Turnover rent — percentage rent, revenue share, whichever name your leases use — is the piece of mall revenue that generic accounting software handles worst. A fixed rent is one number a month. Turnover rent is a computation: a percentage of the tenant's sales, shaped by the specific structure the lease was negotiated with, applied to a sales figure that both sides must trust. Get any part of that wrong and you either leak revenue quietly or spend your year in disputes.
The structures you will actually meet
- Pure revenue share: rent is a flat percentage of sales. Simple, rare in prime malls, common for kiosks and food courts.
- Minimum guarantee (MG) versus revenue share: the tenant pays the higher of a fixed minimum or the percentage — the most common structure in Indian malls, often written as 'MG or X% of sales, whichever is higher'.
- Tiered bands: the percentage changes with the sales level — say 4% up to a threshold and 6% beyond it. The lease decides whether the higher rate applies to the whole base or only the slab above the threshold; the two readings produce very different bills.
- Category rates: an anchor, a multiplex, a jeweller and a cafe on the same corridor can carry entirely different percentages, sometimes different rates for different product categories inside one store.
- Exclusions: leases commonly exclude GST, gift-card sales at load time, returns, and sometimes delivery-aggregator orders — or explicitly include them. The exclusion list is a clause, not a convention.
Provisional billing and the annual true-up
Because sales figures firm up slower than billing cycles, most malls bill turnover rent provisionally each month — on declared or captured sales — and then true up annually against audited figures. A correct true-up recomputes the whole year under the lease terms, nets what was billed provisionally, and produces one adjustment with the working attached. If your system cannot reproduce the original monthly computations, the true-up becomes a negotiation instead of an arithmetic exercise.
Why determinism is the whole game
A turnover-rent bill is only as strong as your ability to explain it. When a tenant's auditor asks why March came to a particular figure, the answer has to be a line-by-line derivation: this sales base, minus these exclusions, at this rate for this band, against this minimum guarantee — computed from the lease version that was in force in March, not the one signed since. That means lease terms stored as structured data rather than PDF prose, sales stored immutably as they were captured, and billing runs that pin the exact rule set they executed with.
This is the standard CuroCentral was built to: every charge computed from the abstracted lease, every figure reconstructable for any past period, every number explainable to an auditor without a spreadsheet archaeologist. If you evaluate any mall management system, put one question at the top of the demo script: show me last March's bill, and show me exactly how the system got there.