Let’s talk about Agreements in Harmony.

Agreements are part of the magic that makes Harmony a better solution. It’s a big part of the flexibility and power, and the foundation on which automation and predictive actions are built.

Your old software may have a two dimensional structure, which is extremely limiting. Harmony introduces a three dimensional structure.

This may be new to you, so we’ll spend some time explaining it.

Olden days property management software is mostly adapted from the real estate sales world. In that, you have a property, a buyer, and a seller. 

It’s really easy to slap a label on the buyer and call him a tenant, and on the seller and call him an owner. 

But, as you’ve discovered if you’ve used another property management software, that really doesn’t represent your business.

While good software creates a bunch of workarounds and bolt ons to make it work adequately for property management, great software abandons that model completely.

Great property management software is built on a three dimensional foundation.

Instead of the two dimensions of places and people, Harmony adds a third dimension: agreements.

When you think about it, This is how your business really works.

You don’t collect rent from your tenant Tammy because she happens to be a tenant. You collect rent from Tammy because you have a lease agreement with her.

You don’t send a distribution to your owner Oswald because he happens to own a rental unit. You send him a distribution because you have a management agreement with him.

You don’t collect dues from association member Molly because she lives in an HOA. You collect dues because she has an association membership agreement.

This is the reality of your business. There’s nothing new there.

What’s new, is that Harmony is the first software to be structured the same way your business is structured.

In Harmony, the agreement is where transactions happen.

You still have people, and places. Those don’t go away. But they represent an actual person, and an actual place. An agreement represents an actual agreement. 

In Harmony, we don’t just slap a label on something to make you think it’s something it’s not.
As you unlearn the limitations of a 2 D system and move into the 3 D world, you’ll find the natural alignment with your business needs and structure is incredibly liberating!

Harmony's agreements fall into three distinct categories.

Account agreements include management agreements for owners, and community agreements for associations. 

Occupant agreements include lease agreements for tenants, reservation agreements for guests, and membership agreements for association members.

Provider agreements include services agreements for vendors, and commission agreements for sources.

Each agreement includes people, places, and parameters.

Agreements also typically have an agreement form, which is the narrative of the people, places, and parameters that is understood and executed by the parties to the agreement.

Dealing with the agreement forms, addendums, and notices is covered in detail in resources covering content templates. We won’t get into it much here. It’s worth studying up on it, if you haven’t already.

In this video, we’ll give an overview of all agreements, with a focus on management agreements for owners, lease agreements for tenants, and services agreements for vendors.

If you manage short-term rentals with reservation agreements, or associations with community and membership agreements, watch this video for a general understanding, then take a look at other resources specific to those management areas.

Let’s dive in and see how this all works.

In order to create an agreement, you start with a person and a place.

Adding those in Harmony is covered elsewhere, so we’ll run through this at lightning speed. We want to get to the agreement.

First, you’ll add a place.

If you have a unit within a property, like a four-plex, apartment building, or HOA community, you can create an account agreement on the entire property, and then add its units to the agreement with a separate occupant agreement for each unit.

Alternatively, if you have a bunch of rentals in a condo building, but they’re owned by different owners, you can have units in a property that are on separate account agreements. All of this is really flexible in Harmony, so you can structure it to exactly match your business.

We’ll keep this demo simple, and add a unit that’s not contained in a property, like a single family rental home.

We’ve selected the all fields form definition, so you’ll have the opportunity to enter absolutely everything. Managing your listing form definitions is covered elsewhere.

You don’t need to add everything now. You can come back and fill in details and marketing information later. However, it’s worth recognizing that more details here means more automation when you create agreements covering the unit.

You’ve added the unit, so it’s time to add the owner.

Again, you can enter the basics, then come back and fill in the rest later. However, the more information you have on the owner, the easier it will be to create an accurate management agreement.

Once you’ve entered the owner’s info, select Next Step.

You’re prompted to create their management agreement.

You can do this later if you want, from the owner’s agreement menu option. However, we want to do it now for this demo, so select, Create.

Harmony’s warning you that you don’t have a template for management agreements.

If you have consistent parameters for management agreements, it saves time to set up a default values template.

This allows you to set standards for things like your fees.

We won’t do this now, but it’s worth exploring to save you time for future management agreements. You can always change each individual agreement to be different from the default values, and you can update your default values if something changes, while keeping all established agreements intact until renewal.

You’re now on Step 1 of the agreement wizard, where you can add and change agreement parameters for this management agreement.

This step covers details on the ownership.

You see that everything is already entered based on the owner’s profile, and the default values, if you had a template.

There are some things that you may change from the defaults.

For example, if there are multiple owners on the management agreement, you can add them now. Do this either by entering something in the Find Owner box, or quick adding a new owner.

You can always add and remove owners later, and adjust their distributions at any time.

Just for fun, we’ll say that Oswald is the trustee on a revocable trust, and your management agreement is with the trust.

It’s worth noting that you have a lot of flexibility here. When you added the owner, instead of adding Oswald, you could have added the trust as an owner.

You also could have made the trust, a group, rather than an individual, and made Oswald a part of that group. Then, you could have added anyone else, who may interact with you on the trust’s behalf, as additional members in that group.

Alternatively, you could have added all of these people as individual owners, and given all but Oswald a 0% allocation in the agreement.

It’s important to understand there are reporting, tax reporting, communication, and other considerations when dealing with non-individual ownership entities.

Remember, these are the parameters of the legal agreement you’re going to enter into. Your structure in Harmony should be a mirror image to what you’re dealing with in real life. Harmony has the flexibility to accommodate pretty much anything, but it’s up to you to set up your agreements accurately.

When you’re done, select Next Step to move through the agreement wizard.

Next, we’ll add all of the units covered by this management agreement.

In this case, it’s one single family home, so we’ll just enter part of its address to pull it up.

Select this match, then add it to the agreement.

If there were more units on this management agreement, you would add them all.

You can always add and remove units from a management agreement down the road.

