User Guide

1. What SAC Is

Smart Apartment Care runs an apartment society: its flats and residents, its money, its maintenance, its gate and its community life.

There are two ways in, and they are for different jobs.

They sign in with the same credentials — country code and mobile number — and show the same records. Use whichever suits the job: pre-registering a guest is a phone thing, working through fifty visitor entries is a desk thing.

A third console exists for the people who run SAC across many societies. It signs in with an email address and is not covered here.

2. Signing In

2.1 First time

Your society's committee creates your account and the app emails you a temporary password. If you have not had one, ask whoever manages the flats register — not SAC support, who cannot add you to a society.

2.2 Signing in

1. Open the app (or go to the console and press Login).
2. Choose your country code and type your mobile number.
3. Type your password and press Login.

The number is the one on your account, not necessarily the phone you are holding.

2.3 You must change a temporary password

A new or reset account is marked force password change. The app takes you straight to the change-password screen and will not go anywhere else until you have set your own. This is deliberate — the temporary password went out by email.

2.4 Forgotten password

1. Press Forgot password on the sign-in screen.
2. Enter your mobile number. A six-digit code is emailed to the address on your account.
3. Enter the code and your new password.

The code is valid for 15 minutes and a new one cancels the previous one. If no email arrives, check that the society has the right address for you.

Sign-in attempts are rate limited — five failed attempts in fifteen minutes and the account pauses briefly. It protects you; wait it out rather than trying harder.

2.5 Changing your password

Profile → Change password. You need your current one. Changing it signs out every other device, and leaves the one in your hand signed in.

2.6 Signing out

Profile → Logout. On a shared gate-house tablet this also wipes the saved offline copy of everything that device had downloaded, so the next guard on shift cannot read the previous one's screens.

3. Your Account & Preferences

3.1 Language

The app speaks English, हिन्दी, తెలుగు, தமிழ், ಕನ್ನಡ and മലയാളം.

Profile → Language. Each language is listed in its own script. By default the app follows your phone; set it explicitly when the handset is in one language and you would rather read another — which is normal where one phone serves a household.

Money is grouped the Indian way whatever the language: ₹1,23,456, and ₹1.2L / ₹3.4Cr where space is short. Dates read in your chosen language; times are 24-hour throughout, because a gate log wants 18:30 rather than "6:30".

3.2 Appearance

Profile → Appearance — Match my phone, Light, or Dark. The default follows the phone, which is usually right: somebody starting a night shift has generally already told their phone to go dark.

3.3 Your profile

Profile holds your name, mobile, email and photo. Your mobile number identifies your account, so changing it is not a self-service action — ask the committee.

4. Finding Your Way Around

4.1 The three tabs

The app opens on three tabs: Facilities, Split Bills, Profile.

4.2 The facilities list

Every society you belong to, one card each. A card shows unread notifications for that society. Most people have exactly one.

4.3 Inside a facility

A grid of illustrated tiles, grouped under headings — Overview, My Flats, Management, Charges & Bills, Operations, Procurement & Staff, Utility. You only see tiles you can use. A tile that leads nowhere but a management screen is drawn only for whoever manages that area, which is why your neighbour's screen may look different from yours.

My Flats is hidden entirely if you hold no flat here — a technician who works in the building but lives elsewhere would only find four empty lists.

4.4 My Home

A resident does not land on the tile grid at all. If you have no hand in running the place — no committee role, not the owner, not staff — the app takes you straight to My Home: what you owe, your complaints, your visitors, the notices on your board, and quick actions including Emergency.

It happens once, on the way in. Press back and you get the grid, which is where the things My Home does not cover live — meetings, polls, the committee list, contacts, tambola.

4.5 Search

The magnifying glass in a facility's header searches the whole society at once: flats, residents, visitors, vehicles, complaints, notices, bills and vendors. Two characters minimum.

It never shows you anything you could not open anyway — each kind is filtered by the same rule its own screen applies, and a kind you may not read is named as skipped rather than silently dropped. “No results” and “you may not search residents” are different answers and it says which.

4.6 Badges

A number on a tile is something waiting. Red means already late (an overdue schedule, an open incident, expired fire equipment). Amber means waiting on somebody (meter readings due, payroll to approve, cars with no bay).

4.7 The bell

Top right, on both the facilities list and inside a facility. On the list it is your total across every society; inside one it is that society's share. A notification is marked read when you open it, not when you open the list — so the dot still means "I have not looked at this". Mark all read is there when you want it.

Tapping a notification opens the thing it is about.

5. My Flats

Only shown if you hold a flat here as owner, tenant or care taker — or if you own the facility.

5.1 Info

The society's own details: name, address, contact. Read-only unless you run the Facility area.

5.2 My Units

One card per flat you hold, with your role on it (Owner / Tenant / Care taker), its block, its type and what it currently owes.

From a unit card you can reach:

• Charges — what this flat owes and its payment history
• Rent — the tenancy agreement and rent payments, if there is one

5.3 My Payments

Your own money, newest first — the opposite order to a worklist, because what you came to check is what happened last.

Everything you have been charged, paid and unpaid, with the receipt for each payment. Filter by month, or by Paid / Unpaid — a part-paid charge counts as unpaid, since it is still owed.

It also shows attempts that went wrong, which is the half no screen used to have. If a payment was taken and never reached the charge, it says so, tells you not to pay again, and gives you the reference to quote. If a card genuinely failed, it offers Try payment again — and never offers that where the money was actually taken.

See Paying Your Dues.

5.4 My Work

Only for technicians, housekeepers and guards, and for anyone named as a reviewer. One list of everything waiting on you personally — work orders, housekeeping rounds, meter rounds due, overdue inspections, escalations raised to you, and anything awaiting your sign-off. Tapping an item opens it.

6. Paying Your Dues

My Flats → My Payments, or a unit card → Charges.

Each charge shows what it is for, the flat, what was billed, what has been paid and what is still due.

6.1 If your society takes online payments

You will see a Pay now button.

