What it measures

Payment Health answers one question: how reliably has this tenant met their payment obligations? It reads the ledger you already have — rent charges, fees, payments, credits — and reports what happened, month by month.

It is not a credit check and it does not look outside your own records. Nothing is fetched from a bureau, nothing is shared with another landlord, and no data about this tenant from anywhere else is involved. It is your ledger, rearranged into a form you can read at a glance.

The result has three parts, and you always get all three:

  • A score from 0 to 100, with a band from Excellent to Critical
  • A confidence level, which says how much history stands behind the number — not how good the number is
  • The factors that produced it, in counts you can check against the timeline

You will never see a bare number. If we cannot explain a score, we do not show it.

How a month is judged

Each billing period gets one outcome. The periods come from the lease itself — its start date, its due day, its grace days — so a month where rent was never posted shows up as a gap rather than quietly disappearing.

For each period we work out what was owed, what was paid, and when:

  • On time — payment was initiated by the due date
  • Within grace — initiated after the due date but inside the grace window
  • Late — initiated after the grace window closed
  • Outstanding — still unpaid, and the grace window has passed
  • Due — unpaid, but the deadline has not arrived yet, so it is not counted against anyone

Payments are matched to the oldest thing outstanding first, which is how your balance already behaves. If a tenant misses one month and then pays once, that payment clears the older month and the newer one becomes the outstanding one — which is what actually happened.

Everything charged to the tenant counts, including late fees and the fee raised when a bank payment fails. Those are their obligations too. A small unpaid amount is shown as outstanding, but it weighs far less than a whole month unpaid — the score scales with how much is owed, not merely whether anything is.

Why a payment that settled late can still be on time

This is the rule that surprises people most, and it matters.

Bank transfers take days to clear. A tenant who starts a payment on the 1st may see it settle on the 6th — and that delay belongs to the banking rails, not to them. So timeliness is measured from when the tenant initiated the payment, not from when the money landed.

What is measured at settlement is the outcome. Did it go through, or did it come back? A payment that was started on time and then failed for insufficient funds is not on time — it is a failed payment, and the month stays unpaid until something else settles it.

Put simply: when they acted decides timeliness, and what happened decides reliability. Time spent in transit is neither, and it is never scored.

Third-party assistance

When a nonprofit, a government program, an employer or a family member pays toward the rent, you record it as a payment with a note about where it came from. It behaves exactly like any other payment: it reduces the balance, appears on the statement, and settles the obligation.

It never lowers the score. A month covered on time by someone else is on time. The score still asks the same questions — was the full amount satisfied, by the deadline, did a balance remain — and assistance appears as context so you can see it happened without it counting against anyone.

We record the kind of source, not a profile of it. A church is recorded as a nonprofit. The organisation's name is optional, kept only for your records, and never used in any calculation.

Correcting and excusing

Sometimes the record is wrong, and sometimes it is right but you would rather not hold it against a tenant. These are different things, so they are two different actions.

Correcting a mistake is for when the incident was never the tenant's doing — a payment processor fault, an error on our side, something you recorded wrongly, a duplicate. You pick what went wrong. The period stops counting because it should never have counted.

Choosing not to count it is for when it really happened and it really was theirs, but you are exercising judgement — illness, a hard month, a one-off you have decided to absorb. You write a short reason. The period stays visible in the timeline and simply does not score.

Both are counted in the explanation. A score built on several adjustments says so on its face — otherwise, six months later, nobody could tell a reliable tenant from a generous landlord, and that distinction is the whole value of the number.

What it will not do

Some of these are deliberate limits rather than missing features:

  • It does not decide anything. No renewal recommendation, no automatic notices, no ranking of tenants. It reports payment behaviour and stops there.
  • It is never shown to tenants. This is an internal view.
  • It never leaves your account. A score is computed from your data and visible only to you. It is not shared with other landlords and never will be.
  • It does not score a month we cannot vouch for. If rent was never posted, or a landlord waived the balance, that month is shown but not counted — you should not be able to lose points because of a gap on our side or a decision on yours.
  • It will not give you a number too early. Below three completed billing periods you get the timeline and no score, because three data points cannot support one honestly.

Payment Health summarizes payment activity recorded in GoodTenant. It does not make lease-renewal, screening, or housing decisions. Payment records should be reviewed for accuracy, and housing decisions must comply with applicable laws and lease requirements.