Some property managers have a separate management agreement for each unit, even if the owner owns multiple units. Others have multiple units on a common management agreement for an owner. Once you understand the three dimensional structure of Harmony, you’ll see that either of these are entirely possible, and the choice is up to you. You should structure things in Harmony to exactly match the real-life structure of your business.

If you own all of the units you manage, without a management agreement, reference other resources for switching Harmony to self-management mode. This switches the mode that Harmony operates in, and is a major change, even though it’s done with a simple click.

When you’re done adding places to the agreement, select Next Step.

The agreement source allows you to track your campaigns, including commissionable events to commissioned sources, or return the unit to a listing agent after you’re done managing it. Sources, external applications/bookings, and business growth and development are covered in other resources.

In Terms, you’ll set date parameters and a few other things.

The help tips on each input provide extensive details on what the option means.

In, Agreement Renewal, you’ll set whether this agreement is set to automatically renew, but you’ll still have the option at renewal to confirm the parameters of the renewed agreement. It doesn’t have to renew with the same parameters.

The exception to this, which we’ll touch on later, is month-to-month renewal residential and storage leases, and commercial holdovers. In those cases, Harmony automates the process, but keeps you informed along the way.

In, Allowed Occupancy Agreements, you see that this demo includes options for both residential leases, and for reservations. That’s because this company’s Harmony package includes both.

If you have a single management agreement that allows multiple types of occupancy agreements, you’ll set the agreement parameters for each type of occupancy agreement. When that type of agreement is created, its specific parameters will be in force.

For this one, we’ll keep it simple and just allow and set parameters for residential leases on this management agreement.

You’ll notice you now have a, Discard, option.

At this point in the Wizard, the unit is locked into this agreement until the agreement is complete, avoiding accidental duplication. If you want to abandon the wizard, choose, Discard, instead of just walking away, to undo everything you’ve done so far.

Select Next Step to proceed.

Here you’ll set all your management fees.

If you had a default values template, you’d probably have already set these for standard management agreements, and you’d just change whatever’s different in this one.

In this case, you started with a blank slate, so you’ll enter everything.

Again, each one has a help tip that provides further information on each item.

Harmony has an incredibly flexible management fee structure to exactly represent your business.

You can include percent fees on collected rent (or any other occupant charge that’s designated as management fees apply), a flat monthly fee, a base amount with optional minimums and maximums, as well as recurring fees, annual fees, and special fees. 

This stuff is all covered in property management school, but you may find there’s an undiscovered way to compete in your marketplace when you discover how Harmony will automate fees for you.

Select Next Step.

You don’t have a default values template, so your authorizations start blank.

Typically, management agreements include agent authorization to spend up to a certain amount before obtaining specific authorization. When you add a limit here, it will show up in the money section of all work you do on a unit, allowing you to limit the amount spent, or set a work order to be approved by the owner with an electronic signature, either in their portal, or as a loginless function.

More on this is covered in resources for maintenance.

If you have power of attorney covering this agreement, you can create a form based on a template, or upload a scanned or attached copy of a provided form to connect it. When you create this in Harmony, the owner can e-sign it, just as they would any other agreement.

When you’re done with Authorizations, select Next Step.

Reserve and distributions determine what happens when it’s time to run distributions for this agreement. Harmony automates this for you, and it’s covered elsewhere.

Temporary holdbacks are a powerful feature of Harmony. In this case, let’s imagine the owner came to you and said, “I was recently told I’ll need a new roof on this home next year. Don’t send me any money for now, until my account has 20,000 dollars for the roof.”

For this, you can use a temporary holdback. 

Alternatively, if it’s your responsibility to find a vendor and schedule the work, you can use Harmony’s quote request feature, and then create a work order with the estimate withheld until the work is complete.

In work orders, you can also set future withholds for an owner. For example, he might want all of his distributions for the first three months, then have you withhold subsequent income for the future roof. Learn more about the power of maintenance and related functions in other resources.

You don’t have to set temporary holdbacks when you establish the management agreement. You can add them at any time something pops up where you need to keep extra money on the owner’s behalf.

Of course, you could also manually adjust the distribution each month, but that misses the advantage of Harmony’s automation. The idea is that you don’t have to keep doing things manually, or keep a library of post it notes for special circumstances. Make your life easy, and let Harmony do the work that computers do best.

Posting allows you to assign a set of rules for posting and reporting for this management agreement.

It’s common for property managers to use a standard, normal, posting rule set for all management. However, Harmony gives you the flexibility to automate charging other accounts, or putting receipts in other bank accounts, with posting rules. More on this is covered in other resources.

Thankfully, it’s rare to have taxes on management. Equally thankfully, Harmony has extensive options for dealing with excise tax, rent tax, accommodation tax, sales tax, equipment rental tax, and more. Again, that’s more than we’re going to cover here, and it’s handled in other resources.

Select Next Step.

If you have supporting files, including documents, photos, and videos, add them now. You can always add them later, too, and Harmony will automatically add anything that happens in the course of this management.

It’s worth understanding a bit about how Harmony handles documents at all the different levels, and that’s covered in resources about documents. Here, you’re looking at the core supporting files related to this management agreement. Later, you’ll see how any created or uploaded document can be linked to the management agreement, while preserving the core supporting files embedded in the agreement separately.

You’ll notice a flag was added to the discard option at this step of the wizard.

This means it’s your last chance to discard this agreement, before it’s locked in. Of course, administrators have the power to fix mistakes after the fact, but it’s assumed that if you proceed from here, you’ve settled in on all the parameters for this management agreement.

Select Next step.

In this last step of the wizard, you can add management bills. You can do this any time later, but at this point, Harmony has figured out everything the owner owes you now, based on the parameters of the agreement, and you can easily add them.

Select finish to run the agreement post check.

Post check will run through everything you’ve entered, and ensure that it’s all good. If there are problems, alerts will show with guidance for fixing errors. If there are no problems, post check has passed successfully.

If an agreement fails post check and you do not fix it, the agreement has a status of, failed post check.

It’s highly discouraged to proceed with a failed post check, as the automation features of Harmony will likely run into snags and require manual intervention down the road. When an agreement has passed post check, you have the confidence that everything will work exactly as you expect it to.