1. Press Pay now.
2. Check the amount. It defaults to the whole outstanding balance; you may enter less for a part payment, but not more.
3. Press through to the payment screen and pay by card, UPI or net banking.
4. Wait for the confirmation rather than closing the app.

Your balance updates and a receipt PDF is generated and emailed to you.

If you close the app mid-payment, the payment may still have gone through. Do not pay twice. The screen says confirming rather than failed in that case; give it a moment, then check the charge again. If money left your account and the balance did not move, tell the treasurer — there is a screen that finds exactly this and puts it right.

6.2 Recording a payment you made another way

Press Record to write down a payment made by cash, cheque or transfer.

1. Enter the amount.
2. Choose the payment mode.
3. If you choose Online Payment and the society has a gateway, the button becomes Continue to payment and takes you to the secure screen instead.
4. If you choose Online Payment and the society has no gateway, the Transaction / Reference ID becomes required — put in the UTR or reference from your bank or UPI app, because that number is the only thing that makes the entry checkable later.
5. Press Pay.

If your society has not nominated a collecting account, no payment buttons appear at all. That is not a fault: dues are taken at the office and the treasurer records them.

6.3 Receipts

Every recorded payment produces a receipt PDF, linked from the payment and emailed to the resident whose dues they are — not to whoever pressed the button.

7. Complaints

Complaints tile. Anyone in the facility may raise one.

7.1 Raising one

1. Press +.
2. Pick a category and a priority.
3. Describe the problem. Attach a photo — it saves a visit.
4. Name the flat if it is about a particular one.
5. Submit. The committee is notified.

7.2 Following it

Your complaint moves through Open → Assigned → In Progress → Resolved, and then through sign-off if your society uses reviewers. You are notified at each step, and you can add notes at any time.

You may be asked to confirm the fix. Complaint reviewers can be any member, because the right person to say whether a leak stopped is usually whoever reported it. If a job comes to you for review, approve it or send it back with a reason — a rejection puts it back on the technician's list rather than closing it.

7.3 Running the complaint desk

Needs the Complaints responsibility (a role ticked for Work Orders keeps it too). You get every complaint in the building, and can assign, change status, raise a work order from a complaint, and close it.

8. Visitors & Guests

Visitors tile. Everybody has it — expecting a guest is your own business.

8.1 Pre-registering a guest

1. Press +.
2. Enter the visitor's name and mobile, the purpose, and their vehicle number if they are driving.
3. Choose your flat.
4. Save. The gate can now see them coming.

8.2 What you see

Your own flat's visitors. Whoever keeps the register — the guard, or a committee member holding Visitors — sees the whole building's, can check people in and out, and can search by name, number, purpose or number plate.

8.3 At the gate

Guards work from the console: log an arrival, mark an exit, and see who is currently inside. It keeps working when the connection drops — see Working Offline.

9. Emergency Alerts

Any member can raise one, with no rights at all. A permission check on a panic button is one nobody passes at the moment they need it.

The red SOS pill sits first in the facility header so it never moves as other buttons come and go, and there is an Emergency action on My Home.

1. Press it. A screen opens rather than an alarm firing — a single tap would fire it in your pocket, and a building that learns to ignore false alarms is worse off than one with no button.
2. Choose the kind: medical, fire, security, other.
3. Add a note if there is time. Nothing but the kind is required.
4. Confirm.

It reaches the committee and the gate house together. Managers alone would be wrong: at two in the morning the person who can walk over is the guard, and a guard is staff rather than committee.

Responders see your name and your mobile number — the one place in the app a number is shown without its owner having published it. Somebody has pressed a panic button, and the first useful thing anyone can do is ring them back.

An alarm is acknowledged and then resolved. Two steps, because the gap between them is the useful number: how long before anybody came. Resolving one nobody acknowledged marks both, so it never reads as though nobody turned up.

The console answers alarms and deliberately offers no way to raise one. A guard at a desk with a phone in reach picks the phone up.

10. Amenity Booking

Amenities tile. The clubhouse, the gym slot, the guest room.

10.1 Booking

1. Open Amenities and pick one.
2. Choose a date from the week strip.
3. Pick your time — a slot from the grid, a start and end time, or a range of dates for something booked by the night. Which one you get depends on how the amenity is set up.
4. Confirm.

Every slot is shown whether free or not, on purpose: a busy morning should look busy rather than empty.

If the amenity needs approval your booking sits as Requested until somebody answers. A pending request holds the slot — nobody else can take it while you wait.

10.2 Cancelling

Open the booking and press Cancel. That releases the slot immediately.

Times cannot be edited. Moving a booking means cancelling and rebooking, so the new time faces the same clash and quota checks. The price you were quoted is stamped when you book and does not change afterwards.

10.3 Running the diary

Needs the Amenities responsibility. You get the request queue, the diary of what is coming, and blackouts for closing something for repairs. Closing an amenity stops new bookings and leaves existing ones alone — you are told how many fall in the window so you can talk to those people.

Defining an amenity — hours, capacity, price, notice period, per-flat quota — is done in the app.

11. Noticeboard

Notices tile. Everyone can read the board; posting needs the Notices responsibility.

11.1 Reading

Notices newest first, urgent ones marked. The tile badge counts your unread ones, and turns red if any unread notice is urgent. A notice is marked read when you open it.

Expired notices drop off the board automatically but are not deleted — there is an Include expired filter for looking something up later.

11.2 Posting

Best done at a desk, in the console: a notice is a paragraph somebody has to write.

1. Notices → Post.
2. Title and body.
3. Choose the audience: everyone, owners only, tenants only, or one block.
4. Optionally set publish at to schedule it, and expires at so it comes down by itself.
5. Mark it urgent if it genuinely is.
6. Post. Everyone in the audience is notified.

Editing a notice does not re-notify anybody and does not mark it unread — fixing a typo must not tell three hundred people they have unread post. Something genuinely new should be a new notice.

You can see who has read it, which is the answer to "has everyone seen the water notice".

