals → Leases and choose the Occupants tab, which sits alongside Details, Invoices, and Notes. Choose Add Occupant and fill in the stay:

Name. Who is staying. This is the only required field.
Phone and email. Optional contact details for the person on-site.
Check-in date. The day the occupant arrives.
Check-out date. The day they leave. Leave it blank for an open-ended stay.
License plate. Optional, for units where you track parking.

Screenshot coming soon

The Occupants tab on a lease, showing a table of occupants with their status, name, phone, and check-in and check-out dates.

Check-in, check-out, and status

The occupant list shows a status for each person, worked out from today's date against their stay:

Upcoming — the check-in date is still in the future.
Current — today falls within the stay. This is who's in the unit right now.
Departed — the check-out date has passed.

The check-out date is the day the occupant leaves, so they count as departed from that date on. An occupant with no check-out date shows as Open-ended and stays current until you set an end date.

Overlapping dates and turnovers

Tenant Buddy keeps the record honest by preventing two occupants from claiming the same unit at the same time. If a new occupant's dates overlap an existing stay on the lease, it's rejected.

Same-day turnovers are allowed

One occupant checking out on the same day the next one checks in is not an overlap — that's a normal turnover, so it's permitted. Occupant dates also have to fall inside the lease term.

Notes and documents per stay

Each occupant can hold its own notes and documents. Attach a scanned ID, a government authorization letter, or anything else tied to that specific stay, and add notes for your own reference. Documents are stored privately against the occupant — they aren't shared with the tenant or shown on any listing.

Every occupant you add, edit, or remove is written to the lease's history, so you keep a dated trail of who was tracked and when, without any extra bookkeeping.

Occupants on the calendar

Turn on the Occupant Dates layer on your calendar and every check-in and check-out appears on the day it happens, labelled with the occupant's name plus the property and unit. Seeing arrivals and departures side by side makes the turnover days — where one guest leaves and another arrives — easy to spot so you can line up cleaning before the next check-in.

The Occupancy Lookup report

Questions about a stay often come up weeks later: who was in that suite when the damage happened, or which employee to bill for a particular week. The Occupancy Lookup report answers them. From Reports , choose Occupancy Lookup, pick a property or unit and a date range, and generate it.

The report lists every occupant who was staying during that window, with their check-in and check-out dates and status, and downloads as a PDF or CSV like the rest of your reports.

Built for after-the-fact questions

Because occupants carry their own dates, the Occupancy Lookup report can reconstruct who was in a unit on any past date — the kind of record that's hard to rebuild from a spreadsheet once people have come and gone.

Tenants & Leases

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