In this final view, Harmony advises you to change the owner’s status to reflect his new agreement. As events happen with this agreement, Harmony will suggest the appropriate status for owners on the agreement.

However, for your own business purposes, you may want to give an owner a status other than what’s recommended, and manage their status manually. More on this is covered in other resources addressing people and their status.

In this case, you’ll make the owner Current to move him into your group of owners who have a current management agreement.

You’re done with the agreement parameters for this management agreement, so select Finish.

Harmony now prompts you to create an agreement form.

Again, to recap, the agreement form is the narrative, including the agreement's people, places, and parameters, along with narrative clauses and descriptions, and optional addendums or articles, that the owner signs or e-signs to fully execute the management agreement.

Typically, you’d create the form based on your management agreement form template, and send it to the owner for their e-signature. This is all covered in dealing with templates and e-signing.

In some cases, you may want to deal with the agreement form later, and proceed to deal with something else right now.

In still other cases, you might send your agreement parameters to your attorney, and have them draft a management agreement form and send it to the owner.

For this, you can use Harmony’s agreement notices, with a notice structured exactly as your attorney wants to see the information for their part of the process.

When you receive this completed form back from your attorney, instead of choosing the option to create the agreement form from your templates, you’ll just upload the completed form into this agreement.

You now have a completed management agreement, and you’re ready for what’s next.

If you need to make any changes, do this by selecting the options drop down, then Change Agreement.

Each option allows you to edit a component of the agreement, and provides follow on actions. For example, if you add another unit to this management agreement, and the management agreement has a new unit set up fee, adding the unit will prompt you to add the bill for the unit setup fee.

If you encounter a situation where another owner is added to the management agreement, or one owner sells or transfers part of their interest in their properties to another owner, Harmony deals with this elegantly and simply, including automatically updating 1099s and distributions. When you run into this, please review available resources to understand it in depth.

If you ever encounter an event where one of your owners sells their unit and you retain management with the new owner, Harmony offers a process to make this easy, too. There are numerous real-life scenarios, and Harmony resources cover each one, with guidance.

When it comes time to renew this management agreement, Harmony will prompt you in advance in your dashboard action boxes. The advance notice is determined by your setting for, Number of days in advance to alert on renewing/ending agreements.

Since we brought up settings, let’s go take a look at your settings for agreements. We’ll come back to adding an occupant agreement after this brief detour.

Select Settings, Agreements.

Templates & Defaults is covered extensively in other resources.

Custom merge rules is a powerful feature that allows you an advanced level of control over the agreement forms, addendums, and notices that you create. It has its own resources for learning about this.

Report definitions allow you to customize the report data in agreement reports. You’ll need this when you start creating advanced reports. When that time comes, study up on Reports in help resources.

Preferences is the one we’ll cover here, and where the setting we just referenced is contained.

We’ll run through the basics.

The first section covers things that apply to all agreements.

An agreement can have any name you want; it should be something that helps you easily identify what it is. When this option is: on, Harmony will default new agreement names to the unit address. You should turn it off if most of your agreements include multiple units, or you want to use the owner's name as the default.

In Harmony, each agent account is assigned a portfolio to manage, just like in the real world. Many companies organize these portfolios by people, while others organize by place. Set this preference to ensure your agreement assignments follow your portfolio structure.

When an agreement is due to end or be renewed, it’s included in the action box on your dashboard and agreement list. You can see the action boxes in advance of the date when action must happen.

A month can be prorated according to three different formulas. Choose the proration formula that you use in your business. The help tip has detailed information.

Harmony’s business growth and development tools allow you to not only track where you get your business from, and related costs, but also the reasons you lose business. 

While you can enter free-form reasons for why an agreement terminates, by establishing termination reason codes, you can easily track and report on the business you intentionally lost, and the business you accidentally lost, with data, charts, and graphs.

Violations is its own complete system, allowing you to effectively manage all agreement violations. While you’ll typically use this most in occupant agreements, like a tenant’s failure to pay rent, or an association member’s failure to mow their lawn, violations are available for all agreement types. Learn more about this in other resources.

Your calendar automatically shows key dates for all aspects of your business. If you don’t want things like lease move-outs or management agreement renewals to show up on your calendar, exclude them here.

Subsequent sections are specific to each type of occupant agreement. You’ll have one section for each occupant agreement type enabled in your account.

Each item has a help tip with valuable information, but we’ll point out a few in more detail.

Key and access management is a complete Harmony system, allowing you to track who has what key and who has access to what. When you issue physical keys and access devices (like garage door openers, fobs, and proximity cards), you typically want to include this on the agreement, along with the fees for unreturned keys and devices.

If all property access is done virtually, by access codes, you’ll still track this in Harmony’s access management, but you don’t need to include the same level of detail in your agreements.

If you are manually getting rental applications or vacation bookings from an external source that’s not integrated with Harmony, you might want to track this on your agreements. In such a case, turn this on. If you are exclusively using integrated applications and bookings, you can leave this off.

If you are provisioning insurance with occupant agreements, take a moment to learn about Harmony insurance options in other resources.

If you are charging taxes on occupant agreements, this is a complex and powerful function in Harmony. Be sure to carefully study available resources, and correctly configure your taxes. 

You will need to customize three areas: your taxing jurisdictions and rates, the tax rules, and, in some cases, tax disclosures. 

You may wish to submit a support ticket to have our team review your tax configuration before you create agreements and charges.

Extras are a robust Harmony function that allow you to add mandatory or optional externally provisioned products and services on an agreement.

For example, you may add a tenant benefit package to a residential lease, or optional theme park tickets or kayak rentals with a reservation.

Harmony can integrate to automatically order or provision items from your suppliers, by establishing an extras partnership.

If you're directly providing the product or service, you don’t need an integration. You can just configure your extras options, and select them in the agreement, or add them to the agreement after the fact, per your configured settings.

More on agreement extras is covered in other resources.

There are some configurable elements of agreements that you might never use, depending on your management business.

For example, if you don’t have to track and pay security deposit interest, simply exclude this option, and it will never show up.

