A repair is five links in one chain: logged against the unit (by you or by the tenant from the portal, with photos), assigned to a contractor in writing, tracked to completion with the tenant updated automatically, invoiced as a contractor fee linked back to the maintenance request, and deducted on the landlord's disbursement statement with the payment confirmed against bank data. Break any one link and you lose either compliance evidence or money. TenantSync holds all five in one system, on web, iOS and Android, with client-ledger entries behind every movement for PSRA purposes. Free 14-day trial, no card required.
Maintenance is the part of lettings that looks operational and is actually legal. Nobody opens an agency because they enjoy chasing plumbers — but of everything a managing agent does day to day, repairs are where the obligations, the evidence and the client money all intersect at once. Get the workflow right and it's invisible. Get it wrong and it surfaces months later, usually in front of a third party.
The failure is rarely dramatic. It's a boiler reported on a Friday to a mobile number, promised to a contractor on a call, done at some point, invoiced on a scrap of paper, and recharged to the landlord from memory five weeks later. Every individual step happened. None of them is provable, and the money took the scenic route.
This is a guide, not legal advice
Landlord repair obligations, minimum-standards enforcement, deposit disputes and PSRA client-money rules are detailed and fact-specific. This article explains the general position for private residential tenancies in Ireland and how a maintenance workflow supports it. Confirm your own obligations with the RTB and the PSRA, and take advice on a contested deduction, an improvement notice or a dispute before acting.
Where the chain breaks — and what each break costs
There are three distinct failure modes, and they cost you in three different currencies. It's worth naming them separately, because a workflow that solves one often ignores the other two.
| Break | What it costs |
|---|---|
| The repair is missed | A fault reported into a text thread and forgotten is a live minimum-standards exposure. The Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 cover heating, ventilation, sanitary facilities, fire safety including smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, and more — and local authorities inspect against them and can serve improvement notices. Under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 the repair obligation is the landlord's, and a tenant who notifies you and waits can be entitled to reimbursement for repairs they reasonably arranged themselves. |
| The repair isn't documented | Six months on, "was it reported, and what did you do?" has no answer with a date on it. That's the position that turns a legitimate deposit deduction into a lost dispute, and a diligent agent into an unconvincing one. Deposit retention is one of the most common disputes the RTB deals with, and it is decided on evidence. |
| The money doesn't follow | The contractor gets paid late or chases you, the landlord is recharged from memory or not at all, the cost never reaches the year-end figures as an allowable expense, and the client-money trail has a gap in it — which for a licensed agent is a category of problem all of its own. |
Most agencies fix the first break with diligence and the second with a spreadsheet. The third one — the money — is the one that quietly decides whether maintenance is a service you provide or a cost you absorb.
Step 1 — The request, logged against the unit and the tenancy
Everything downstream depends on the first link being attached to the right thing. A repair logged against a property becomes part of that property's history and can be recharged to that property's landlord. A repair logged in an inbox belongs to nobody.
In TenantSync a maintenance request is created against a specific unit and carries:
- Title and description — what was reported, in enough detail for a contractor to act on.
- Job type — electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cooling, security, carpentry or general, so you can route it to the right trade and later see what a property keeps needing.
- Priority — low, medium, high or urgent. This is what keeps a genuine emergency visible above forty routine jobs.
- Photos — up to three, taken with the phone camera or picked from the gallery. Photos taken at the point of report fix the date, the location and the condition simultaneously, and they are the one piece of evidence you cannot go back for later.
- Status — where the job currently stands, from new through to completed.
Let the tenant raise it
Tenants with tenant-portal access can create a request themselves against the property they lease, describe the fault and attach photos. For an agency that removes the worst version of intake — a voicemail at 11pm that somebody has to transcribe — and replaces it with a structured, dated report. It also means the tenant can watch the job move, which is what most "any update?" calls are really asking. Tenants see only their own requests.
Creating a request doesn't just save a record. It emails the landlord, sends an acknowledgement email to the tenants on the tenancy, and pushes a notification to the mobile app — so the three parties who need to know are told without anyone remembering to forward anything.
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Step 2 — Assigning the contractor, in writing
The classic failure here is a job passed on by phone. The contractor writes it in a notebook, turns up at the wrong unit or without knowing what the job is, and if anyone later asks when the work was instructed, nobody can say.
Contractors are held as service providers with a company name, service type, address, email and phone. Assigning one to a maintenance request emails them the whole brief: the property address, the job title and description, the type, the priority, the status, the date it was raised, and the assigning agent's name, email and phone number.
That single email does two jobs. It removes most of the back-and-forth about what and where. And it creates the second half of your evidence: not just what was reported, but who was instructed and when. "The contractor was assigned the same afternoon, here's the job that went to them" is a materially different position to "I'm fairly sure I rang someone."