12. Resident Directory

Directory tile. Reaching a neighbour.

Available to people who hold a flat here as owner or tenant. Guards, technicians and care takers do not have it — they are members of the facility without being members of the society.

12.1 What is shown

Everyone by name and flat. Phone numbers and email addresses are not shown unless that person has chosen to share them. Somebody who has not appears with "not shared" rather than a blank.

12.2 Your own entry

Directory → My listing. You control:

• Listed — whether you appear at all (on by default; who lives where is on the door anyway)
• Show mobile / Show email — both off by default
• Alternate mobile — publish a landline or second number instead of your account number

Nobody else can edit your entry. The only thing a committee can do is unlist somebody entirely, and that takes owner-level rights.

13. Meetings, Documents & Polls

These belong to the flats, so they are for owners and tenants — plus whoever runs the module. Guards and technicians do not see them.

13.1 Meetings

The schedule of AGMs and special meetings, with agenda, minutes and attendance. Whoever holds Meetings can create and edit them.

13.2 Documents

Bye-laws, approvals, insurance, audited accounts. Whoever holds Documents can upload and remove them; everyone else reads.

13.3 Polls

1. Open Polls and pick a live one.
2. Choose your option and cast the vote.

A flat's vote belongs to that flat's owner or tenant, so you choose which of your flats you are voting for. Care takers cannot vote.

Whoever holds Polls creates them, sees the tally and exports results.

14. Vehicles & Parking

Parking tile. Everyone has it — registering your own car is your own business.

14.1 Registering your vehicle

1. Parking → Vehicles → +.
2. Registration number, type, make, colour.
3. Choose your flat.

Type the plate however you like — TS 09 AB 1234, ts09ab1234 and TS-09-AB-1234 are the same plate to SAC.

14.2 The slot plan

Which bay belongs to which flat, grouped by block. Open to every member — it is the building's layout, and it is what you check before complaining that somebody is in your space.

14.3 What others see

You see your own flat's vehicles. The gate and whoever holds Parking see the whole register.

Allotting a bay is a separate, narrower right than reading the register: a guard can look up any plate at three in the morning but cannot decide which flat gets B1-042. Allotting a bay to nobody is how a bay is freed.

15. Split Bills

The second tab, and deliberately not about your society — it is for flatmates, trips and parties, and the people in a group may live anywhere.

15.1 A group

1. Split Bills → + and name the group.
2. Add members by mobile number.
3. If a number is not registered, you are offered a short form — name and email — and that person is created and added there and then, and emailed a password. The debt is real whether or not they have installed anything.

15.2 An expense

1. Add expense: what, how much, who paid.
2. Split equally or enter exact amounts. Exact shares must add up to the total.
3. Save.

Shares are written down per person when the expense is added, so somebody joining or leaving later never restates an old dinner.

15.3 Settling up

Balances shows one number per person: positive means the group owes you. Suggest settlements turns those into a short list of concrete payments. Record one when it happens.

A member with a non-zero balance cannot be removed, and a group with unsettled balances cannot be deleted — that would hide a live debt. Archive instead.

16. Tambola

Utility → Tambola. Housie night.

16.1 Playing

Open the game to see the board — all ninety numbers, ten to a row — and your tickets. You strike your own numbers: tap a square once its number has been called. Following the caller is most of what the game is.

A number that has been called but not yet struck is outlined, and the ticket header says how many are waiting, so looking away for a round does not cost you the game.

When you complete a prize — a line, a corner, a full house — press Claim. Claims are checked against the numbers actually called, not against what you have marked, so marking nothing can still win and marking everything cannot.

First valid claim takes the prize.

16.2 Hosting

Anybody can create a game among people they name. Handing a ticket to every flat needs the Tambola responsibility, because that puts the society's name on it and notifies people who never asked to play.

1. + New game, name it and set the time.
2. Choose the audience and how many tickets each player gets.
3. Set what each prize level is worth.
4. Tickets are cut immediately, so players can see them before the evening.

At game time press Start, then Draw for each number. Only the person who created the game can draw and end it.

Prize amounts can be changed during a game — a sponsor announced halfway through is normal. The name, time and players cannot be changed once it starts.

Players are reminded about an hour before a scheduled game.

17. The Society Record

Info tile (app) or Society / Facility details (console). Needs the Society or Facility responsibility.

Two different things, deliberately separated:

• Facility details — the society's own particulars: name, address, contact, registration. Changes once a year.
• Society — registration number, registered address, the formal record.

Handing somebody the flats register should not hand them the society's own details, which is why these are separate ticks.

18. Committee & Roles

Committee tile. Everyone can see who is on the committee and how to reach them — that is the point of it.

18.1 Members

Name, role, flat and contact for each committee member. Whoever holds Committee can add and remove people.

18.2 Roles and responsibilities — how permissions actually work

Roles → the role → its responsibilities. This is the heart of the permission system, and it is worth understanding.

A committee role is a list of ticked responsibilities. Each tick grants one area of the app. A treasurer might hold Banks, Bills and Charges; a secretary Meetings, Documents and Polls; a maintenance convenor Work Orders, Maintenance and Vendors.

The tick is the permission. There is no separate "make this person an admin" step.

There are 32 areas: Work Orders, Maintenance, Housekeeping, Staff Attendance, Complaints, Visitors, Parking, Amenities, Notices, Tambola, Assets, Vendors, Inventory, SLA, Incidents, Fire Safety, Meters, IoT, Contacts, Society, Banks, Committee, Blocks, Units, Facility, Documents, Meetings, Polls, Charges, Bills, and the rest.

A role with nothing ticked has blanket rights, not none. That is how it behaves for societies that never divided the work up. As soon as you tick one box, the role is scoped to that box only — so ticking a single area on a long-standing role takes everything else away. Tick everything the person actually does, not just the new thing.