Almost all the fees you could imagine including in an agreement are already built into Harmony. However, if you have special custom fees, configure them here.

It’s important to understand the difference between other fees and extras/add-ons. There can be legal implications to this, so be sure you’re putting the right thing in the right place. 

In general terms, if there’s something that will have to be provided to the tenant, it should probably be an extra. If there’s something they already have by virtue of their agreement with you, it might be just a fee. If it’s something an occupant could theoretically opt out of, or it’s something not traditionally and historically associated with occupancy, it’s probably an extra. These are guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Consult your attorney to determine if what you’re including on an agreement can be considered a fee, or must be registered as an add-on.

Other agreement types have additional configuration preferences, and the help tips provide guidance.

Reservations are the most complex occupant agreement, and offer configurable options for turnovers, revenue optimization, cleaning work orders, check-in and check-out, booking deposits, advance and split payments, value calculations, and more.

If you are doing short-term vacation rentals, work with your onboarding specialist or consult available help resources for configuring all of these items to match your business operations.

Now that we’re done looking at settings, close the settings so you can go back and add the occupant agreement for the property you added a few moments ago.

From Management, you’ll add the tenant who will occupy this unit.

If they applied through Harmony, their tenant profile will already be there - you won’t need to add them. When you accept their application in the screening step, you’ll be prompted to visit their profile, and you can create their lease.

If they did not apply through Harmony, add the tenant the same way you added the owner.

When you’re done, select Next Step.

Just like with the owner, you’re now prompted to create their agreement. Select Create.

Again, you don’t have a default values template for residential leases. If you have common parameters in residential leases, you should create one. Skip it for now. You can revisit this in Settings, Agreements, Templates and Defaults.

You’ll notice this looks similar to the management agreement. Add all the tenants or tenant groups as required for this lease. Then set the legal entity, and adjust anything as needed.

Select a help tip for anything where you need additional information.

Add the unit in the same way as you did before.

Select the help tip if you can’t find the unit. Note that a unit must be on a management agreement before it can be added to an occupant agreement.

Once you add the unit, you’ll see the management agreement that it’s on.

Select Next Step.

The following couple of screens look almost exactly like the management agreement, with a few differences. Consult the help tips for details.

In our demonstration, you see that the minimum and maximum lease terms are both 0 years. This is because we did not set these in the management agreement. Sometimes, your regulations or your owner preference will require a minimum or maximum duration for a lease, and Harmony shows you those here.

Previously we referenced the month-to-month renewal option on leases. This is a specific construct whereby a lease will continue to renew one month at a time past its end date if it has neither been terminated nor renewed. Be sure you understand month-to-month renewals when checking this option, and the specific language and disclosures that may be required in your lease form.

Select Next Step to proceed.

The lease rent and fees is quite different from the management agreement.

If you had a default values template for leases, any values set there would be loaded as defaults here, and you can adjust them as necessary for this lease.

Any items impacted by the specific unit will display the unit’s value. Click or tap that to set it as the lease value.

For example, you marketed this unit for $2000 per month. If you negotiated the lease at $2000 per month, simply click that to set it as the base rent.

If you enabled taxes for residential leases, you’ll see a bunch of tax options on this screen. These include the rates, jurisdiction, and assignment of fees as taxable. This is all configurable, and you definitely need to spend some time setting up taxes before creating leases, if you’re obligated to collect taxes.

If your lease requires prepaid rent, also called advance rent, enter the amount.

Advance rent is typically tightly regulated in most jurisdictions. There’s a lot to understand around that, including how it’s paid, where it’s kept, when and how it’s released, and how it impacts the owner’s unavailable balance.

There are configuration options for how prepaid rent is displayed and treated. If you’re collecting prepaid rent, be sure to reference Harmony’s help on the topic.

Late fees in Harmony can be totally automated. It’s pretty powerful, and allows you to set it and forget it.

You can configure which occupant charges are subject to late fees, and set an initial amount or percent, a daily amount or percent, and a period cap. 

In many jurisdictions, excessive late fees can really mess up an eviction, so be sure your late fees are in line with your attorney’s recommendations.

Harmony includes advanced features for tracking occupants’ animals, for both pets and service animals. This covers everything from collecting: photos, records, and proof of vaccination and training, to registering and tracking DNA.

Animal information can also be collected on a tenant application, which flows through to their animal profiles. Learn more about animals in Harmony in other help resources.

If your lease allows pets, check the box to show pet options. In this case, you see that the unit does allow pets. If the tenant profile contains pets, they’ll display here. If you haven’t added them to the tenant profile yet, you can still create the lease with pet charges, and add the animal profiles later.

Again, use the help tips for additional insight.

For example, we have two separate numbers here. The first is the number of pets allowed in the lease, the second is the number to charge. If your lease allows two pets, for example, but the tenant hasn’t adopted their second dog yet, the number of pets allowed is 2, but the number to charge is 1.

Your lease form would include language, on the advice of your attorney, for the tenant obligations when adopting an additional pet. In Harmony, when the tenant notifies you of their successful adoption, you would simply add a pet to the existing lease, where you’d discover there’s an allowance for one more pet. 

Again, reading the help tips, and additional articles, will fully enlighten you on how to best manage this.

When making a change that affects another component of the lease, an alert pops up with the new value and a suggestion to review.

If you configured extras for leases, they would display here. For each add-on, you can configure, and select whether it’s included and charged by default, or presented to the tenant as an option to accept or reject. 

For optional add-ons, you can use agreement form option blocks to indicate options on the tenant’s lease form before they sign it, and charge the extras after the lease is created.

For example, if you add a tenant benefit package to each lease, you would configure that as a custom extra, assuming you are providing the package. If a third-party is providing the package, you would enable that as an integrated extra in configuration.

In your settings, you would determine the cost of this package, and if the package is automatically included in the lease, or if it’s selectable by the tenant. You can also configure whether the package rate is per lease, or per occupant.

These settings then flow through to each lease that you create. In the lease, you can simply leave it, to use the configured settings, or adjust it to override them.

More on extras is available in other help resources.

