From Application to Move-In

This is the heart of leasing in REDA: moving a lease from a brand-new application to a tenant who has moved in and is being billed. Along the way you complete the application, add the charges, get it approved, and work two short checklists REDA hands you — the Lease Agreement and the Move In. This article walks the whole journey and, just as importantly, explains which records REDA creates for you at each step, so nothing that appears on the screen is a surprise. No prior REDA experience is assumed — every stage and term is defined as we reach it.

The journey at a glance

A lease is a record on the Opportunities tab — REDA's single "deal" object — and it advances through a fixed set of Stages shown as a Path across the top of the record. For a lease, the path from application to occupancy runs:

Application - New → Application - Completed → Application - Approved → Agreement - In Process → Occupied - Pending Move In → Occupied - No Notice

You drive the first three stages by hand. The last three are driven for you by the two tickets REDA creates — you work the ticket, and the ticket moves the lease. That division is the single most important thing to understand about leasing in REDA:

Step 1 — Complete the application

A lease usually starts life when you convert an inquiry; the new lease opens at Application - New. Fill in the essentials — the Property (the unit being leased), the Lease Start Date, the Term, and the charges the applicant will pay (see Setting Up Lease Charges for the chargebook). Then move the Stage to Application - Completed.

REDA will stop you if the basics are missing. Try to complete an application with no property or no charges and you'll see:

When the application is completed, any charge you flagged as due at the application stage — a holding or application fee, for example — switches on and its invoice is raised. Everything else waits until later.

Step 2 — Submit for approval

Approval is a two-part gate: you use the Submit for Approval action at the top of the lease, and only then can you set the Stage to Application - Approved. Skip the submission and REDA responds:

Approval also insists the charges are in place — on the lease and on any co-living child leases beneath it:

Once the lease is approved it locks for editing — a deliberate control so an approved application can't be quietly changed. If you try to edit it you'll see "The leasing record is approved and locked for editing." To make changes, you'll rewind the lease (see If plans change).

The moment the lease is approved, REDA creates the first ticket for you.

Step 3 — The Lease Agreement ticket

A ticket in REDA is a short, tracked checklist for one step in a record's life — it has its own status Path and, when you finish it, it moves the parent record forward. As soon as a lease is approved, a Lease Agreement ticket appears on the lease's Tickets tab, already filled with a proposed move-in date taken from the lease start. (Only the parent lease gets one; child leases in a co-living arrangement are handled together with the parent — see Child Leases.)

Work it down its status Path. The status you set writes the lease's Stage:

Two things happen automatically while you work this ticket. First, every charge line on the lease (and its children) is linked to this agreement, so the paperwork and the money stay together. Second, the ticket marks its own approval as complete during that step — so if you notice it reads "Approved" without you touching it, that's expected; you don't need to approve it by hand.

If the contract was signed on paper, REDA won't let you close the ticket until the signed document is actually attached, and it checks that a file is really there:

Step 4 — Pending move-in (the lease turns billable)

Setting the Lease Agreement ticket to Contract Signed (or Closed) moves the lease to Occupied - Pending Move In — and this is the busiest moment in the whole workflow. The lease's billing switch (Accounting Active) turns on, and REDA raises a cascade of records in one go:

Step 5 — Close the Move In ticket

On the day the tenant takes possession, open the Move In ticket and set it to Closed. REDA stamps the lease's Actual Move In Date from the ticket and advances the Stage to Occupied - No Notice — the steady state of an occupied lease with no notice to leave on file.

If your Leasing Rule has renewal automation switched on, REDA immediately looks ahead: it creates the first Renewal ticket, dated the configured number of days before the lease ends, so the renewal conversation is never missed (see Renewing a Lease).

If plans change

Plans fall through, and REDA is built for it. Every lifecycle ticket remembers the stage the lease was on when the ticket was created. Cancel the ticket and the lease rewinds to that remembered stage — but only if the lease is still on the stage this ticket set, so a cancellation never overwrites a step some other process has since moved. Cancelling a Move In ticket also cancels the related move-in inspection.

To start an application over from scratch, use the Reset Lease action. It clears the lease's charges, tickets and invoices, returns the Stage to Application - New, and wipes the lease and move dates — a clean slate. Reset is available only while the lease is still in its application, agreement or pending-move-in stages; once a tenant has actually moved in, the lease can't be reset.

Worked example: Aisha's lease

Aisha Rahman applies for Meridian Court #101 — a 12-month lease at 1,200.00 per month starting 1 Aug 2026, with a 100.00 application fee (due at application) and a 1,200.00 security deposit (due at move-in). Here is how the whole file plays out:

The auto-created Lease Agreement ticket that appears once the lease is approved — its status Path sits at New, and it carries the Parent Opportunity (the lease) and Property (Meridian Court #101).

Reference: gate → automation

One row per stage, showing who moves it and what REDA creates as it lands there:

Where to go next

1. Setting Up Lease Charges — build the chargebook before you complete the application.
2. Renewing a Lease — the Renewal ticket that appears at move-in, worked through.
3. Notice, Move-Out & Lease End — the other end of the lifecycle.
4. How Recurring Invoicing Works — what bills after move-in, and the first-month double invoice.
5. Understanding Tickets — the process engine behind every step here.
6. Child Leases — how co-living and multi-unit applications move together.

Frequently asked questions