18.3 What a responsibility can never grant

Two things stay with the facility owner (or a SAC administrator), whatever is ticked:

• Payroll — staff salaries, bank details, PF numbers
• Payment gateway credentials — the keys that collect money from every resident in the building

A treasurer who keeps the bank accounts still does not get the credentials that collect into them.

19. Blocks, Units & Unit Types

The register everything else hangs off. Needs Blocks or Units.

19.1 Blocks

+ to add a block: name, floors, description.

19.2 Units

Within a block: flat number, unit type, area, and who holds it.

A flat records an owner, a tenant and a care taker — any of which may be empty. A flat can have several owners; one is the primary.

Creating units in bulk creates accounts for the residents and emails each a temporary password.

19.3 Unit types

2BHK, 3BHK, penthouse — with the area and the default charge basis. Set up once.

20. Move-in & Handover

Needs Handover — or Units, which still grants it.

Ending a tenancy used to clear the tenant and nothing else. The person who left kept their parking bay, their cars on the gate register, their listing in the directory and their booking of the clubhouse next month — and whatever they owed simply stayed on the ledger with no moment at which anybody was asked about it.

A handover is that moment. Start one against a flat and you get a checklist of eight items, in the order a society actually works through them:

Each item reads its own live state. “Dues cleared” shows what is owed right now and “Parking released” shows which bays are still allotted, so the checklist is a readout rather than a list of text somebody ticks from memory.

Several items can act as well as report: releasing the parking actually frees the bays.

An item is done or waived. A blocking item can be waived — a society may let somebody go owing money — but not silently: waiving one requires a reason, and the reason is kept.

21. Doing It in Bulk

Three things are worth doing to many rows at once. Each takes the same responsibility as doing it to one — doing something to two hundred flats is not a smaller act than doing it to one — and each decides what would happen before it does any of it, because a bulk action that half-succeeds is worse than one that refuses.

21.1 Importing the register

Console only, under Units. Picking a file and reading a three-hundred-row preview is desk work and there is no version of it usable on a handset.

Download the template, fill it in, and upload. The preview is the feature: an import creates flats, mints resident accounts and emails passwords, and there is no undo, so you see exactly what will happen first — including the rows that will not import and why.

Column headings are forgiving about case, spaces and underscores. A column it does not recognise is reported and skipped rather than refused, because a register exported from whatever you used before carries things this does not need. A flat already on the register is skipped, never overwritten — re-running a file you have since corrected by hand is the normal way to finish an import that had a few bad rows.

21.2 Raising a charge now

On a charge, Raise against the whole society, one block, or flats you pick. This is what a one-off is for — a lift repair, a Diwali levy — rather than waiting for the nightly run.

You must say which scope you mean; “everybody” has to be chosen deliberately, because an empty selection is what a half-filled form sends. Safe to press twice: a flat already billed for that charge today is skipped.

21.3 Allotting a row of bays

On the parking plan, Allot in bulk over the bays currently in view. All or nothing: the whole batch is checked first, including for contradictions inside it — one bay named twice, one car given two bays — which is what a spreadsheet with a stale row looks like.

Sending a notice to chosen flats is not here. It is an audience on the notice itself, so the read receipts stay on one announcement instead of being split across several.

22. Charges & Charge Types

Needs Charges.

22.1 Charge types

What a society charges for: maintenance, water, corpus, sinking fund. Each has a name and a basis. Define these before raising charges.

22.2 Raising a charge

1. Charges → +.
2. Pick the charge type and the period.
3. Set the amount, per flat or per square foot.
4. Choose which flats it applies to.
5. Raise it.

Every affected flat gets a charge line and its residents — owner, tenant and care taker — are notified.

22.3 Recurring charges

A monthly charge can be set to raise itself. The job runs nightly and notifies each flat.

22.4 Recording payments

Open a charge line and press Record payment: amount, mode, reference, and which bank account it landed in. This decrements the flat's balance, adds to what it has paid, and credits the bank — in one action. A receipt is generated and emailed to the resident.

23. Collecting Dues

Needs Collections — or Charges, which still grants it, so whoever was collecting yesterday still is.

Collect Charges in the app, Money → Collections in the console. The other cut through the same money: not one charge and the flats under it, but everything outstanding across every charge, one row per debt, oldest first.

Sorted by age rather than by flat on purpose. By flat it is a directory; by age it is a queue, and the top of it is where the money is.

23.1 How old, and how worried

Four buckets — 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days. Tapping one narrows the list. A total says how much is owed; the buckets say how worried to be about it.

Days overdue are counted by the server and floored at zero, so a charge dated next week is never “-6 days late”.

23.2 Reminders

The society chases on its own, once per rung and never twice:

A debt sitting at ten days overdue for three weeks produces one message, on the day it crossed seven. Email joins at the second rung rather than the first: a society that emails somebody the day a charge falls due reads as a debt collector rather than a neighbour.

Remind sits beside Collect and sends that same message early. It sends the rung the debt has actually reached and never the next one up — pressing it on a three-day-old debt cannot conjure the thirty-day notice that copies the committee. Nothing goes twice within twelve hours, it asks before it fires, and it tells you afterwards exactly what went and to whom.

23.3 Chased already?

A Chased column says when somebody was last reminded, which is the question you have before picking up the phone. Ringing the one resident who was emailed this morning is how a society annoys the person who was about to pay.

A charge the committee has not approved shows Not approved instead of Collect. It stays on the list, because the money is genuinely outstanding and hiding it would make the ageing totals lie.

24. Bills & Bill Payments

Needs Bills. This is money going out — the lift contractor, the electricity bill, the security agency.

24.1 Recording a bill

Bills → +: name, bill number, payee, amount, due date, category.

24.2 Paying one

Open the bill and press Add payment: amount, date, mode, reference, and which account it was paid from.

A payment voucher PDF is produced — the society's proof that it went out, showing the bill total and what is still outstanding. It is emailed to whoever recorded it, as the society's own copy. The payee is not emailed.

Bills can be paid in instalments; the voucher says what remains.

25. Bank Accounts

Banks tile. Needs Banks.