The next few sections are ones that you left in, in your settings, but may not apply. If they don’t apply to you and your management, it makes sense to exclude them from your settings.

Otherwise, complete the inputs, selecting the values from the unit, if they apply.

When managing rental units within an association, Harmony’s association components may be beneficial, or they may be useless. If you don’t need them, turn them off in configuration.

However, if your tenant must register or apply with the association, with or without a fee, and/or if they must directly pay a fee to the association to cover the owner’s dues, you’ll want to keep association components enabled.

If the association has a registration or application link, you can include that here to allow the tenant to directly apply from their lease, either before or after they sign it.

If you manage units in a resident owned cooperative, Harmony is the only solution that allows you to effectively manage an owner as a tenant. Study other resources for implementing resident owned communities in Harmony.

Deposits collected from tenants are typically subject to constraints in most jurisdictions. Harmony has tools that allow you to properly record, retain, release, and report on deposits like security/damage deposits.

Some property managers offer a damage waiver in lieu of a deposit. This is also a function in Harmony, for both self-funded (where allowed) and underwritten policies.

In this case, you did not damage waivers in agreement preferences, so only the deposit amount displays.

In your configuration, you chose to issue physical keys and access devices to the tenant. Here, you have options to enter the information about these keys. If you entered fees into the unit, and if you registered keys in Harmony’s key management, that will also display here.

When you’re done entering and adjusting these parameters, select Next Step.

Just like with management agreements, you can add core documents, photos, and videos for the lease here. You can also add them later, and can connect future uploaded and created documents and files to the lease. More on that is covered in help resources for documents.

If you’re confident your lease is what you want, select Add Charges.

All of the recommended charges display. You can adjust as necessary here, or you can always add and change charges later. When you set them here, you can be confident that your charge amounts, structure, and settings match exactly what you have in your lease and what’s configured in your money settings.

Review all of these charges, their charge codes, recur schedules, and fees, and adjust as necessary.

Notice that there is no management fee or late fee for the recurring monthly pet fee. This is because in your money configuration, you did not set pet fees as subject to management fees or late fees. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s up to you how you configure your money settings, including charge and bill codes. Harmony offers the flexibility to configure these exactly as you’ve established you want it to work in your business.

In the charge date for a future lease, you would generally set it to the start of the lease or occupancy date. However, this is an accounting consideration that depends on how you record charges.

Accounting can be complicated, and is covered in extensive detail elsewhere. Any time you add charges or bills and don’t know what to do, consult your accountant.

After you’ve reviewed and adjusted all charges, select the button to confirm you want to add them to the tenant’s account.

The charges are added and the lease agreement post check runs.

If there are any issues, you’ll be alerted, with guidance on how to resolve them.

You see a prompt to change this tenant’s status to future, to indicate they are a tenant, but have not moved in yet. Managing the status of people is flexible in Harmony, and in your control. You can leave their status unchanged, select any status here, or go to the person’s profile at any time to adjust their status.

In this case, you want to change them to Future, because if you get an email from them tomorrow, or if you want to send a bulk email to all current tenants, you want to know that they are not yet occupying the unit they’ve leased.

Primary agreements are their own area of study, and other resources cover the concept in detail.

Select the help tip for a bit of information.

In short, when selecting an action on a place, including a unit or property, there are cases where that needs to be correlated with an agreement.

Since you can have more than one agreement on a unit, Harmony needs to know which agreement to assign it to. Typically, when you have multiple agreements, one of them is current, and the other is future. However, there are numerous structures and scenarios where this may not be the case.

For this, Harmony gives you the option to choose which agreement is primary on any unit at any time. This permits automation that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

In this case, there is no current lease on the unit. If there were, it would display here. So you may want to make this agreement primary immediately. However, if there was a current lease that hadn’t yet ended, you would want the current lease to stay primary until you move this tenant into the unit on their move-in date. 

In the typical flow of things, you’ll make an agreement primary on a unit at move-in or start of management. However, there are numerous atypical scenarios, which are covered in other help.

Select Finish to complete your lease agreement.

Again, you have the option to create a lease agreement form now, or skip it and either create one later, or upload one provided by your attorney or scanned from a hard copy.

Dealing with agreement forms and e-signing is covered in other videos and articles.

It may feel like this took a while, but once you have your places and people added or imported, enable applications to skip the step of adding tenants manually, and set your configuration and default values, creating an agreement takes only a moment.

When you look at the options drop down for this lease, you see the next action is the move-in.

In real life, you don’t need to do this now. Harmony will alert you when it’s time to move the tenant in.

However, for this demonstration, we’ll compress time and move them in now.

Select the option for, move in.

Go through each section, selecting the options and entering the information that applies.

In the money section, you see a warning. You have not yet collected the tenant’s deposits.

In real life, it’s a bad idea to move in a tenant without first collecting their deposit. In most cases, you wouldn’t even move them in if they have outstanding unpaid charges. 

Harmony warns you that you should deal with this before proceeding, but it doesn’t block you from proceeding in this case. If you want to move in a tenant who hasn’t paid you yet, you’ll either get really lucky, or learn!

Here you have the opportunity to schedule a move in activity.

Activities, including tasks and projects, are a comprehensive Harmony system that allows you to effectively manage your obligations and opportunities. They’re covered in detail in other videos and resources.

For a move-in, you might, for example, meet the tenant at the house with a welcome gift. 

Or, you might have a florist deliver a petunia to adorn their kitchen island. 

Or, you might have a project with multiple items, like sending them a welcome text message, sending an email to remind them to complete their part of the move in inspection, delivering a bottle of wine, and sending them a survey a week down the road to ask about their experience.

All of these are options that can be easily managed in Harmony, assigned to various team members, automatically scheduled, and more.

We won’t do any of that in this demonstration, but it’s worth taking some time to learn about how this will help you be more productive while avoiding having anything fall through the cracks.

When you’re done, select Save Change, or Next Step if this lease contains other items to deal with at move-in.

The tenant is now moved in, even though they still haven’t given you any money. Obviously, you’ll want to study up on accounting in Harmony to be sure you’ve properly dealt with their deposits, prepaid rent, and other charges.