Step 3 — Tracking the work to completion
A status is only useful if it reflects reality and somebody outside your office can see it. Both are handled: as the request moves, the tenant is emailed the update automatically.
| Status | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| New | Reported and logged. The clock — legal and reputational — starts here. |
| Scheduled | A time is agreed. The status tenants most want to see. |
| Awaiting contractor | Assigned and with the trade — out of your hands, still in the record. |
| In progress | Work under way. |
| Tenant responded | Back with the tenant: access, availability or more detail needed. |
| Pending | Blocked on a part, a quote or a landlord approval. |
| Completed / Cancelled | Closed out, with the dates that closed it held against the property. |
Two kinds of conversation run alongside the status, deliberately kept apart. Comments are the shared thread — tenant, landlord and agent can all see them, which is where access times get agreed and completion gets confirmed. Notes are internal, addable and readable only by a landlord or agent, which is where a contractor's quote, a view on whether a cost is the tenant's or the landlord's, or a note about a difficult tenancy belongs. In a WhatsApp thread those two conversations are one conversation, which is how the wrong message ends up in front of the wrong person.
Step 4 — Invoicing the contractor fee to the right landlord
This is the link most maintenance tools simply don't have, and it's where agencies lose money. The work is done; now the cost has to reach the landlord's account correctly, promptly and with something the landlord can read.
TenantSync raises a contractor-fee invoice as a first-class invoice type, against the property, and — importantly — it can be linked to the maintenance request that triggered the work. That link is what turns a line on a statement into an answerable question: which job was this?
- Contractor details auto-populate from the service provider record — company name and address — unless you override them, so you're not retyping the same plumber's details forty times a year.
- Line items describe the work and are categorised as contractor fees, so the invoice reports correctly rather than sitting in a generic bucket.
- The landlord is billed, with their name and address in the bill-to section, auto-populated where you don't supply them.
- The invoice is numbered and rendered as a PDF on creation, with issue and due dates, optional tax, currency, notes and your branding.
- It has a lifecycle — draft, sent, pending, partially paid, paid, overdue or cancelled — so an unpaid recharge is a status you can filter for, not something you discover.
Because contractor fees are invoices like any other, they roll into the same reporting: the invoice dashboard summary, the aging report, and the reminder cadence that runs at 7 days before due, on the due date, 3 days overdue and 10 days overdue. Maintenance recharges stop being the category of income that quietly never gets chased.
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Step 5 — The landlord's account, and the client-money trail
For an agency running rent through TenantSync's Open Banking reconciliation, there's a second, parallel path for the same cost — and it's the one your landlord clients actually read.
- The work is recorded as a contractor work item against the property, with an amount and a work date, and can be linked to an expense record.
- The agency approves it. Nothing reaches a landlord statement without an explicit approval step — which is also the control that stops a disputed cost being deducted by accident.
- It's deducted on the disbursement statement, which sets out rent collected, management fee retained, contractor deduction and the net amount paid over. A landlord asking "what was the €480?" gets the answer from the statement.
- Payment is confirmed against bank data. When the agency pays the contractor, the outbound transaction on the collection account is matched back to the work item and marked paid. An item that goes unmatched past the confirmation window is flagged payment overdue — which is exactly the failure that quietly damages contractor relationships and, eventually, your ability to get someone out on a Friday.
- Every movement posts to the client ledger — rent in, fee retained, contractor cost, net disbursement — which is the shape a PSRA client-money file needs to be in.
Two paths, one cost — and that's deliberate
The contractor-fee invoice is the document your landlord client receives and pays against. The contractor work item is the deduction that flows through the rent you already hold, before the balance is disbursed. Which one you use depends on how the agency handles that landlord's money — some are billed, some are netted off. The point is that both start from the same logged repair, so neither depends on someone remembering the job in five weeks' time.
The audit trail you end up with — and where it pays
Run the chain and the by-product is a per-property record you didn't have to write. It pays out in four places, none of which you can predict in advance.
At a minimum-standards inspection
Local authorities inspect against the 2019 regulations. A property log showing faults reported and closed out, with dates and photos, supports the case that the home has been actively maintained — and it makes the visit shorter. TenantSync also stores BER and compliance certificates per unit with expiry reminders; our guide to minimum standards and the BER-at-registration rule covers what inspectors look for.
At an RTB dispute
Whether the argument is a deposit deduction or a claim that repairs were ignored, the case is made with dates, photos, contractor instructions and invoices. That's precisely the set of artefacts the chain produces as a side effect.
At a PSRA client-money review
Contractor money moving through a client account is client money. Ledger entries that decompose each disbursement into its parts are what makes that traceable. Our guide to PSRA compliance for letting agents goes through the wider obligations.
