The rent roster at the top of this page is invented, down to the landlords and the case manager initials in the notes column. Anyone who has administered rental assistance will recognize it anyway: a July file saved as FINAL (2) (1), a tab for every grant, and a color code one coordinator could explain.
Four case managers keep it current. Accounting keeps a second file. Before any check goes out, someone has to confirm three things: the household is where the roster says it is, the payee is right, and the expense is one the paying grant allows. A rental assistance spreadsheet can hold the answers to all three. It can’t tell you who gave them, or whether the third one changed when the household moved to a different tab.
Four case managers share one roster, and each reads it differently
A shared roster records that a step happened. It can’t record who completed it or when.
In the roster pictured, the status columns run left to right: property created, documents uploaded, payee created, submitted to finance, letter uploaded, letter emailed. Each one flips from FALSE to TRUE as a tenancy moves, and the TRUE overwrites everything before it. A row where the letter went out yesterday looks the same as one where it went out in March.
With one case manager, the gap is small, because that person remembers. With four, a TRUE in Submitted to Finance could belong to any of them, and the person covering a caseload during a vacation inherits rows without their history. Colors fill in what the columns can’t say. Blue might mark a new referral and purple a tenancy waiting on the landlord, until a second person uses purple for something else.
RDOOR Housing Corporation is one of the partners behind HomeNow Indy, the coordinated rehousing system Indianapolis launched in 2020 with the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention. Breya Birdsong, MPA, RDOOR’s Vice President of Rental Assistance Programs, described the result before her team moved to Journey:
“Having fragmented systems and relying on excel sheets managed by (multiple) people created significant gaps in tracking and keeping up with program needs.”
Accounting works from a second file, so every payment is checked twice
The roster says a payment is ready. Accounting has to find it again in its own records before anything is paid.
In most programs we’ve implemented, accounting keeps its own payment log, a vendor list with W-9s and the general ledger, and matches the roster to those by household name, landlord and amount. Every row marked Submitted to Finance becomes a lookup.
The lookups fail in predictable places. The same landlord entered as “Tamsin Realty Grp Inc” on one row and “Tamsin Realty Group Inc” on another is two payees in any vendor list built from the roster. A management company that changed hands mid-year has a new payee on file in accounting and the old one on the roster. The note says “check returned, wrong address on payee,” and the fix has to be made in two files by two people.
At month-end the two files are reconciled against each other and against the draw. At HOM, Inc., where Journey was first built and which administers rental assistance for more than 5,000 households in Arizona, the handoff to accounting ran on paper before the switch. Stacy Petersen, an accounting specialist there, describes what replaced it:
“Before Journey, a housing specialist would submit a HAP release or a file with an FRC with payments. In contrast, when a payment is ready and approved in Journey, the payment appears within process transactions to be paid. This process is a more efficient, digitized approach that has reduced our reliance on paper forms and files.”
The same expense is eligible for one household and not the next
Whether a grant can pay for something depends on the program, the project and the funding source behind the tenancy, and on a spreadsheet that rule lives in someone’s head.
The tabs carry the funding source: SSVF RRH, CoC RRH, ESG RRH, State Flex Funds. The rules that come with each tab are written nowhere on the sheet. If you run ESG, CoC and local flex dollars from one roster, two households in the same building can ask for the same thing and get different answers, and both answers can be correct.
Rent is the clearest case. Under 24 CFR 576.106(d)(1), Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) rental assistance cannot be provided unless the rent is at or below the Fair Market Rent (FMR) and reasonable. In Continuum of Care (CoC) rental assistance, the FMR sizes the grant and each unit’s rent is tested for reasonableness under 24 CFR 578.51(g). A household paid from local flex dollars follows whatever terms the local funder set. A $1,650 rent can be ineligible on the ESG tab, eligible on the CoC tab after a reasonableness check, and payable from the flex tab if the local terms allow it, depending on the program.
Damages work the same way. “Client moved out w/o notice, LL reporting damages” is one note with two different answers. CoC rental assistance can pay for property damage once, at exit, up to one month’s rent, under 578.51(j). ESG’s list of eligible financial assistance costs at 24 CFR 576.105(a) covers rental application fees, security deposits, last month’s rent, utility deposits, utility payments and moving costs, and damages aren’t on it. In practice, a program that covers damages on an ESG tenancy pays them from another source, usually local flex dollars.
On a spreadsheet, the case manager who requests the payment and the accountant who releases it each have to know the rule for that tab, and nothing on the sheet checks that they agree. When a household transfers from ESG to CoC midway through a lease, the rule changes on the date of the transfer, and the row on the new tab doesn’t carry that date with it.
