PG Management App

Why I built it

With more than 250 beds, registers and notebooks weren't keeping up, and my father was looking at paid rental software. I decided to build our own instead, shaped around how the PG actually works. It took several days of focused work to get right.

What it does

• Occupancy, collections and dues for every property on one dashboard
• Tenant records, rent and dues for the whole business
• New properties can be added without changing any code
• Branded receipts made on demand in the PG's own colours
• Messages to tenants through the Meta WhatsApp API

Reading the paper we already use

A lot of the PG still runs on paper: handwritten rent notes, and a printed guest details form every new tenant fills in. The app has two OCR flows built on the Gemini API. One reads rent notes. The other knows the layout of our own tenant form and fills in each field of a new tenant's record from a photo.

Owner and manager access

Owners see everything. Managers get what they need to run a property day to day, but not the financial records. Those limits are enforced on the server, not just hidden in the app.

Fast on a phone

It's a mobile-first web app. Database queries are kept lean with caching and pagination, so it stays quick even on mobile data. The public side of the business is the Bhagya Lakshmi PG website.

What I learned

Software for a real business has to fit how people already work, not the other way round. The managers weren't going to stop writing rent notes, so the app had to learn to read them.