Questions, answered properly

Yes. Patrimoine sends a six-digit code to your email address on every sign-in, not only on a new device or a new browser.

It is deliberate. The software holds an entire portfolio's money — rents collected, deposits held, what each owner is owed — and a password on its own is one leaked password away from all of it. The code costs you ten seconds and removes that risk almost entirely.

Check the spam or quarantine folder first; that is where it is nine times out of ten.

If it genuinely has not arrived after a minute, press Send a new code. The previous code stops working the moment a new one is sent, so use the newest email in the inbox and ignore the others.

Repeated requests are throttled, so asking five times in a row will slow you down rather than speed things up.

Your organisation details, under Settings. They appear on every invoice, receipt and statement you produce, so getting them right once saves reissuing documents later.

Then the language, currency and VAT rate on the Preferences tab. The currency decides how every amount is written, down to the thousands separator.

After that, use the guided lease assistant for your first letting. It creates the property, the owner, the unit, the tenant and the lease in one sitting, which teaches you the shape of the thing far faster than building each piece separately.

Your registry — parties, buildings and their ownership, units and leases — can be imported from a workbook under Settings › Data. The restore runs as a dry run first and tells you exactly what it would create before anything is written.

Financial history cannot be imported, and that is deliberate. It is immutable once written, and a way to load it from a file would be a way to rewrite the accounts. An organisation with a history before Patrimoine starts with opening balances instead, which are reconciled once and then closed.

Because the oldest debt is the one that should be settled first, and letting anybody choose otherwise is how arrears get quietly hidden.

A payment is applied to the oldest unpaid invoice until it is settled, then the next, and so on. Anything left over stays on the tenant's account as a credit and is applied to the next invoice raised.

You can always see which invoices a payment answered: the allocation is shown on the payment itself.

It stays on their account as a credit and is applied automatically to the next invoice raised. Nothing is lost and nothing needs remembering.

If they want it back rather than held, record a withdrawal against the account. That produces its own numbered receipt.

When the rent has been collected, not when it has been invoiced. An invoice raised is not money; treating it as money is how agencies end up paying owners out of other owners' rent.

The management fee and any agent commission come off as the rent arrives, so what you see as available is genuinely available to pay out.

No, and nothing in Patrimoine deletes a financial record. It is cancelled instead: the correction is posted as its own entry and both remain visible.

That is what makes the journal answerable to an auditor. A ledger you can quietly edit is not a ledger.

An adjustment is a correction, and only a correction. Money received is a deposit, money paid out is a withdrawal or a payout, and something charged is an expense — each has its own action because each means something different on a statement.

Using an adjustment for one of those hides what actually happened, which is exactly what you will wish you had not done when somebody queries the account eight months later.

No. Patrimoine raises them from the lease, on the schedule the lease sets, in a nightly run. A letting cannot be forgotten.

An invoice that already exists for a period is never raised twice, however many times the run happens.

Because something with financial history behind it cannot be removed without leaving the accounts unable to explain themselves.

A building whose units have ever been let, a party with payments against them, a lease with invoices — all are kept. Patrimoine lists exactly what is in the way before you commit to anything, so you can see whether the thing you want gone is genuinely unused.

They have to total exactly 100%. Anything else would make every owner statement for that building wrong, so it is refused rather than rounded.

Every message Patrimoine shows when something will not go through carries one. The code is stable, it means the same thing for ever, and it is the fastest way for support to know what you saw.

Every code has a page explaining what happened and what to do next, both inside the application under Help and publicly on this site.

No. Five codes in the whole catalogue say that, and they are the ones that are ours to fix rather than yours. Everything else tells you what you can put right yourself.

An Administrator can do everything, including Settings, Users, the Licence, the Activity Log and the Financial Journal.

A Property Manager does all the day-to-day work — properties, parties, leases, payments, owners, reports — and may delete records, but cannot reach the Manage group.

A Viewer can read and can export reports, and can change nothing.

Controls a role may not use are not merely greyed out, they are not shown. The server enforces the same rule, so a hidden control cannot be reached another way.

Yes. Invite them as a Viewer: they can read everything and export every report, and they cannot alter a record.

If they need to post corrections themselves, make them a Property Manager instead — but note that a Manager cannot see the Financial Journal, which is Administrator-only.

Switch them to inactive rather than deleting them. Their sessions end and their tokens stop working immediately, and their name stays on everything they did.

The activity log is never rewritten. Who did what is a matter of record, and a record you can erase is not one.

Yes, in the Activity Log. Every event records the person, the action, the record it touched, the time, and the address, browser and device it came from.

It is append-only: nothing in it can be edited or removed, by you or by us.

Invoices, receipts, reminders, notices, vouchers and statements — each at the point the record behind it is created, and each in your organisation's language.

Turn emails off on that party's own record. They are then sent nothing, and anybody who tries to send them something is told why rather than left wondering.

To stop everything for everybody, there is a single switch under Settings › Communications. With it off, an individual party can still be allowed back on.

Emails to your own colleagues — sign-in codes, invitations, password resets — are never affected by either switch.

The layout is fixed, but what it says about you is not: the name, address, telephone number, registration and tax numbers and bank details all come from your organisation details under Settings.

Documents already produced keep the details they were produced with. Changing your address does not rewrite last year's invoices, which is the correct behaviour for a document somebody has already been sent.

Every report exports as PDF, XLSX or CSV, and every role may export, including Viewers.

The whole registry exports as a workbook from Settings › Data. Your data is yours; there is no plan on which that stops being true.

Active leases are the number that matters. Users and parties have limits too, but they are set well above what a portfolio of that size needs, so in practice it is the leases that decide the plan.

Buildings, units and history are unlimited on every plan.

New active leases are blocked. Nothing already recorded is touched, nothing is hidden, and everything you can already see stays readable and exportable.

Going over a limit is a reason to talk to us, not a reason to lose access to your own records.

An administrator can do it from the foot of Settings › Organisation. It asks for the organisation name typed back exactly and for your own password, and then permanently deletes the organisation and everything in it.

It cannot be undone, by you or by us. There is no recycle bin and no copy kept.

If what you actually want is to stop paying, or to put Patrimoine aside for a while, write to us instead. That is a conversation, and closure is not.

No. Closing the account destroys the properties, the parties, the leases, the invoices, the payments and the financial journal, together with every user account.

The only thing that survives is a line in our own records saying that an organisation of that name closed on that date, which is what lets us answer if you ask us later what happened.