LearnTrust and security
How Haven handles money
Every euro that moves through Haven leaves a permanent trail. We keep money the way a bank keeps money: double-entry, append-only, counted in exact minor units, with every declared deposit tracked as its own recorded obligation. Nothing is ever quietly overwritten.
Every movement is a journal entry
When rent is collected, a deposit is declared, a fee is charged, or a refund is issued, Haven does not adjust a number somewhere. It records a journal entry, a dated, immutable line describing exactly what moved, from which account to which account, and why.
Each entry is balanced: the amounts leaving one account equal the amounts arriving in another. Money is never created or destroyed inside the system, only moved between accounts that are named and reconciled. This is the same method banks and audited businesses have used for centuries, applied to every cent of your tenancy.
Because entries are append-only, the record grows but never shrinks. A mistake is not erased; it is corrected with a new, offsetting entry that references the original. The full history stays intact, so the story of any payment can always be read back in order.
Balances are derived, never edited in place
There is no stored "balance" field that Haven increments and decrements. A balance is simply the sum of the journal entries for an account, computed when you look at it.
This matters more than it sounds. Mutable balance columns are where money quietly goes wrong: two updates race, one overwrites the other, and a number drifts from reality with no trace of how. When the balance is a derivation, there is nothing to overwrite. If the entries are right, the balance is right, by construction.
It also means every figure you see is explainable. Behind any amount on your screen is the exact list of entries that produced it. You can always ask "why is this number what it is," and the answer is a set of dated lines, not a guess.
Deposits tracked as their own recorded obligation
A security deposit is the tenant's money, and Haven never takes custody of it. The amount is declared in the lease and tracked as its own recorded obligation, kept entirely separate in the ledger from the money Haven and owners actually transact day to day.
That separation is enforced in the ledger, not just described in a policy. The declared deposit is recorded the moment the lease is signed, with the move-in condition sealed against it. Its record only changes at defined moments, settled when the tenancy ends, or applied against a documented, agreed deduction, and each of those is its own journal entry with a clear reason. The landlord holds the funds throughout; Haven holds the record.
Rent flows on its own path. Collected by SEPA autopay, it settles to the owner, with Haven's roughly one percent recorded as an explicit fee entry rather than skimmed silently. The deposit obligation and the rent that actually moves never blur together.
Exact minor units, no rounding, no floats
Haven counts money in integer minor units, cents, and never in floating-point numbers. A rent of 1,200 euro is stored as 120,000 cents, an exact whole number, not as a decimal that a computer approximates.
Floating-point math is fine for physics and wrong for money: it produces tiny, invisible errors that accumulate. Over thousands of payments, split fees, and prorated months, those fractions of a cent become real discrepancies that no one can fully explain. By working in whole cents, Haven keeps arithmetic exact.
When an amount has to be split, a prorated first month, a fee taken from rent, the division is done so the parts add back to the whole exactly, with no cent lost or invented. What you are charged and what is recorded are the same figure, to the cent.
Why this makes disputes rare and answerable
Most money disputes are really disputes about record-keeping: someone believes a payment was made, or a deposit was larger, or a fee was never agreed, and there is no clean way to check. Haven removes that ambiguity before it starts.
Because every movement is a dated, immutable entry, and every balance derives from those entries, there is a single, ordered account of what happened. Was the rent paid, and when? Where is the deposit, and how much of it? Was this fee charged, and on what basis? Each question resolves to specific lines in the ledger, the same lines for the owner, the tenant, and Haven.
That shared, tamper-evident record is what makes the hard moments calm. Nobody has to take anyone's word for it. The answer is already written down, and it is the same answer for everyone.