Houses and bedrooms
What a house record holds
Section titled “What a house record holds”Each house in SILWise stores the basic facts needed to run rent and board for one property. A house record holds a Name and an optional Address, Total bedrooms, Bedrooms for participants, its rent (labelled Rent / FN on the house page and Rent per fortnight when you edit it), whether it is SDA-registered - registered as Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) housing, a simple Yes/No - an optional Charges effective from date, and the house’s Cost-centre set, which decides which cost lines this house pays. Cost-centre sets are explained fully on the cost-centres and sets page.
SDA-registered is a record-keeping label you set yourself. It doesn’t change any calculation - rent and board are worked out the same way whether it’s ticked or not. It’s there so you can tell your SDA houses apart from the rest and filter your house list by them.
You fill in all of this when you add a house, and can change any of it afterwards from the house’s Edit house screen.
Bedrooms describe the property, not the people
Section titled “Bedrooms describe the property, not the people”SILWise tracks two things that sound similar but are not:
- Bedrooms describe the property itself. Total bedrooms is every bedroom in the house. Bedrooms for participants is total bedrooms minus any set aside for staff or an office - it does not change when someone moves in or out.
- Participants are the actual participants living in the house today, added one by one on the house page.
A house can have three participant bedrooms and only two participants in residence if one room is sitting empty. SILWise deliberately keeps both numbers, because they are used for different sums.
Which number divides what
Section titled “Which number divides what”This is the distinction that causes the most confusion, so it is worth being exact about it:
- Rent is divided across Bedrooms for participants, not across the number of participants living there. A house with three participant bedrooms and rent of $1500.00 per fortnight splits that rent three ways by default, even if only two participants currently live there.
- Not every line under Cost inclusions is divided the same way. Bills priced per 90 days - electricity, water, lawn mowing and similar - are divided across the number of participants actually living in the house: with two participants in a three-bedroom house, those bills split two ways, not three. Meal lines - Breakfasts, Lunch, Dinner - are priced per person per week and are charged to each participant in full. They are never split between participants, however many are ticked in for that meal.
SILWise won’t let a house hold more participants than it has participant bedrooms, so most of the time rent and the 90-day shared bills match up and the difference is invisible. It shows up as soon as a participant bedroom sits empty: rent keeps assuming that room is filled, but the 90-day bills only ever count the people who are actually there. If a rent figure and an electricity figure for the same house look like they were split differently, this is why.
What to do next
Section titled “What to do next”Keep Bedrooms for participants current whenever the property changes - for example, if a bedroom is turned into a staff office. Then make sure the participant list is up to date before relying on a calculation, since it is the participant count, not the bedroom count, that decides how the 90-day shared bills are split.