The How to series · Post 6
How to keep on top of compliance deadlines without the Sunday dread
For UK landlords and letting agents carrying compliance dates in their head: what a slipped date can now cost under the Renters' Rights Act 2025, and how to end the Sunday check.
It's 8pm on a Sunday. Laptop open, working out which properties need what before Monday: the written statement that hasn't gone out, the date nobody was watching that lands this week. The work isn't hard. Finding out what's due is the work.
That's the loop: watching compliance deadlines. Most breaches aren't carelessness. They're a date that lived in one person's head, or in one inbox, and slipped quietly.
The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)
Start with the number that makes the rest small. Under the Renters' Rights Act 2025, fines reach up to £7,000 for a breach, and up to £40,000 for serious or repeat breaches (England). And it isn't only landlords: letting agents are on the hook too.
Now the weekly cost of doing it by memory:
- 45 minutes a week on the Sunday check
- × £30 an hour = £22.50 a week
- × 46 working weeks = £1,035 a year of your time, spent finding out what's due.
One avoided fine covers years of that. The maths isn't the hours. It's the fine.
Score it: the three checks
- Hours. 4. An hour most weeks, plus the background dread, which never reaches a timesheet but is real.
- Repeat. 5. Every deadline has a date, a rule and a document. The whole watch list fits on one page, which is the test.
- Risk-if-wrong. 2. If the watching slips once, the cost is a fine. A slip here is expensive, so the hand-over needs the right shape.
Verdict: two checks at 4 or more. Start narrow. Let software watch the dates and warn while there's still time to act, and keep the filing and the decisions with a person.
Try one thing this week (free)
The 30-minute deadline dump. From memory, list every compliance date you're tracking: what it is, which property it belongs to, when it next falls due, and where the date lives today (your head, a diary, a spreadsheet, someone else's inbox). By Friday, fill the gaps you find. The list you couldn't finish is the risk, and now it has a name.
Where a person stays
This is the loop where approval-first matters most. The machine watches the dates, pulled from the systems you already use, and warns before problems bite. A person decides what to do and files. Compliance and legal work stays approval-only, always: nothing files on the machine's say-so. The warning is the feature. The decision stays yours.
FAQ
Good, that's where the dates should live. The loop this post is about is the watching: who reads the spreadsheet on a Sunday, and what happens the week nobody does. A warning that fires itself beats a row nobody opens.
Anything with a date attached: written statements, information sheets, renewals, certificates, deposit duties. The Act added new duties, and each one is a date somebody has to watch. Miss one and the fine structure above is the answer.
No, and it shouldn't. The warning is a watchman, not a filer. A person confirms what's needed and does it. That's the approval-first line, and on compliance it's not negotiable.
Then the warning says so, with what's needed next to it, while there's still time to act. Finding out after the fact is the expensive version, and that's the version the machine removes.
The shape is. Deadlines scattered across inboxes and heads until one slips: that's filing dates for an accountant, certificate renewals for a trade. Swap the examples. The watching, the warning and the person who decides stay the same.