Add a house

Start with cost centres

From the Houses page, select Add house. Every house needs a cost-centre set - the list of shared costs a house can charge participants for - so this is where adding a house always starts.

If your organisation has no cost-centre sets yet, the page tells you so, headed First, set up your cost centres, with a Create your cost centres button that takes you to set up cost centres. Come back here once you have one.

If you already have one or more active sets, the page is headed Cost centres for this house instead. Select Use for this house next to the set you want, and you go straight to the house form with that set already chosen - you do not have to open the set’s own page first. If none of the sets fit, select Create a new set instead at the bottom to go build one, then come back and start again.

This chooser is also skipped if you arrive by selecting Next: add your house while setting up your cost centres - the set you were just working on is already chosen, and you land straight on the form below.

Open the form

The house form asks you to fill in the four sections below, then save once at the bottom. There is no Next button and no step counter - work through the sections in any order.

Cost-centre set

The first section still asks Which set applies to this house?, already set to the set you picked on the previous screen. Change it here if you want a different one - your choice decides which cost lines appear later in Cost inclusions. Choosing + Create new set… takes you away to the sets page to add one, and that navigation does not keep anything else you have typed on this form. Settle on a set, new or existing, before filling in the rest of the form.

House info

Next, fill in the details of the property:

• Name - required, so you and your team can find this house later.
• Address (optional).
• Total bedrooms - how many bedrooms the property has.
• Bedrooms for participants - total bedrooms minus any staff or office rooms. Rent is divided across these bedrooms, not the total. See houses and bedrooms for how this affects each participant’s share. Set this higher than the number of named participants below, and a note explains that the provider covers the empty room’s share of the rent - so an intentionally spare bedroom is never billed to anyone.
• Rent per fortnight - required, the total rent charged for the house every fortnight.
• Charges effective from (optional) - the date these figures start applying.
• SDA-registered - tick this if the property is registered for Specialist Disability Accommodation.

Cost inclusions

This section asks Which cost lines does this house pay? Defaults match the cost-centre settings, so most houses need no changes here. Tick or untick individual lines, or use Select all and Clear all to set them all at once.

Participants

Add a row per resident. The form starts with three blank rows. If the meal lines in your chosen set - breakfast, lunch and dinner - are all still unpriced and not ticked under Cost inclusions above, a note above the rows says so: meals will charge nothing even if a participant’s meal boxes are ticked, until those lines are priced and switched on. See set up cost centres if that is not what you want for this house.

Each row asks for:

• Name.
• Which meals are included - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Consumables - or use All meals or Clear to set all four together. All four start unticked on a new row, including Consumables, so a participant is only charged for a meal once you tick it for them.
• Is this participant under 21 years old? - answer Yes or No. This decides which Centrelink payments SILWise offers for this person. See participants and payment profiles for what these choices mean. You must answer this for every named resident before SILWise will let you save.

Once you answer the age question, fields for this participant’s actual Centrelink payments appear below it. Use Remove to delete a row, and + Add participant to add another. Empty rows are dropped automatically when you save, so it is fine to leave spares blank. You cannot save more named residents than the number set in Bedrooms for participants - raise that number first if this house needs more rows than it currently allows.

Review and save

At the bottom, a read-only Review box shows a live summary: name, total and participant bedrooms, Rent / FN, how many cost lines are included, and how many participants you have added. Check it matches what you intended, then select Save house.

What you should see

Saving takes you straight to this house’s Custom splits page, ready for you to review how any shared bills are divided. See set custom splits for what blank, 0 and switched off each mean there, then run a calculation once you are ready.