Since we’re compressing time, imagine the tenant has now come up on their renewal notification date.

Harmony alerts you, you’ve consulted with the owner, and you’ve decided you want to offer them a renewal with a 1% rent increase.

Your first step would be to send a notice of option to renew. This should be one of your template notices. For this demo, we won’t go there, since that’s covered elsewhere.

We’ll imagine the tenant received the notice, and e-signed it, selecting the option to renew.

From the lease options, or from the Harmony alert that displays at renewal time, select Renew Lease.

Here you have a lease that was set to renew month-to-month. However, the tenant indicated they want to renew for another year, so you’ll move past that.

The lease dates automatically adjust for the renewal term, but you can change them if you’re doing something different.

In the Increase By, enter and apply a 1% increase.

Note any special warnings. In this case, Harmony warns you that if you are planning to increase the security deposit, a new deposit will be charged for the difference from the old deposit.

If you were adding additional prepaid rent based on the increase, you’d see that, too.

If any of the lease parameters are changing based on this renewal, adjust them.

The omitted items shows all options that were not included on the original lease, but could be included on the renewed lease. Hover over each for a description. Click or tap it to add it to the renewed lease, and set the amount or quantity.

In activities, you can set a renewal activity, similar to how you set a move-in activity. You may, for example, schedule yourself a phone call for their lease anniversary to thank them for being a renewing tenant.

Harmony tells you that you had two recurring charges on the old lease. In this case, it’s because you renewed them in the demo before their old lease charges were done recurring. 

For the demo, stop the two existing recurring charges, and set new charges.

Select Next Step.

Just like when you first created the lease, you now have the option to set the charges. Harmony makes recommendations based on your settings and the parameters of the renewal, but you can change them here, or later in the tenant’s money view.

In real life, you’d be creating all kinds of confusion here by renewing the tenant before they’ve actually started their initial lease, but we’re compressing time in this demo, so select Next Step to add the charges as recommended.

The tenant now has a renewed lease!

Let’s imagine that it took a year, but the tenant’s adoption of their second dog is now complete.

Select the options drop down, and choose, Change Lease.

In the change options, select, Pets.

Enter the quantities and fees for this new pet arrangement.

Here you entered 3 pets to charge, because this new dog is a cerberus. Harmony warns you this exceeds the number allowed in the lease. You can change the lease, or reduce the number of pets.

Because you completed your twelve labors already, you’ve reconsidered and are charging this new dog as only one additional pet.

In real life, you’d add this new pet, along with all of its details, in the tenant’s animals. We’ll skip that in this demo and just add a brief description of the new pet.

Harmony gives you the option to stop the recurring pet fee that you previously charged, to replace it with a new pet fee covering both dogs. Select this, and choose next step.

The new recommended charges display. Again, adjust these, or accept them as-is and select, Finish.

The tenant has now been charged, and the lease has been updated with the new pet situation.

Other changes to the lease are done in a similar fashion.

Now, we'll look at a new problem. In the course of the tenant’s lease, they took a vacation to Paris and forgot to pay the rent.

Obviously, this wouldn’t happen if they’d set up pre-approved payments. Watch the Payments video, or read articles on pre-approved payments, for information on setting this up in Harmony.

They’ve now received their automated notices of late rent, and had late charges added. But it’s still unpaid. Unfortunately, the tenant dropped their phone in the Seine, and purchased their hotel’s unlimited wine plan, so you hear nothing from them.

The next step, on the advice of your attorney, will likely be to send your jurisdiction’s official notice of a rent demand.

You’ll have a template for this in your lease notices.

Select Create Lease Notice.

Choose the applicable template, and the lease data will be merged in.

For this situation, you probably want to record a violation. This allows you to effectively follow up on the issue until it’s resolved, and establish a record of the violation. Select the Add a Violation button to choose the violation code.

You want to notify the tenants, the owner, and yourself so you can print this notice and have it hand delivered to the tenant.

Save the notice, and you see this agreement now has one open violation.

Select this to scroll down to the violation details.

Open the violation, where you can track and process this through to resolution. You can also add details like the resolution deadline, the penalty (in this case, eviction), and anything else required for this violation.

On your dashboard, you’ll see a new action box for an open lease agreement violation.

Thankfully, the tenant returned from France, saw all the notices, and quickly logged into their portal to pay their rent with their Amex card.

You can update the violation accordingly, and move along.

Since we’ve found the tear in the space time continuum, let’s imagine a year has passed since renewal and you’re giving the tenant the option to renew again.

You send the notice of option to renew, but this time, the tenant selects the option to non-renew.

From the lease options drop down, select Vacate/Non-Renew.

This is the first part of the process. You do this as soon as you receive the tenant’s notice of non-renewal, or you send them a notice to vacate.

When the time to move out comes, you’ll perform the next step, the move out.

For now, let’s start the non-renewal.

In terminated by, select who initiated this and why. This affects some of your future prompts.

In this case, the tenant is completing their lease and has elected not to renew. Select that the termination is by the tenant because the agreement was completed.

Normally you would send the tenant a notice that their agreement will end, with details. This would be a lease agreement notice template you add to your templates. Create this the same way you create other notices, which is covered in other resources.

If, alternatively, your attorney drafts this notice and sends it to you, you can upload it and attach it to the lease.

Enter the appropriate dates. Known dates will already be filled in for you, but you can change them as necessary.

In reason for termination, enter the reason the tenant provided, if there is one. You might also ask for their reason in your communications, if you’re tracking this for the owner or for your internal records.

In, termination code, select from your list of configured termination codes. Termination codes allow you to easily track and report on why agreements end. You probably want to know when a lease is non-renewed because of a problem with the home, a problem with the property manager, a problem with the community, etc. These are actionable items that help you improve your business and increase retention.

Lease considerations show you items that could affect this lease ending process. For example, if this tenant is active duty military and ending the lease early, you need to be sure the termination is compliant with the SCRA. If this lease has an executed rent to own contract, it may contain disclosures required on ending the lease. These are subject to your laws and policies.

In forwarding contact, you’ll need an address to send a security deposit disposition or any correspondence after the tenant moves out.

