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 tenant deposits held apart from operating funds. Nothing is ever quietly overwritten.
Every movement is a journal entry
When rent is collected, a deposit is placed, 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.
Escrow accounts kept separate from operating funds
A security deposit is the tenant's money, held in trust until the tenancy ends. Haven treats it that way. Deposits are recorded in escrow accounts that are kept separate from operating funds, the money Haven and owners transact day to day.
That separation is enforced in the ledger, not just described in a policy. A deposit sits in escrow from the moment it is placed. It only moves at defined moments, returned to the tenant at move-out, or applied against a documented, agreed deduction, and each of those moves is its own journal entry with a clear reason.
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. Deposit money and rent money 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.