I’m affiliated with a daycare that rents space in a church building that is owned by the other tenant (the church). We are not affiliated with the church in any way, other than our rental agreement.

We do not have a lease in the traditional sense. We have a “memorandum of understanding” which is a very vague document outline various responsibilities and procedures. IMO this document is worthless because of how vague it is.

There are some sections that basically say “build maintenance is the responsibility of the church but daily maintenance is shared by the church and daycare based on usage.” There is no description on how daily maintenance is different from building maintenance and there is no detail on what or how “usage” is measured.

For some context, this daycare has historically been a financial struggle. Month over month we had losses, which were compounded by Covid, until we were operating with borrowed money and our credit accounts were maxed out. Over the last year we have been slowly working our way out of this hole and after some creative changes we are finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Suddenly the church is starting to drop expenses on us. Things like certifying various safety systems (fire alarms), pest control, lawn care, etc. We are fine paying these because the church has helped us in the past, but we recognizing our “memorandum of understanding” needs to be rewritten to include significantly more detail.

Over the past few months the church has been asking for our financials. They are asking under the guise of “helping us out” but we don’t really need help adding numbers — our account does that just fine. They also can’t really help us understand our expenses because 1) we understand them and 2) they are unfamiliar with our industry. We have asked them to help us unblock revenue by renting us more spaces but they have shot that down and are unwilling to discuss it. So clearly, they don’t actually want to help us.

I’m posting here for some advise. How should we be handling this situation? What expenses are reasonable to assume as a tenant and what are unreasonable? How do we handle our landlord asking how much we make? Really any advice is helpful.

FWIW, our daycare is a non-profit ran by a volunteer parent board.