How Rentolio works

Everything belongs to a property

A property is one rented place. Every bill, rent payment and meter reading is attached to one, and what you can see follows from your connection to it. A landlord reaches the properties they own; a renter reaches the ones they live in. Switching between them is the bar under the top of the screen, and the whole app follows that choice.

Three kinds of account

• Renter — marks bills and rent as paid, and records when.
• Landlord — sets the rent amount and the day it falls due on the places they own.
• Admin — creates accounts and properties, decides who is attached to what, and can do anything either of the others can.

Two further abilities are granted per account rather than by role, because households differ: uploading bills and recording meter readings. A control an account cannot use is never shown to it.

Bills read themselves

Photograph a bill or upload the PDF, and its issuer, amount, dates and reference are extracted automatically. Nothing is saved until you have seen what was read and confirmed it — the extraction is a first draft, not a decision. The original document is kept and can be opened from the bill at any time.

Once a bill is settled, whoever pays marks it paid with the date and the amount actually paid. Paying less or more than the amount billed is recorded as such, and the difference shows up in the outstanding balance rather than quietly disappearing.

Rent, in euro and lei

Rent is set per property, in whichever currency the contract names. Where that is euro, the app converts using the National Bank of Romania reference rate, and pins the rate of the day a payment is made — so the lei value of a month is the value it actually had, not today's.

Meters

Gas and electricity indexes are recorded together once a month, with water alongside them where there is a meter to read. Consumption is the difference between consecutive readings, so the charts show what was used in a period rather than what the counter says. A month holds one reading: recording again corrects that month instead of adding a second one.

The renter score

A single figure for how promptly what is owed gets settled, made of two halves that are always shown separately: how long bills take from being added to being marked paid, and how close to the due date the rent lands. Bills have a few days of grace, since handling time is not lateness. Rent has none, because its date was known a month ahead.

Anything still unpaid past its date counts against the score as it stands today — otherwise never marking a bill paid would look better than paying it late. It is a record of this household's own habits and nothing more: it is not a credit score, it is not shared with anyone outside the property, and it reaches no one.

The boards

Three places to write, and the difference between them is who reads it.

• Your property's board — between the landlord and the renters of that one home. Announcements, questions, the boiler, the neighbours. It stays inside the property like everything else here.
• The renters board — every renter using Rentolio, across every property. Landlords cannot open it.
• The landlords board — every landlord, across every property. Renters cannot open it.

The two community boards are the one place anything crosses between households, and that is the point of them: somewhere to compare notes with people in the same position. It also means a post there carries your name and picture to people you have never met. Anything you would rather keep to your own home belongs on your property's board.

The admin can read every board, including both communities and any property's. They run the app, they answer the questions nobody else can, and they are the only person who can take a post down. Worth knowing before you write, which is why it is written here rather than left to be discovered.

Posts can be liked or disliked — one reaction each, and pressing it again takes it back — and replied to. Replies sit under the post they answer and go one level deep, so a thread stays something you can follow. You can delete anything you wrote; the admin can delete anything at all.

Being told

A bill added, a payment made, the rent updated, something posted on your property's board — everyone on that property is notified, in the app and, if they have allowed it, as a notification on their device. Never for your own action: you already know about that one.

A reply reaches the person who wrote the post being answered, wherever it was written, including the community boards. Those are otherwise quiet on purpose — a board spanning every household would turn every passing remark into everyone's notification.

Reminders arrive for a bill coming due and, once a month, to read the meters. Certain moments can also send an SMS in Romanian to the people the message concerns, and never to anyone unconnected with the property it is about.

Signing in

An email and a password, with the option of a passkey — Face ID, Touch ID or a fingerprint. A passkey keeps its private half on your device and proves who you are by signature, so nothing that could be phished ever leaves it. Accounts are created by the admin; there is no public sign-up.

What it does not do

Rentolio does not move money. The payment sheet shows the beneficiary's details for you to copy into your own banking app; the transfer happens there, and Rentolio only records that you say it happened. It has no connection to any bank and cannot initiate, verify or reverse a payment.