The notes column holds the compliance record
The most important information on the roster is in the one column nobody can filter.
“Rent increase to $1,650 at renewal, rent reasonableness done, ok.” “Transferred from ESG to CoC RRH eff 8/1 per supervisor.” “Client in hotel Rm 214 til unit ready, $90/day x 6 nights approved.” “Exit 7/31, client increased income, no longer needs asst.” Each note records a decision, the person who made it and, usually, a date.
24 CFR 578.103(a) requires “sufficient records to enable HUD to determine whether” a program meets Part 578, including, for each participant, “the services and assistance provided to that program participant” and, “where applicable, compliance with the termination of assistance requirement.” Paragraph (c) keeps those records for at least five years. On the roster, they are sentences in cells, spread across five years of July files.
The same column holds things that shouldn’t be in a shared file at all. “Client requested transfer due to safety concern” is visible to all four case managers, to accounting and to anyone the file is forwarded to. Paragraph (b) of the same section requires written procedures to ensure that records containing a participant’s identifying information “will be kept secure and confidential.” A general notes column has one setting for everyone who can open it.
Journey answers the three questions on one household record
Padmission Journey puts case managers and accounting on the same record for each household.
The tenancy carries its project and funding source, and every transaction is coded to the project that pays it. A household with ongoing rent from one project and deposits or other costs from a flex fund has both on the same record, and a transfer between projects keeps a single history. Steps that the roster tracks in TRUE and FALSE are tenancy actions in Journey, and payments move through review and approval with the full history of who requested, reviewed and approved each one. Accounting works the payments from the same place. Landlords and management companies are entered once, with their payment accounts and W-9s on the owner or company record.
For programs administering assistance across several providers, the same record is what makes centralized rental assistance workable. If your roster looks like the one at the top of this page, we can walk through how it would move, using your own tabs and columns.
Frequently asked questions
What’s the most spreadsheets one staff member has retired after their community switched to Journey?
57. (You know who you are!)
Why does a shared rental assistance roster lose track of who did what?
Because each status column holds one value. When a case manager flips Submitted to Finance from FALSE to TRUE, the sheet keeps the TRUE and drops who changed it and when. With four case managers on one file, any of them could have made the change, and a row finished yesterday looks the same as one finished in March.
Why does accounting check every payment twice?
Accounting pays from its own payment log and vendor list, so each row the roster marks as ready has to be found again there by household name, landlord and amount. A landlord spelled two ways becomes two payees, and a correction such as a new payee address has to be made in both files by two people.
Can the same expense be paid for one household and not the next?
Yes, when the two households are paid from different funding sources. ESG rental assistance cannot pay rent above the Fair Market Rent (24 CFR 576.106(d)(1)), and ESG’s list of financial assistance costs has no line for damages (24 CFR 576.105(a)). CoC rental assistance can pay for damages once, at exit, up to one month’s rent (24 CFR 578.51(j)). Local flex dollars follow the local funder’s terms.
Is it a problem to keep case notes in a shared spreadsheet?
It can be. 24 CFR 578.103(b) requires written procedures to keep records with a participant’s identifying information secure and confidential, and a notes column is visible to everyone who can open the file. Those notes are also part of the program’s record: 24 CFR 578.103(c) requires CoC records to be kept for at least five years.
What takes the spreadsheet’s place in Journey?
One record for each household. The tenancy carries its project and funding source, payments move through review and approval with the history of who requested, reviewed and approved each one, and accounting works the payments from that same record. Landlords and management companies are entered once, with their payment accounts and W-9s.
Regulatory citations in this article were verified against the eCFR as of October 9, 2026. The rent roster pictured is illustrative; every name, address and note in it is fictional. Nothing here is legal advice, and where your HUD field office has issued written guidance on a point, that guidance governs.
Sources
- 24 CFR 576.106 — Rental assistance (ESG), paragraph (d)(1), verified 7 October 2026
- 24 CFR 576.105 — Housing relocation and stabilization services: financial assistance costs, paragraphs (a)(1) to (a)(6), verified 9 October 2026
- 24 CFR 578.51 — Rental assistance (CoC), paragraphs (g) and (j), verified 7 October 2026
- 24 CFR 578.103 — Recordkeeping requirements, paragraphs (a), (a)(8), (b) and (c), verified 9 October 2026
- Breya Birdsong, RDOOR Housing Corporation (HomeNow Indy), interview responses, September 2026
- Stacy Petersen, HOM, Inc., interview, August 2026