25.1 Adding an account

1. Banks → + (or Add account in the console).
2. Bank name, account number, account name, branch, location, IFSC.
3. Choose the account type — Savings, Current, Overdraft, Fixed Deposit or Escrow.
4. Optionally a UPI id and an opening balance.

25.2 Account numbers are protected

Account numbers and UPI ids are encrypted. Whoever holds Banks sees the full number; everybody else sees it masked (••••••••7890).

If you are editing an account and the number shows as dots, leave the field alone — typing over dots is how a masked value gets saved as the real number.

The IFSC, bank name and branch are not encrypted: an IFSC identifies a branch and anyone can look one up.

25.3 Balances

Every charge payment credits its account and every bill payment debits one, so balances move by themselves.

26. Budget & Funds

Needs Budget — or Banks, which still grants it. They were one right until it became clear that letting somebody draft next year's figures should not also hand them the society's bank accounts.

26.1 A budget

What the society expects to raise and what it expects to spend, a line per category, for a period you name. Argued over once at the AGM and then measured against.

Actuals are not typed in. Spend is read from what is already recorded — bills, payroll, work orders, purchases — so the budget screen and the ledger cannot disagree about what a category cost.

Cost trend shows the same categories month by month.

26.2 Funds

The sinking fund, the corpus, whatever else the society keeps money aside in. Each fund has a balance and a ledger of movements in and out.

Reading the funds needs nothing but membership. A sinking fund is what every owner paid into, and a committee that could see the balance while residents could not would be the wrong way round.

27. Taking Payments Online

Owner or SAC administrator only. Not the committee, not the treasurer.

Each society uses its own Razorpay account and its own bank. Nothing pools anywhere in between.

27.1 Setting it up

In the console: Money → Banks → the account → Payments. In the app: Banks → the account card → Online payments.

1. Key ID — from your Razorpay dashboard. Public; it goes to the payment screen.
2. Key secret — from the same place. Encrypted before storage and never shown again, so leave it blank when editing to keep the stored one.
3. Webhook secret — a different value, from Razorpay's webhook settings. Optional but strongly recommended; see below.
4. Tick Collect payments into this account.
5. Turn on Accept online payments.
6. Save.

27.2 The webhook

In your Razorpay dashboard, add a webhook pointing at the address shown on the settings screen, subscribed to payment.captured, and paste its secret above.

Payments work without it — the app reports back when a payment finishes, and that is what settles the charge. What a webhook adds is the payment whose report never arrives: somebody closes the app mid-payment, or finishes in a separate UPI app that does not return. Razorpay takes the money and nothing tells the society.

Without a webhook that money is not lost, but somebody has to look: see Payments & Settlement.

27.3 Test mode

A key beginning rzp_test_ puts the gateway in test mode and the screen says so. Payments are simulated and no real money moves. Swap in the live key when ready — a society that believes it is taking real money and is not is a worse position than one that cannot take money at all.

27.4 Only one account collects

Setting an account to collect switches off any other. No collecting account means residents see no Pay button — deliberately, because choosing where other people's money lands is not a decision to make for somebody.

28. Payments & Settlement

Owner or SAC administrator only. Console: Money → Payments. App: Banks → Payment activity.

This answers the question a treasurer actually gets asked: "his card was declined and the money left his account anyway."

28.1 The list

Every online payment attempt, with what the trail says about it. The Only the ones that need a look switch is the working view.

Two separate date columns, and they mean different things:

• Credited — the society's books moved. This is the money you can spend.
• In the bank — Razorpay's settlement into your account, days later. It moves nothing on its own.

28.2 Discrepancies

Where the record and the trail disagree, the row says how:

• Captured but never applied — the resident has paid and the charge is still outstanding. This is the one you can fix.
• Marked failed, but captured — the same fact from the other side.
• Paid with no verified capture — worth a look, not fixable here.
• Bad signature — either a misconfigured webhook secret or somebody posting invented payments at your endpoint. Check the secret first.

28.3 Putting one right

Press Apply on a flagged row and confirm.

The amount and payment id come from Razorpay's own signed record, not from the screen — so you can apply a payment that provably arrived and cannot post one that never did. It clears that much of the charge and credits the account, exactly as it would have at the time. Pressing it twice changes nothing.

With no signed capture on the trail, Apply does not appear: detecting a problem is not licence to write off a debt. Check the Razorpay dashboard and record it by hand if it really arrived.

28.4 The trail

Trail on any row shows every outcome for that payment — the report from the app, the webhook, the duplicate that arrived second, the declined card with Razorpay's own wording, and the settlement. Exactly one event is marked moved the money.

29. Rent

From a unit card → Rent. For a flat that is let.

29.1 The tenancy

Tenant, monthly rent, deposit, start date and due day. A flat has at most one live agreement; ending one keeps it as history and clears the flat's tenant.

29.2 Payments

Log each rent payment against the agreement. Nothing is generated on a schedule — what is owed is worked out from the due dates that have passed against what has been paid. Paying in advance shows as a negative outstanding.

29.3 Who can do what

• Start, edit or end a tenancy — the flat's owner, a facility owner, or an administrator.
• Record a payment or view — those, plus the care taker (who often collects) and the tenant on that agreement.

30. Work Orders

Needs Work Orders. The job list.

30.1 Raising one

+: title, description, category, priority, and the asset or flat it concerns. One can also be raised straight from a complaint, an incident or a failed fire inspection.

30.2 Allocating

Assign and pick from the staff and committee list — technicians, housekeepers, guards, and committee members, because a society that does its own snagging hands half its jobs to the secretary. Optionally name a reviewer.

The assignee is notified.

30.3 Doing the work

The assigned person can move their own job along — status, costs, notes — without any wider rights.

Open → Assigned → In Progress → Completed. Everything after Completed is sign-off; see Review & Sign-Off.

30.4 Filters

To review (waiting on you) and Awaiting review (waiting on anyone) are the two that matter day to day.

