BoardHub: Smart Boarding House Management System in PHP

Managing a boarding house with spreadsheets, notebooks, or WhatsApp messages is a nightmare that gets worse with every new tenant. Missed payments slip through the cracks, utility bills take hours to calculate, and tracking who’s in which room means digging through papers.

BoardHub is a complete boarding house management system built with PHP and MySQL that handles everything — tenants, rooms, billing, payments, utilities, maintenance, and contracts — from one dashboard. It’s designed for landlords, property managers, and dormitory owners who need a real system, not another spreadsheet.

What BoardHub Does

BoardHub covers the full lifecycle of managing a rental property. Here’s what’s inside.

Property & Room Management

You can manage multiple properties from a single account. Each property has its own currency, timezone, and settings. Rooms support three types — Single, Shared, and Dorm — with individual bed tracking for bedspace-style rentals. A visual room grid shows availability at a glance using color-coded status indicators, so you always know which rooms are open and which are occupied.

Tenant Management

Every tenant gets a complete profile with ID uploads, emergency contacts, and status tracking. The system handles the full move-in to move-out workflow, and tenants can be marked as Active, Moved Out, or Blacklisted. There’s also a tenant self-service portal where tenants can view their own bills, payment history, and submit maintenance requests — which means fewer messages and calls for you.

Billing & Payments

This is where BoardHub saves the most time. Monthly bills are auto-generated with line items for rent, utilities, and extras. Tenants can pay via Cash, GCash, Maya, Bank Transfer, PayPal, or any custom method you set up. The system supports partial payments, tracks overdue balances, and applies late fees automatically. Every transaction generates a PDF invoice and receipt that you can download or email directly to the tenant.

Utility Tracking

Electric and water meter readings are logged per room. BoardHub calculates consumption and cost automatically based on your configured rates. You can choose from four billing methods depending on your setup: per meter reading, flat rate, split equally among tenants, or per bed. No more manual math on utility bills.

Maintenance Requests

Tenants submit maintenance requests through the portal with photos and a description. Each request has a priority level (Low, Medium, High, Urgent) and moves through a status pipeline: Open → In Progress → Resolved. You can also track the cost of each repair for your records.

Contracts & Documents

BoardHub includes customizable contract templates that auto-fill with tenant, room, and rate details. Contracts are generated as PDFs that can be downloaded or signed digitally. No more manually editing Word docs for every new tenant.

Reports & Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a quick overview of occupancy rates, monthly income, outstanding balances, and upcoming lease expirations. For deeper analysis, you can export reports to CSV or PDF.

Four User Roles

BoardHub uses role-based access control with four levels:

Super Admin has full system access across all properties and users. Owner/Landlord manages their own properties, rooms, tenants, and billing. Staff can record payments and view tenants but only for properties they’re assigned to. Tenant gets a self-service portal to view bills, track payments, and submit maintenance requests.

This means you can give your property caretaker staff-level access without exposing financial reports or other properties.

Security Built In

Authentication and data security aren’t afterthoughts in BoardHub. The system includes bcrypt password hashing, CSRF protection on every form, session timeout management, login attempt throttling to prevent brute-force attacks, XSS and SQL injection prevention, and a full audit log that tracks who did what and when.

Tech Stack

BoardHub runs on a standard PHP stack that works on any shared hosting or VPS:

• PHP 8.1+ with a custom MVC framework
• MySQL 8.0+ for the database
• Tailwind CSS 3.x for the frontend
• Apache or Nginx for the web server
• Dark/light mode toggle with system preference detection

No Laravel, no heavy framework dependencies. It’s lightweight, fast, and easy to deploy on XAMPP, WAMP, or any Linux server.

Multi-Currency & International Support

BoardHub supports multiple currencies (PHP, USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, INR, and more) and timezones per property. If you manage properties in different countries or regions, each one can have its own settings.

Try the Live Demo

See BoardHub in action before you buy:

Live Demo →

Get BoardHub

BoardHub is available as a complete source code package with documentation and database schema included. Buy it from whichever platform you prefer:

Buy on Deeve Shop →

Buy on Gumroad →

Buy on Codester →

Installation

Getting BoardHub running takes about 5 minutes:

1. Extract the files to your web server directory
2. Create a MySQL database called boardhub with utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation
3. Import the included database/schema.sql file
4. Copy .env.example to .env and add your database credentials
5. Run npm install && npm run build:css for the frontend
6. Point your browser to the public folder and follow the setup wizard

It works with PHP’s built-in server for testing (php -S localhost:8000) or with Apache/Nginx for production.

Who Is This For?

BoardHub is built for anyone who manages rental properties with multiple tenants: boarding house owners, dormitory managers, hostel operators, and small apartment landlords. If you’re currently tracking tenants and payments manually — or if you’ve outgrown a basic spreadsheet — BoardHub replaces all of that with a single system.

View the Live Demo → or Get the Source Code → and start managing your properties properly.