I have a solution to keep track of rental properties and can’t quite think through the logic of how to handle something. Let me give you an example of a building with 10 apartments and they are all rented.

A. Current tenant moving out: Tenant tells me April 1st… they are moving out of their apartment #412 at the end of their lease on June 1st.

B. New Tenant moving in: On May 12th I have a new tenant who will be moving into apartment #412 effective June 8th. (7 days are needed for apartment cleanup, painting, repair etc.)

Here’s what I can’t seem to get my brain around.

I don’t want to lose all of the past information from tenant A. But I need to add the new tenant on June 6th and start them with their own information.

How would you handle this? And if your idea juices are flowing here’s another related question. How would you put letter B’s name into the system prior to move in? They fill out an application and put down money to hold the apartment right. I don’t just want to put their name on a piece of paper I want it in the database in a way that works.

I use FMP8.

Thanks a lot,

Bill

Hi Bill,

I would use three tables for this. Apartments, Leases, and Tenants. Each apartment would have multiple leases overall (leases would have a ApartmentID field to link them to apartments by relationship, and a Tenant ID field to link to Tenants by relationship), but only one lease for a given period. When you entered the information would be irrelevant - you could just capture this as a 'Lease created on' date field in addition to a lease start date field. You probably could do without a tenant file and just trap that info on a lease, but you would be duplicating that data everytime a tenant renewed a lease, or moved to a different apartment in the same complex.

-Raz

Edited March 23, 200619 yr by Guest
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