In activities, you can add a termination activity in the same way you added a move-in or renewal activity.

Harmony warns you there are two recurring charges on this lease. Stopping recurring charges doesn’t remove any charges already added, but does prevent them from recurring after you stop them. In this case, you know the tenant is fulfilling their lease, so you can uncheck this and allow all recurring charges to run their course.

Note that you can also see details in the tenant’s money view, and manually stop recurring charges there, or manually add charges.

There are cases where you’d want to deal with money manually at the end of a lease.

For example, if allowed, you could permit an early termination with no fee, but require payment of regular rent until the unit is re-rented. All of these are options in Harmony. You have complete control over this in the tenant’s money view.

For this demo, skip the recurring charges and leave them in place.

Select Save Change.

You now have a vacating lease, with a vacating tenant.

When it comes time to move out, Harmony will alert you to complete the next steps.

For the demo, we’ll do this now.

Note that between the notice of non-renewal and the move-out, you can reverse the entire process you just performed. You might do this if the tenant frantically calls you and says, “We sent a notice to non-renew, but just found out our new house will not be ready in time! Can we stay?”

This tenant did not frantically call, so from the lease options drop down, select Move-out.

Since you did not create or upload a termination notice in the previous steps, you have the chance to do this again. If you had, you’d see the notice so you can reference any details.

In Lease Fulfilled, you see Harmony’s analysis of your lease terms and any areas of concern. In this case, the tenant did not provide adequate notice of their intent to non-renew, so Harmony is bringing this to your attention. Of course, you know that this is because we compressed time for the demo, so you don’t need to do anything.

The dates and reasons will display as you set them in the first part of processing the lease ending.

Since you elected to issue physical keys, at move out it’s expected that the tenant returns them or is charged. In this case, we’ll imagine the tenant lost the garage door opener, so you’ll set this to zero.

Harmony advises you to add a new charge for $75 for the missing garage door opener. You’ll do this in money.

Continuing to the Money section, you see all kinds of red. In a real scenario, you’d stop here, and deal with this before you proceed with the move-out.

If we had not skipped all this for demonstration purposes, your tenant might have a deposit amount that you’re holding. In this case, Harmony would advise you that the deposit will be released.

When a deposit is released, it’s made available to be spent against charges, or returned to the tenant, or a little bit of both.

In traditional cases, after move out, you would perform a move out inspection in Harmony, recording any damages and optionally the amount to charge the tenant. Or, you might record damages, create work orders, and add tenant charges when the work estimates or totals come in. These are all options that Harmony makes easy.

For this lease, you don’t want to charge the early termination fee, which was due to our "time compression" for the demo, but you do want to charge the missing garage door opener, as advised in suggested charges.

In new charges, add this, and any other new charges to add at move out. Note that if you miss one here, you can add it later in the tenant’s money.

Select Next Step.

Typically at this point, you’d see the deposits released, maybe some prepaid rent released (if it’s still unused), and any other financial transactions related to this move out event.

In this case, we have none, because we didn’t actually collect the deposits, as noted in the big red alerts on the previous screen.

You now have the opportunity to collect some money from the tenant. If they had deposits or prepaid rent, you could collect it from those amounts, which are now open credits on their account. If they don’t have any open credits, you can still collect a check or money order, or you can skip the receipt now and deal with this later.

Let’s skip the receipt.

If all the charges are paid and the tenant still has money left over, Harmony would give you the option to issue a payment now, or skip it and deal with it later.

Since the tenant had no money left over, and still has charges, you don’t have this option, and Harmony tells you this.

In places, you have the opportunity to put this unit back on the market. When you do this, you should edit the unit and update the rent, photos, video, date available, and anything else that has changed since the last time this unit was marketed. If you’re not ready to do that, you can keep this unit off the market and deal with all that later.

If you want to remove this lease as the primary lease agreement on the unit, you can do this now.

This will be determined by your policies and procedures. If you’re planning to do an inspection and possibly add work orders the tenant is responsible for, you probably want to leave this agreement as primary now, to be sure that subsequent work on the unit is associated with this lease.

Once you’ve charged the tenant for all work subsequent to move out, and received payment or taken it out of their deposit, you’ll close the lease, and can remove it as primary then.

Select Finish to complete this process.

You now have a completed lease with a completed tenant.

In your dashboard action boxes, you see you now have a completed lease awaiting closure.

Completed means the tenant has finished the move out, but there may still be outstanding items. You close a lease once all of these items have been resolved.

Select, close lease.

Harmony tells you it’s not ready to be closed yet. In this case, you added a $75 charge for the missing  garage door opener, and the tenant didn’t pay it, and you didn’t collect a deposit to pay it from.

In real life, you may have a number of things that prevent you from closing a lease, including other unpaid damages, a security deposit not returned, etcetera.

Once you’ve finished everything with the tenant and their obligations, you can proceed to close the lease, change the tenant status, and remove this agreement as primary from the unit.

You’re now done with this tenant’s lease!

Even with a closed lease, you can still communicate with the tenant as needed. For example, you might have sent them an experience survey upon move out, and you might follow up on that. You might have added them to a campaign to ask for referrals or ratings.

There are all sorts of options, and Harmony makes the entire process of interacting with a tenant - past, present, or future - easy. All of this is covered in other resources, and will magically improve your business when implemented.

There are a few other things to look at in account and occupant agreements.

First is the agreement change log.

From any agreement, select the options drop down, and select the Change Log.

Like change logs elsewhere, this shows you, in minute detail, everything that was ever changed on the lease, who changed it, and when. This is a great resource when you're investigating anything unexpected.

Next, select the options drop down, then the agreement timeline.

This gives you a timeline of everything that happened in the life of the lease.

Select the format icon to toggle between summary and detail format.

You can save this timeline as a document, or print it.

Now, select the options drop down, and we’ll look at the agreement dossier. Select that.

Choose whether to run the summary or detail dossier.

The dossier is constructed, including everything that has any relation to the lease.

In this case, we have a really simple dossier, since nothing really happened with this tenant on this lease.

