Tracking licences and certifications

Many rental properties carry at least one renewable compliance item — an HMO licence, a gas safety certificate, a smoke alarm compliance check, a landlord registration. Prop Insights tracks these as their own event type on a property’s Actuals timeline, alongside rent changes, expenses, and valuations, so a renewal date sits next to everything else you’re already recording rather than living in a separate spreadsheet.

Adding a licence or certification

1. Open the property, go to Actuals, and click + Add Event (or click the Licences & Certifications card on the property’s Summary tab if it’s showing “No licences added” — that takes you straight into this form with the type already selected).
2. Choose the Licence / Certification event type.
3. Fill in:

Field	What it’s for
Issued / Renewed	The date this licence/certificate was issued or last renewed
Amount	What it cost — the renewal/inspection fee
Provider (optional)	Who issued it — e.g. “Council,” “Gas Safe inspector.” Used to match a later renewal against this one (see below)
Next Due Date	When it needs renewing next — this drives the reminder
Payment Date (optional)	When you actually paid, if different from the issue date
Receipt / Document (optional)	Attach the certificate or receipt itself
Notes (optional)	Free text — e.g. “Annual gas safety inspection”

Next Due Date is the only field that’s actually required beyond the date itself — everything else is optional, so a quick “renewed today, due again in 12 months” entry takes seconds even without the paperwork on hand yet.

How the 30-day renewal reminder works

A licence/certification shows up as an active reminder starting 30 days before its Next Due Date, and stays visible for 14 days after it becomes overdue (after that, it drops out of the day-to-day reminder list — it’s assumed you’ve either renewed it or are handling it some other way, so it stops nagging indefinitely).

While active, it appears in two places:

• Notification bell — listed as an action item with a shield icon, colour-coded orange (“due in N days”) or red (“N days overdue”)
• Dashboard property card — contributes to that property’s general due/overdue indicator alongside other reminders (payments due, tenancy expiries). If a licence is the most urgent thing on that property, the card reflects that.

The property’s own Summary tab also has a dedicated Licences & Certifications card showing the worst-case status across every licence on that property at a glance — green “Up to date,” orange “Renewal soon,” or red “Overdue” — without needing to open Actuals.

Renewing — recording a new licence event, not editing the old one

When a licence comes up for renewal, add a new Licence / Certification event rather than editing the existing one’s Next Due Date. Enter the same Provider name (e.g. “Council” both times) and the new Issued/Renewed and Next Due dates.

Matching by provider name is how Prop Insights knows the earlier one has been superseded: a later event with the same provider automatically stops the earlier one from showing as due or overdue, even if its own Next Due Date has technically passed. This also means a property can track several independent licences at once — a gas safety cert and an HMO licence, say — each with its own provider name and its own renewal cycle, without one accidentally superseding the other.

Multiple licences on one property

There’s no limit to how many licence/certification events a property can have. Every one with a different provider name is tracked and reminded on independently; every one with a matching provider name to a later event is treated as history for that same ongoing compliance item.

Where it shows on the property timeline

Licence/certification events appear in the Actuals timeline in the same list as rent changes, expenses, and valuations — sorted by date like everything else, with a shield icon and a distinct colour so they’re easy to pick out. Clicking one opens it for editing, same as any other event type.

Common questions

Does a licence event affect my cashflow numbers? The Amount is recorded for your own records but doesn’t feed into the cashflow forecast the way an Expense event does — if the renewal fee should also reduce your projected cashflow, record it separately as an Expense event too.

What happens if I don’t set a Provider? Nothing breaks — Next Due Date and the reminder still work. You just lose the automatic “this supersedes that one” matching, so if you later add a second licence event for the same real-world renewal, both will show as independently due unless you go back and give them matching provider names.

Can I dismiss the reminder without renewing? The Summary tab’s Licences & Certifications card can be hidden via Edit widgets once nothing’s currently due — but if something’s overdue or due soon, dismissing it doesn’t stick; it reappears, since this is a compliance nudge rather than a cosmetic widget. The notification bell entry behaves the same way — it’s driven by the same underlying due date, not a separate read/dismiss state.