31. Maintenance Schedules

Needs Maintenance. Preventive maintenance — the lift, the pumps, the DG set.

+: what, which asset, how often (in days), who it goes to, and optionally a standing reviewer.

A job is raised automatically when a schedule falls due, and the next due date rolls forward. A schedule with a job still open is skipped, so a neglected one does not pile up twelve identical work orders.

Naming the reviewer on the schedule means every job it raises inherits that reviewer — the committee names the checker once rather than twelve times a year.

Generate now raises the next one early.

32. Housekeeping

Needs Housekeeping.

32.1 Checklists

A template: name, area, and the list of items to be done.

32.2 Runs

Raise a run from a checklist and assign it. The run snapshots the item titles, so editing the template later never rewrites a round somebody already signed off.

The assigned housekeeper ticks items as they go. When every item is done the run goes for review if a reviewer was named.

33. Review & Sign-Off

Work orders, housekeeping runs and complaints all end the same way.

Open → Assigned → In Progress → Completed → Under Review → Reviewed → Finalized
                                    │
                                    └── the work is done here; everything after
                                        is sign-off, not labour

Naming a reviewer is what creates the review step. No reviewer means the job closes at Completed — most jobs in a small society do not warrant two signatures, and forcing one builds a queue nobody empties.

• Review — approve, or reject with a reason. Rejecting reopens the job and puts it back on the assignee's list.
• Finalize — a manager's act, and the last one.
• Reopen — available afterwards if something was missed.

Two rules worth knowing:

• Nobody reviews their own work. A job cannot be assigned to its own reviewer, or vice versa.
• A manager can always step in for a named reviewer who is on leave. The record shows who actually signed.

The buttons you see are decided by the server for you specifically, so a button you can see is one you can press.

34. Guard Duty & Staff Attendance

34.1 Marking your own

Any staff member marks their own day, with no special rights. My Work → Attendance, or the console's Guard duty.

34.2 Keeping the roster

Needs Staff Attendance. Mark present, absent, half day or leave for each person, and see the month at a glance.

This is what payroll is computed from, which is why it has its own responsibility rather than riding on general operations rights.

35. Incidents

Something that happened — a fire, a lift entrapment, a theft — as against a complaint, which is a request to fix something.

Anyone in the facility may report one. Waiting to find a manager is how incidents go unrecorded.

1. Incidents → +.
2. What happened, and when it occurred (separate from when you are reporting it).
3. Severity, category, location, people involved.
4. Submit. The committee is notified.

Investigating needs Incidents: immediate action, root cause, corrective action, and a flag for whether it must be reported to an authority. A corrective work order can be raised from the incident.

36. Fire Safety

Needs Fire Safety. Fire kit is its own register because what matters about an extinguisher is its dates, not its purchase cost.

36.1 The register

Each piece: type, location, capacity, refill due date and hydro-test expiry. A piece can point at an asset if it is QR-tagged.

36.2 Inspections

Raise an inspection and it snapshots the whole kit into lines. The inspector marks each pass or fail; a failed line can raise a work order on the spot. Signing off stamps the result and rolls the next due date forward.

Fire compliance summarises what is overdue. Expired kit shows red on the tile.

37. Meters

Logging a reading is open to any member — whoever is standing at the meter is the right person to type the number in. Editing the register (tariffs, multipliers) needs Meters.

37.1 Logging

1. Meters → pick the meter.
2. + Reading, enter the number and the date.
3. Save.

Consumption is worked out at that moment and stamped on the reading along with the previous value and the rate — so correcting an old reading later cannot silently restate a bill that already went out. Recalculate re-derives the chain when that is genuinely what you want.

37.2 The register

Meter number, type, what it serves, the multiplier and the tariff. Meter summary shows consumption and cost over time.

38. Assets & QR Tags

Needs Assets. The lift, the pumps, the DG set, the gym equipment.

38.1 The register

Each asset has a code, unique in the society, plus category, location, purchase date, cost, warranty and status. Leave the code blank and the next one is allocated.

38.2 QR stickers

Each asset renders a QR sticker to print and stick on the thing itself.

Scan it with the app to pull up that asset immediately — with its open work orders, its maintenance schedules and its live AMC. A damaged label is covered too: type the code by hand.

38.3 Timeline

Timeline in the asset's menu assembles everything that ever pointed at it — work orders, schedules, contracts, incidents, fire inspections, meter readings — plus register events like being moved or decommissioned. The detail screen says what is going on now; the timeline says what it has been through.

An asset with history cannot be deleted. Mark it Decommissioned.

39. Vendors & AMC Contracts

Needs Vendors.

39.1 Vendors

Contracted suppliers, with GST number and payment terms — deliberately not the same list as Contacts, which is a rated list of handy people.

A vendor with contracts or stock movements cannot be deleted; deactivate instead.

39.2 AMC contracts

Annual maintenance contracts: vendor, what it covers, start and end date, value, and how many days before expiry to warn.

Expiry is worked out from the end date, and expiring contracts show on the tile. Renew rolls the contract forward from its current end date, handling short months properly.

40. Inventory

Needs Inventory.

40.1 Materials

What the store keeps: name, category, unit, reorder level, and the vendor.

40.2 Movements

Every movement is a ledger line — receipt, issue, return or adjustment. Quantity is always entered as a positive number; the type decides the direction.

Each line stamps the balance after it, so the ledger reads as a chain. Removing more than is in stock is refused. Reversing a movement restates every later balance.

Recalculate re-totals the whole ledger as an audit check.

41. SLA & Escalations

Needs SLA.

41.1 Policies

A policy sets response and resolution targets. Leaving category or priority empty means "any"; the most specific matching policy wins. Measured against both work orders and complaints.

41.2 The escalation ladder

Rules by level: how many hours overdue, and who to tell — the assignee, the committee, the owner, or the person who raised it.

41.3 Escalations

Its own tile, separate from SLA on purpose: a policy is a setting you touch twice a year, an escalation is something to deal with today.

