Rent ledger template
The ledger is the document a judge reads first. One row per month, every payment dated, and a balance line that has never been retyped by hand.
One row per month. Every cell is editable; the total rule adds itself.
| Month | Due | Paid | Date paid | Method | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | $5,550.00 | $5,200.00 | Balance $350.00 | ||
What a ledger has to survive
A rent ledger is not bookkeeping; it is evidence. It has to survive a tenant saying they paid, a co-tenant saying they paid half, and a judge asking what the balance was in March. Every one of those is answered by a dated row with a method beside it.
| Column | Answers |
|---|---|
| Month | Which period the payment belongs to |
| Due | What was owed under the lease that month |
| Paid | What actually arrived |
| Date paid | Whether it was late, and by how much |
| Method | Which bank record corroborates it |
Recording partial and late payments
- A partial payment gets its own row, not an edit to an old one.
- Late fees, where the lease and the statute both allow them, get their own row too — never folded into rent.
- A returned payment is reversed with a new dated row, not by deleting the original.
- Prorated first and last months use the figure from the prorated rent calculator, with the method noted.
Never overwrite history
A ledger that has been edited in place proves nothing. Corrections are new rows. That is the whole reason the format has survived since ink.
The ledger at move-out
The closing balance on this sheet is the "unpaid rent" line on the deposit deduction statement. Copy it across rather than recalculating, and attach the ledger to the statement. A deduction backed by a ledger is a deduction that rarely gets disputed twice.
Related in the binder
