Managing Lease Contract Templates and Active Leases
How to customize the lease contract every new tenant at a property receives — including uploading an existing signed PDF to auto-extract its clauses instead of retyping them — and how to read the Leases dashboard once contracts are live: active, expiring, pending, and critical leases at a glance.
What you'll learn
- Where the Lease Contract Template lives and what it controls
- How to upload an existing signed lease PDF and have its clauses extracted automatically
- What the placeholder tokens are and how they get filled in per tenant
- How to edit, add, or remove individual clauses, and download or preview the template as a PDF
- How to read the Leases dashboard: active, expiring, pending, critical, and upcoming leases
- What a signed lease contract record looks like once a tenant has signed
Step by step
Open a property's Lease Contract Template
From a property's page, open Lease Contract Template. This is scoped per property — each property can have its own clauses, since terms can differ between an apartment complex and a standalone house. A banner explains the core rule up front: clauses here are injected into every new lease contract sent from this property going forward, but signed contracts already sent are never modified retroactively.
Start from the default clauses, or upload an existing one
Every property starts with a full set of default clauses (property description, lease term, rent payment, security deposit, permitted use, and more — around 29 in total) ready to use as-is. If you already have a signed lease format you use today, click Upload existing lease PDF instead: the system reads the PDF and automatically extracts its clauses, no retyping. A short processing state ("Reading document and extracting clauses...") shows while this happens, then replaces the default set with the ones pulled from your document once it finishes.
Understand the placeholder tokens
Above the clause list, Available placeholders shows every token the system fills in automatically per tenant: {{rentAmount}}, {{depositAmount}}, {{startDate}}, {{endDate}}, {{tenantName}}, {{unitNumber}}, and {{propertyName}}. Use these inside any clause's text and they're replaced with the real values the moment a contract is generated for a specific tenant and unit — the same template produces a correctly personalized lease every time.
Edit, add, or remove clauses
Each clause is numbered and expandable — click to edit its text directly, including inserting placeholder tokens where needed. Add Clause appends a new one to the list; the delete icon on any clause removes it. Nothing is saved until you explicitly choose to, so you can experiment freely.
Preview or download before saving
Download PDF and Preview both render the template exactly as a tenant would see it, with placeholders shown in blue-purple italic text so it's clear which parts are template fields versus fixed contract language. Useful for a final read-through before committing changes that affect every future lease sent from this property.
Save Template
Once the clauses are right, click Save Template. This becomes the active contract for this property — every new lease sent afterward uses these exact clauses with the placeholders filled in for that specific tenant.
Read the Leases dashboard
Tenants → Leases gives a portfolio-wide view: stat cards for Active Leases, Expiring Soon (within 30 days), Pending (awaiting activation), and Monthly Revenue from active leases, plus a Critical/Warning/Upcoming breakdown by days remaining so nothing expires unnoticed. Filter tabs (All, Active, Pending, Expired, Terminated) and a search bar narrow the list by tenant, email, unit, or property.
Act on an individual lease
Each lease card shows the tenant, property, unit, monthly rent, deposit, lease period, and the exact date the contract was signed. From the card: View Details opens the tenant's full profile, View Contract opens the signed, immutable contract record itself, Renew Lease starts a renewal for an ending lease, and End Lease closes it out.
Tips
- Upload a real signed PDF rather than rebuilding your clauses from scratch if you already have a trusted lease format — the extraction step saves significant retyping and reduces transcription errors.
- Use the placeholder tokens inside clause text, not just in the obvious fields — e.g. referencing {{tenantName}} again later in a clause works the same way as the first time it appears.
- Changing the template only affects contracts sent after the change. If you need to correct an already-signed lease, that has to be handled as a separate amendment — signed contracts are intentionally immutable as a legal safeguard for both landlord and tenant.
Key terms
The set of clauses, scoped per property, that gets assembled into every new lease sent from that property. Editing it only affects future contracts, never ones already signed.
A field like {{tenantName}} or {{rentAmount}} inside clause text that the system automatically replaces with the real value for that specific tenant and lease when a contract is generated.
Once a tenant signs a lease contract, that exact version is locked permanently — it reflects precisely what was agreed to at signing and cannot be altered afterward, even if the underlying template later changes.
More tutorials