Each level raises once. Whoever it was raised to can acknowledge and resolve it. Manual escalation is always available.

42. IoT Devices

Needs IoT. Tank sensors, energy meters, gate controllers.

Register a device to get a device key, which is shown exactly once — copy it then, because only a hash is stored. Losing it means rotating to a new one.

Alert rules set thresholds. Alerts appear on the tile in red, and can be acknowledged and resolved. A device that stops reporting is flagged within the hour.

43. Staff & Payroll

Owner, SAC administrator, or somebody given Payroll by name. A blanket committee role does not pick this one up: salaries and staff bank details are not covered by general operations rights, so the tick has to be put on a named role deliberately.

43.1 The staff register

Staff is its own tile, beside Payroll. Who the society employs: designation, department, employment type, joining date, salary, bank details, PF and ESI numbers.

It was a tab inside Payroll and is a screen of its own because keeping the register is a standing job — somebody joins, somebody leaves, a bank account changes — while a pay run happens once a month.

Salary fields come back blank rather than refused for anybody without payroll rights, so the screen shows a dash rather than an error.

43.2 A payroll run

1. Payroll → New run, choose the month.
2. Generate — computed from the attendance already marked.
3. Check the lines, and regenerate if attendance was corrected.
4. Approve, then Mark paid.

Only a draft can be regenerated or deleted. Each person can see their own payslip under My payslips.

44. Needs Attention

Open to everybody, and it shows a different screen to each person.

One list of what is wrong here that you are answerable for, gathered from eight places: unpaid dues, open complaints, approvals waiting on you, overdue work orders, contracts expiring, stock run out, visitors still inside from yesterday, and unread urgent notices.

Each group is narrowed to your own where you do not run it. Your dues, your complaints, guests at your flat, notices on your board. So a resident's version is short and honest, and a manager's is the building's. Groups with no honest personal reading — approvals somebody else must sign, contracts, stock — are simply absent rather than shown empty.

A group with nothing in it is dropped entirely. A screen whose main feature is eight empty headings teaches people there is never anything on it.

Red is already late, amber is waiting on somebody — the same two meanings the tile badges use, so the colours cannot disagree. A debt goes red at thirty days, which is the same threshold the reminders and the ageing buckets use.

Nothing is done from here. Tapping a row opens the screen that owns it, which already has the permissions and the forms.

45. Approvals

Open to everybody, and usually empty.

Everything waiting on your signature, oldest first, across the five workflows that have one: charges to approve, bills to verify, bills to approve, amenity requests to answer, payroll runs to freeze, and complaints to review or finalise.

Not grouped by kind. Five headings would be five queues again, and the thing that has been waiting three weeks belongs at the top whatever it happens to be.

A resident's queue is the interesting one. Reviewing a complaint is usually theirs — the person who reported the leak is the only one who can say whether it stopped — so this is worth opening even if you run nothing.

The button on each row posts to the screen that already owns the act, so this is a queue rather than a second place a bill can be approved from. Where a decision needs a reason, it asks for one, because the screen behind it would refuse without.

46. The Calendar

Six diaries in one, which is the question nobody could answer before: what is happening here next Saturday?

• Meetings
• Preventive maintenance falling due
• Amenity bookings
• Fire safety checks
• Bill due dates
• Game nights

An agenda rather than a month grid, on both the app and the console. A grid on a phone gives each day about a centimetre, which fits a coloured dot and nothing else, so every answer needs a second tap.

Each kind is gated by the rule its own screen applies, so the calendar never shows you something you could not have opened anyway. A kind you cannot read is absent from the legend rather than listed empty.

The legend doubles as the filter — the thing that explains a colour and the thing that turns it off should be the same chip.

A bill appears only if somebody put a due date on it. Older bills have none and are left off rather than given a made-up one.

47. Dashboards

47.1 Manager dashboard

Dashboard tile, for owners, administrators and committee members. The whole facility on one screen — dues, complaints, work orders, attendance, assets, compliance — each block colour-coded by the server so no two screens disagree about what counts as bad.

The payroll block is omitted for anyone without payroll rights, rather than blanked. Headcount and attendance stay, being operational.

47.2 My Work

The other end of the telescope: one person's list. See My Flats.

48. Analytics

For owners, administrators and committee members — the same test the dashboard takes.

History, where the dashboard is a state. The dashboard says how the building is running right now; this says which way it is moving, over twelve months: collection rate, how long complaints take to close, spend by category, occupancy, visitor volume and maintenance load.

Each block is drawn only for whoever runs that subject. A block you cannot read is missing rather than empty.

A gap is not a nought. A month in which nothing was billed has no collection rate, and it is drawn as a gap — nought would be a claim that the society collected nothing, which is a statement about the society rather than about the data. Counts are the exception: a month with nobody at the gate really is zero visitors.

Collection is filed under the month of the charge, so September's maintenance settled in October counts towards September, where you would look for it. Closure time is filed under the month it closed, because that is the desk's current performance.

49. The Audit Trail

Owner or SAC administrator. The same tier that holds the gateway credentials, because this names people against acts.

Who did what to the society's money, its accounts and its roles: payments taken, recorded and unrecorded; bank accounts and gateway settings; who owns the place; the committee, its posts and what each post may manage; charges raised and signed off; bills raised, verified, approved and paid.

Two ways to read it. The stream, newest first — the opposite order to the approvals queue, because this answers “what just happened” rather than being a list to reach the end of. And one thing's own history: every approval on this bill, every edit to this charge, which is what you actually want when a figure looks wrong.

Each entry is a sentence the server composed, so two screens cannot word the same event two ways. Some say more than the act: approving a bill records 2 of 3 approvals, and creating a role with nothing ticked says out loud that it carries every area.

Nothing can write to it. There is no endpoint that adds an entry by hand, no edit and no delete — the value of a record is entirely in nobody being able to author it. Entries outlive what they describe, so a bill deleted next year leaves its approval history readable.

Account numbers and gateway secrets are dropped by name before anything is stored. That a credential changed is recorded; what it changed to is not.

