Student Hostel
The Student Hostel module manages long-term, recurring rentals — a room or a bed billed a flat amount every calendar month — a genuinely different billing shape from Hotel Management →'s nightly guest folio, built for student hostels and similar long-term rental properties.
- Student Hostel isn't on the public price list — ask your service provider to add it to your subscription.
- Add at least one hostel property and at least one Rental Unit before signing a lease, and register the occupant.
The pages are under the Hostel menu — Rental Units, Occupants and Leases (under Hotel & Hostel in the business-unit menu layout).
Properties & Rental Units
Each hostel property is its own location, added in Settings → Company → Properties (called Branches & Properties if you also run POS stores) under the Hostel Properties tab. Hostel properties are kept separate from any POS stores or hotel properties, so a hostel property never shows up where a till or a hotel room would.
Rental Units are the physical inventory — a Room or a Bed (many Tanzanian student hostels rent per-bed within a shared room, not always a whole room). Each unit has a property, a label (e.g. "Room 4 - Bed B"), a monthly rate, notes, and a status: Vacant, Occupied, or Maintenance. Signing a lease sets the unit to Occupied and ending it sets it back to Vacant; you can also change the status yourself (e.g. to Maintenance) when editing the unit. Filter the list by property and export it to Excel.
Occupants
The renter directory — full name, phone, email, ID / registration number, institution, and optional guardian name and phone. The list shows whether each occupant has an active lease, and exports to Excel. The first time an occupant signs a lease, a matching Customer record is created automatically so the rent invoices always have a real Customer to bill against.
Leases
Click + Sign Lease (available once there's at least one vacant unit and one registered occupant) and enter:
- Occupant and Vacant Unit
- Start Date and End Date (both required; the end must be after the start)
- Monthly Rate — filled in from the unit, editable, and kept on the lease; changing the unit's rate later doesn't change an already-signed lease
- Deposit Amount and Deposit Method (optional)
A preview shows the number of months × the rate = total rent for the lease.
A lease stays active until someone with lease.terminate clicks End Lease and chooses the outcome — Ended (normal move-out) or Terminated (early/forced) — records whether the deposit was Refunded or Forfeited (required if a deposit was taken), and optionally a reason. The unit goes back to Vacant. Recording the deposit outcome doesn't move any money or post anything.
Payments
The Payments view lists each lease with its total due (rate × months), amount paid and balance. Use + Record Payment on an active lease to log a payment (amount, date, method, notes). The Report view shows the same figures read-only.
Payments recorded here are tracked on the lease only — they don't mark the monthly rent invoices as paid. Update the invoice itself in Invoicing → when rent is collected.
Automatic monthly rent invoices
Every day (09:00 East Africa time) the system checks each active lease whose dates cover today, and drafts one invoice per lease for the current month if it doesn't have one yet — billed to the occupant's Customer, with one line "Rent — [unit] — [month]" at the lease's monthly rate and no VAT. In practice each lease gets its invoice early in each month of the lease.
The invoice is always created as a Draft, never sent automatically, so you review it and send it yourself — see Invoicing → Invoice approval if your tenant requires approval — before it posts to the books or fiscalizes. It never double-bills the same lease for the same month, even if the job runs more than once. There's no button to generate a rent invoice by hand.
Dashboard & reports
For users with report access, the Dashboard and Reports pages in the Hotel & Hostel menu (business-unit menu layout) include hostel figures: occupancy, vacant units and leases expiring in the next 30 days on the dashboard, and a Leases tab in Reports listing leases that start within a date range.
Permissions
| Permission | What it allows |
|---|---|
unit.view | See the rental unit (room/bed) register |
unit.create | Add rental units to a property |
unit.edit | Edit a unit's details, rate, type, or status |
occupant.view | See the renter directory |
occupant.create | Register a new renter |
occupant.edit | Edit a renter's contact/guardian details |
lease.view | See leases and their payments |
lease.create | Sign a new lease, assigning an occupant to a unit |
lease.edit | Record rent payments against a lease |
lease.terminate | End or terminate a lease and record the deposit outcome |
Hostel Manager is a dedicated role for day-to-day hostel operations — holds all of the above (plus dashboard.view and invoice.view) and nothing else. Assign permissions in Settings → Users & Access → Roles & Permission Matrix.
Related
- Hotel Management → — the equivalent concept for nightly stays
- Invoicing → — how the monthly rent invoice behaves once drafted
- Customers → — the auto-created customer record behind each occupant