At year end
Repairs and maintenance are generally allowable against Case V rental income; improvements are capital and are not. The reason the deduction gets lost isn't eligibility — it's that in November the cost is an unlabelled line on a bank statement with no job attached. A repair logged when it happened, with a contractor invoice against the property, survives to the return. See the one-click landlord tax pack for how those figures assemble.
Running it at agency scale
One repair is easy. Two hundred open jobs across a managed book is a different problem, and it's mostly a problem of visibility.
The web platform gives the office the heavier tooling: search across the whole book by title or property, filtering by status and priority, sorting by any column, date-range filters including this and last month or quarter and a custom range, statistics on open, in-progress and completed volumes and the priority mix, and an Excel export for when a landlord client or a director asks for a report.
The iOS and Android apps carry the same data for the half of the job that doesn't happen at a desk — creating a request against a property, taking the photo with the camera there and then, setting priority, filtering the open list and opening a job to see its detail. Repairs are reported at inconvenient moments, and a record you intend to write up later is a record that gets written up wrong. Our guide to running the whole lettings business from your phone covers the mobile side in full.
The same workflow, agency or single property
Maintenance and the tenant portal are included on the €20 Starter plan (up to 10 units) for individual landlords. Agencies on the Professional plan get the same workflow across a larger book, plus PSRA client-money compliance, multi-bank rent reconciliation and per-landlord disbursement statements. Every plan starts with a free 14-day trial and no card.
How to get started
- Start your free 14-day trial — no credit card required — or book a demo to see the chain end to end.
- Add your properties, or import them with concierge help if you're moving off a spreadsheet.
- Add your contractors as service providers, with an email address so assignment briefs actually reach them.
- Turn on the tenant portal so requests arrive structured instead of by voicemail.
- Log the next repair in the app with photos, and assign it.
- Close it out and raise the contractor fee — invoiced to the landlord, or deducted on their disbursement statement.
Frequently asked questions
Are landlords in Ireland legally required to carry out repairs?
Yes. Under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 a landlord must keep the structure and interior of a rented home in the condition it was in at the start of the tenancy, apart from normal wear and tear, and must carry out repairs. Where a landlord fails to act within a reasonable time after being notified, a tenant can be entitled to reimbursement for repairs they reasonably had to arrange themselves. The Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 separately set the minimum standards every rented home must meet, inspected and enforced by local authorities. General guidance, not legal advice; confirm at rtb.ie.
Why does an undocumented repair cause problems at the RTB?
Because disputes are decided on evidence, not recollection. If a tenant says a fault was reported and ignored, or you deduct from a deposit for damage beyond normal wear and tear, what's needed is a dated record of what was reported, when, what was done and what it cost. A text thread rarely supplies that and a repair remembered supplies none of it. A logged request with photos taken at the point of report, a contractor assignment and an invoice is the same story with evidence attached.
Can tenants raise maintenance requests themselves?
Yes. Tenants with tenant-portal access can raise a request against the property they lease, describe the fault, attach photos and follow it through the comment thread. The report arrives structured and dated rather than as an out-of-hours call, and the tenant can see the job moving — which is what most chasing calls are actually about. Tenants see only their own requests and can't assign contractors or read internal notes.
How does TenantSync assign work to a contractor?
Contractors are held as service providers with a company name, service type, address, email and phone. Assigning one to a maintenance request emails them the full job — property address, title and description, type, priority, status, date raised, and the assigning agent's name, email and phone. The contractor gets a written brief instead of a phone call, and you get a dated record of who was instructed and when.
How do letting agents recharge contractor costs to the right landlord?
Two routes, both starting from the logged repair. A contractor-fee invoice is raised against the property and optionally linked to the maintenance request, with contractor details auto-populated from the service provider record, line items describing the work, the landlord billed, and a numbered PDF issued. Or, for agencies running rent through Open Banking reconciliation, the work is recorded as a contractor work item the agency approves, which is then deducted on the landlord's disbursement statement showing rent collected, management fee retained, contractor deduction and net paid.
How does maintenance affect PSRA client-money compliance?
Contractor money passing through an agency's client account is client money and has to be traceable. Every movement in the disbursement flow — rent collected, management fee retained, contractor cost, net disbursement — is decomposed into client-ledger entries, and a contractor payment is confirmed by matching the outbound transaction on the agency collection account back to the approved work item. An item with no matching payment inside the confirmation window is flagged as payment overdue, so an unpaid contractor surfaces as a status rather than a phone call.
Can repair costs be claimed against Irish rental income?
Repairs and maintenance are generally allowable against Case V rental income; improvements are capital and are not. The obstacle is evidence — a payment you can't categorise or vouch is a deduction you won't claim. Because the contractor fee is invoiced against the property and the cost captured as an expense, the figure and the job it relates to are already in place when a rental income and expenses statement is produced. General guidance, not tax advice; confirm at revenue.ie or with an accountant.