50. The Gate & Operations Console

A web console for the people who work in one building at a desk. Same account as the app.

50.1 Signing in

Go to your society's address and press Login, or go straight to /app/. Country code, mobile, password — the same as the phone.

Register Your Society on the landing page creates a new society and its first account.

50.2 Choosing the facility

The app bar has a facility switcher. The console works on one society at a time; everything you see belongs to the one selected.

50.3 The sidebar

Grouped: Overview, Gate, Operations, Property, Money, Procurement, People, Management. It collapses to an icon rail, remembered per device, and has a filter box — with thirty-odd screens, typing "vendors" beats scrolling.

You see only what your responsibilities allow.

50.4 What the console is for

The desk half of the job:

50.5 What the console deliberately does not do

Assets and QR scanning, fire safety, meters, IoT, incidents, rent, split bills and tambola are on the phone. They happen in front of the thing — you scan a sticker standing at the lift, not at a desk.

Defining an amenity is on the phone too: a dozen policy fields set once a year.

50.6 Long lists

Visitors and the stock ledger load a page at a time, with Load more at the foot. Searching the visitor register searches the whole register on the server, not just the rows on screen.

51. Plate Lookup

Gate → Plate lookup. The question asked a hundred times a day at a gate house.

Type any part of a plate — spacing, dashes and case do not matter — and press enter. Three answers:

• Green — registered. Whose car it is, which flat, and which bay if one is allotted.
• Amber — not registered, but seen before. The gate has logged this plate as a visitor previously. This is the regular visitor, which is a different thing from a stranger.
• Grey — unknown. Most cars at a gate are, and that is a result rather than an error.

Partial plates match from the end: "1234" finds TS09AB1234. Three characters minimum, and it deliberately does not guess that O and 0 are the same — deciding two different plates are one car is a worse mistake at a gate than not finding a match.

52. Who Can Do What

52.1 The four kinds of person

Staff — technicians, housekeepers, guards — are members carrying a staff role. They get their own job queue, and the gate register, without being on the committee.

52.2 Open to every member

Doing these needs nothing beyond belonging:

• Report an incident
• Log a meter reading
• Lodge a complaint
• Register your own vehicle
• Expect a visitor
• Book an amenity
• Read the noticeboard, the committee list and the contacts list
• Watch a tambola game
• Mark your own attendance
• Move your own assigned job along

The register behind each of those needs the responsibility. Reporting an incident is open; investigating one is not.

52.3 Flat holders only

Meetings, documents, polls and the resident directory. A guard is a member of the facility without being a member of the society, and has no more claim on the bye-laws than on the ballot.

52.4 Owner or administrator only

• Payroll — salaries, staff bank details
• Payment gateway credentials
• Payments & settlement
• Unlisting somebody from the directory

52.5 Two rights that split

• Parking — reading the register accepts gate staff; allotting a bay takes the responsibility. A guard looks a plate up at 3am; deciding which flat gets B1-042 has a queue behind it.
• Visitors — the responsibility or being facility staff, because the guard on the gate is not on the committee.

53. Notifications

You are notified when something needs you or concerns your flat: a charge raised, a payment recorded, a complaint assigned or answered, a job assigned or sent back, a round ready for review, an incident, an escalation raised to you, a notice posted to your audience, and an hour before a tambola game.

You are never notified about your own actions.

Tapping opens the thing. A notification is marked read when opened, so the dot means "not looked at". Notifications outlive what they describe — a deleted work order leaves its notification readable.

54. Working Offline

The app keeps working when the network does not — for reading.

A screen you have opened before while online opens again offline, from a saved copy. This matters most in a gate house, which is usually the part of the building with the least signal.

You will see one of two banners:

• Red — "No internet connection". Nothing saved for this screen.
• Amber — "Offline — showing saved data from 10:42". You are reading a copy, and it says when it was taken.

The amber banner is the important one. A visitor register from forty minutes ago shown as though it were live is worse than an error, because somebody might wave a car in on the strength of it.

Writing still needs a connection, deliberately. Logging a visitor offline would mean deciding what happens when two guards log the same one from two tablets, and the failure mode of getting that wrong is a guard believing an entry was saved when it was not.

A screen never opened online is an error offline, not an empty list — an empty register reads as "nobody came", not "we have no idea".

Signing out wipes the saved copy. A gate-house tablet is shared.

55. Troubleshooting

I do not see a tile / a menu item other people have. It is your responsibilities. Tiles leading only to management screens are drawn only for whoever manages them. Ask whoever keeps the committee roles.

A committee member suddenly lost access to everything except one thing. Somebody ticked a single responsibility on their role. A role with nothing ticked has blanket rights; the first tick scopes it to that area alone. Tick everything they actually do.

No Pay button on my charges. The society has not nominated an account to collect into, or online payments are switched off. Dues are taken at the office.

A resident paid and their balance did not move. Money → Payments, switch on Only the ones that need a look. If Razorpay captured it, press Apply. If nothing is flagged, check the Razorpay dashboard and record it by hand.

Payments are taken but the society is never told. The webhook secret is missing or wrong. It is a different value from the key secret — swapping the two fails every event. Check the address in Razorpay matches the one on the settings screen exactly.

Nobody can see the account type list when adding a bank. The society's master data has not been seeded. Ask your administrator to run the operations seed.

The bank account number saved as dots. It was edited by somebody who only sees the masked number. Re-enter it as somebody holding Banks.

A resident cannot see meetings, documents or polls. They hold no flat as owner or tenant. Care takers, guards and technicians do not get these.

"Offline — showing saved data from ..." on a live connection. The connection dropped and came back. Pull to refresh.

The reset code never arrives. Check the email address on the account — the code goes to email, not SMS. Only three requests an hour are allowed.

A game is stuck and nobody can end it. Only the person who created a tambola game can draw and end it. If they are unreachable the game stays open; it harms nothing.

Smart Apartment Care — making society management simple.