Clearer Onboarding for New Landlords — Deposit Cap Warnings & Accessibility Improvements

Release: v0.1.298

When a landlord sets up their first tenancy, the stakes are high. Get the deposit amount wrong — even unintentionally — and you're already on the wrong side of the Tenant Fees Act 2019 before the tenancy has even started. This release addresses that risk head-on, and fixes a set of accessibility issues in the onboarding form at the same time.

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The problem: a compliance gap at the worst possible moment

Step 3 of the onboarding wizard asks new users to enter the details of their first tenancy, including the deposit amount. Until this release, that field had no inline guidance about the legal deposit cap.

The five-week cap warning did exist — but only inside the full AddTenancySlideOver component used by existing users managing tenancies. First-time users going through onboarding never saw it. That meant a new landlord could enter a deposit figure that exceeds the statutory maximum, submit it, and only find out later that it was invalid.

That's precisely the kind of problem we exist to prevent.

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What's changed

1. Inline deposit cap banner in onboarding Step 3

The Tenant Fees Act 2019 five-week deposit cap warning banner — already used in AddTenancySlideOver — is now rendered directly in the onboarding Step 3 form, immediately alongside the deposit amount field.

New landlords see the cap calculation in context, at the moment they need it, without having to know where to look.

2. Accessible form fields

The email and phone fields in the onboarding form previously relied on placeholder text alone ("Email (optional)", "Phone (optional)") to communicate their purpose. This is an accessibility anti-pattern: placeholders vanish when a user starts typing, and are not reliably surfaced by screen readers.

All affected fields now use explicit <label for="..."> elements paired with matching id attributes on their inputs — the correct, standards-compliant approach.

3. Deposit protection scheme tooltip

A small "Why do I need this?" tooltip has been added to the deposit protection scheme dropdown. It explains the 30-day statutory deadline: after receiving a deposit, a landlord must register it with a government-approved tenancy deposit protection scheme within 30 days. Missing this deadline can expose landlords to significant penalties.

Surfacing this at the point of selection — rather than in a help article somewhere — gives new users the context they need without interrupting the flow.

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Why these details matter

Onboarding is where habits form. If the first time a landlord uses the platform they enter a non-compliant deposit or miss a statutory deadline, it erodes trust in the platform and creates real legal risk for them.

Small UX decisions — an inline warning, a tooltip, a proper label — are what make the difference between a tool that just records data and one that actively helps landlords stay compliant.

These changes are live in v0.1.298.