Haven User Guide

Setting up, in the right order

Haven has no setup wizard, and it does not need one. Four things go in, in this order, and each one is the thing the next one hangs off:

  1. Properties. The building, the house, the parcel. Address, type, and the details you will want later: taxes, insurance and its expiry date, HOA dues, the management fee you charge on it.
  2. Units. The leasable thing. A single-family house is one property with one unit — make the unit anyway, because the lease attaches to the unit, not to the building.
  3. Renters. The people. A renter is a person, not a tenancy, which is what makes roommates, renewals and a returning renter work years later.
  4. Leases. The agreement that joins a renter to a unit for a term at a rent. Creating one posts the deposit, sets the unit to occupied, and starts the money.

You can be running on the first afternoon: put in one property, its units, the people in them, and a lease for each occupied unit with the rent and the day of the month it is due. Everything else in Haven — the rent roll, the calendar, the dashboard, all eleven reports — is worked out from those four things as you look at it. There is nothing to rebuild and no figures to keep in step by hand.

Start the leases where the money starts. A lease you enter today for a tenancy that began two years ago should carry its real start date, but the rent only becomes owed from the month you first run billing. Haven never invents history: rent is posted for a month when you run the billing run for that month, and never before.

Make it look like your company

Under Settings you can set the accent color, the sidebar and workspace shades, the typeface, how rounded the corners are and how tightly the screens pack. That is a company-wide setting an owner or admin saves once. Each person can also choose dark or light for themselves without changing it for anybody else. See Appearance.