Manage rental income. Invoice clients. Stay compliant.

Money you hold is not money you have

Rent collected on behalf of a landlord, service charge held against future maintenance, and deposits held against a tenancy are all obligations sitting in your account looking like a balance. Spending them is the single most common way a property business fails, and it usually happens by accident during a slow quarter rather than by intent.

Keep the split visible — what belongs to a landlord, what is reserved for maintenance, what is yours — and the number you make decisions on becomes the real one.

Commission, management fees and service charge

Three revenue types with three different rhythms, and treating them as one line hides which part of the business actually works:

• Sales commission: large, irregular, and often shared between agents, which makes the gross figure meaningless without the split recorded.
• Management fees: a percentage of rent collected, small and predictable, and the part that pays for the office between transactions.
• Service charge: not revenue at all in the usual case but a fund held for a purpose, reconciled against what was actually spent on the building.

Tax on rent and on agency income

Withholding tax on rent is deducted at source by corporate tenants and remitted on the landlord's behalf, so what arrives is already net — and the credit note is what allows the landlord to claim it. Agency commission is business income taxed in the ordinary way.

Note the asset test in the small company definition. A business holding property on its own balance sheet can be well inside the ₦100,000,000 turnover limit and still fail the ₦250,000,000 fixed asset test, losing the Companies Income Tax exemption entirely. Property is the sector where that happens most often.