Commercial leases and service charge

Commercial leases are handled separately

Terms that differ from residential tenancies — longer horizons, escalations, break clauses — are held on the commercial lease itself.

The residential advance-rent flag is not applied to commercial property. Those terms are negotiated between businesses.

Escalations

A rent escalation is applied to the lease and recorded, keeping both the old and the new rent, so a rent history is a query rather than a reconstruction.

Lease lifecycle

A lease can move between active, expired and terminated, and each change writes an immutable record of who made it, when it took effect and why.

This matters operationally: a lease that has run its course stops attracting escalations and service-charge allocations.

Service charge

A building has a service-charge pool with a budget, against which actual expenditure accumulates through procurement and maintenance.

Costs apportion to tenants by their recorded share, so a tenant's charge is derived rather than assigned. At period end the pool reconciles and the difference settles per tenant, posting to the ledger like any other transaction.

Settling a service-charge bill

Payments are recorded against a specific charge, with each receipt keeping its own row so a part-paid charge retains a full trail. Paying more than is outstanding is refused rather than capped.