In a real world scenario, it would include all of their payments, notices, violations, and much more.

If you have an eviction, the dossier will likely make your attorney jump up and down for joy, and maybe even buy you dinner.

So far we’ve looked at the basics of account agreements and occupant agreements. 

The third category is provider agreements, which work a little differently.

If you want to work with a Provider in Harmony, a provider agreement is NOT required. They’re optional extensions of provider functionality, giving you a way to track and automate things that are unavailable without an agreement.

They also do not require an associated place, like a unit or property, although those can be added if they’re related to the agreement.

We’ll look at a services agreement for vendors. We’ll create one, and you’ll see how it works and what it does.

For this demo, you’ll add a vendor manually. You could also import vendors from a database, or use Harmony’s vendor candidate system to have vendors apply or register online and submit all of their information. 

The vendor candidate system is highly beneficial to increase your efficiency in onboarding new vendors. If you’re not using it, take a look at other resources covering the topic.

For now, select add a vendor from the Management View.

The first input is the vendor’s industry or profession. This is a powerful part of the vendor suitability functions of Harmony, allowing you to choose the right vendor for the job every time. View resources covering maintenance, vendor selection, and vendor suitability for more on this topic.

In this case, we’ll choose an electrician, because they wouldn’t be shocked by being included in a demo.

Enter their information, and select Next Step when you’re done.

Again, Harmony gives you the option to proceed to create the agreement. Select this.

Enter the legal contact information for this agreement, just like you did with your other agreements.

Select Next Step.

Most provider agreements do not have places, but they can.

In the case of a services agreement with places assigned, it indicates this vendor is the default service provider for all maintenance on the assigned units.

It would be unusual to make an electrician a default service provider. Rather, they’d likely be your selected preferred vendor for electrical work, which is different.

A default service provider for a unit means this vendor should be considered before assigning the work to anyone else.

This is common for home warranty providers.

It’s also common if you have an in-house maintenance department, where you have all units assigned to your maintenance department, or you have different maintenance reps each with their own portfolio of units they’re responsible for.

This is also used if you have a handyman, or an owner who triages all of the maintenance on a specific unit or set of units.

All of these scenarios are covered in maintenance help resources. Here, we’re just providing the context for what a unit in a service agreement means.

The next few options are ones we’ve already covered in other agreements.

In licenses and insurance, enter all relevant licenses, policies, and details.

Again, if you’d used the vendor candidacy system, they could have provided this there. Otherwise, you’ll need to collect it separately from the vendor, and record it here.

Select Next step, then enter details for any certifications the vendor possesses, and continue.

If you have supporting files, like a copy of an insurance policy, license, or certification, add them to the agreement.

Select finish.

Harmony now prompts you to create an agreement form based on your services agreement form template. This is the agreement with the narrative and parameters that the vendor would sign or e-sign, and would typically include your work policies as addendums for the vendor.

Like other agreements, you can skip this, and create it later, or upload a copy that you received from your attorney or elsewhere.

Harmony now tells you there’s a problem already.

This vendor’s certification has expired. You can view this now, but don’t. We’re going to see how this shows up on your dashboard.

In your dashboard action boxes, you see a new one.

One services agreement has an expired certification. Select this action box to see the list of affected services agreements.

In this case, there’s only one in the list. Select it.

If you were to scroll down, you’d see all issues highlighted.

You now see the same alert, that certification 1 is overdue.

Again, we’re not going to edit this. Instead, we’ll look at a couple of ways you might deal with this in real life.

The first option is to just shoot out a quick message to the vendor.

From the options drop down, select send email message for an email, send text message for a text, or log a conversation if you’re calling the vendor by phone.

You might have a template for these conversations, or you might free form it. Setting up custom templates is covered elsewhere.

The second option is more formal, but might prove more beneficial to you, especially if you have a vendor who has a lapsed license, insurance policy, or required certification.

For this, send a notice.

From the options drop down, select create agreement notice.

Typically you’d have a notice template for cases where proof of vendor license, insurance, or certification is required. However, you can also send a free-form notice.

If you want to be sure you don’t assign work to the vendor until they provide the required documentation, set their status to Suspended.

To see how other interactions work with maintenance and services agreements, please reference videos and articles covering maintenance in Harmony.

We’ve now covered the basics of management agreements, lease agreements, and services agreements.

While agreements generally hum along in the background doing their job of automation, until there’s some key date or event that alerts you, there may be times where you need to find an agreement.

There are a number of places where you can see agreements.

The first is your agreements list, from the management view.

Here you see a summary of all your agreements, along with a chart showing your agreement growth over time. Since agreements are the primary indicator of your expanding business, this is a key one to watch.

From here, select any agreement type to view its list.

The list includes all agreements that are not yet finished, which are typically active and future agreements.

It also shows action boxes related to this agreement type, which are also displayed on your dashboard.

Select the show/hide finished agreements icon to toggle whether finished agreements are included in your list.

Search anything on an agreement, to filter the list.

To switch to viewing the list for another agreement type, select the switch type icon, then select the type to view.

The, advanced agreement search, gives you powerful tools to search for agreements by status and dates, and by additional components for some agreement types.

You can also view agreements for a specific place, by first selecting the place, then selecting the notes and history menu icon.

This view shows all agreements related to the unit or property, with an indicator showing which agreement is currently primary.

It also shows all violations related to this unit.

Each unit or property also displays an icon in its menu, allowing you to preview and view its current and/or primary agreement for the account, occupant, and provider agreements.

When viewing a person in Harmony, their menu includes an option to view their agreements.

Their places menu icon takes you to a cross-reference view of all units and properties they’re associated with, and the account and occupant agreements related to them.

While we won’t go into any detail here, it’s worth noting that you can view agreement reports from any person, or for the entire company.

Here, in company reports, you see a section for agreements, with all the agreement reports installed in your account. These are powerful reporting tools that allow you to effectively analyze your business, and are covered in more detail in resources related to reports.

While there are about a million more details we could address, most are covered in other videos and articles.

For now, it’s time to put away the laptop, and embark on your own vacation to the French Riviera to take in a movie or two.