Rental properties vs the business of manageing those properties

Doug C

I have an LLC that i own and manage 3 apartment buildings in. I am moving from Buildium cloude based software to Quicken. My question is what is the best way to manage the business side of rental properties such as office supplies, fuel, tools, advertising, credit background etc.

NotACPA

All of those expenses can be tracked in Quicken Windows 2018 "Home, Business, Rental Property"

Doug C

I have that software but it looks like business and rental are separate.  I am trying to understand how they interact.

Doug C

NotACPA - QW HBRP 2019 said:

All of those expenses can be tracked in Quicken Windows 2018 "Home, Business, Rental Property"

Thank you, I should probably clarify my question.  I have Quicken Windows 2018 "Home, Business, Rental Property".  I am in the business of running owned apartments and am trying to understand how to properly set up the business side to properly interact and track the actual properties.  The business side has operating expenses that will eventually be apportioned to each property (the CPAs Job) but each building will experience expense and each unit will also experience expense and revenue.  

Unknown

I am having the same issue... I can not allocate and split expenses towards each individual unit. 

mshiggins

NotACPA - QW HBRP 2019 said:

All of those expenses can be tracked in Quicken Windows 2018 "Home, Business, Rental Property"

From C. D. Bales:

[The following comments are based on Q2017 and earlier;
but I suspect they also apply to Q2018.

FYI: Pre Q2018, the Rental Property version of Quicken
included the Home & Business version of Quicken.]

" ... it looks like business and rental are
separate. I am trying to understand how they interact".

Basically, they don't.

A Quicken "business" is a Schedule C business.
The Quicken rental property features were added long after the business
features were added; and there is very little, if any, overlap between the two.

Business Reports work on "business
transactions". A "business transaction"

is one that has a Schedule C tax line item assigned, or
has no tax line item assigned but has a Business Tag assigned. Business Tags
are created at Business > Manage Business Information.

Rental Property reports work on "rental property
transactions". A "rental property transaction" is one that has a
Schedule E tax line item assigned, or has no tax line item assigned but has
Rental Property Tag assigned.

Rental Property Tags are created when you add a rental
property at Rental Property > Rent Center > Properties & Tenants >
Add Property.

mshiggins

Raphael Tamari said:

I am having the same issue... I can not allocate and split expenses towards each individual unit. 

From C. D. Bales:


"I can not allocate and split expenses towards each individual unit".


Why not? What exactly have you tried, and what exactly happened that was not what you wanted?


Unless I'm missing something about your need, or there is something different about Q2018 than earlier versions; allocating expenses to "individual unit[s]" should be a trivial process - just use a split transaction with one split line per "unit".


You have added the Properties (and Tenants) in the Quicken Rent Center, right?


And your rental property transactions have the appropriate Property Tags and Schedule E tax line items assigned, right?

Michael Jones

I use the rental property part and honestly have never tried to make it work with the 'business' part.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, they do NOT interact.  Some people here seem to have made the invoice part 'work' with the rental side from the business area, but as far as I know (and I've been using rental manager since the start), they aren't meant to work together.

So as noted above, for Quicken business = schedule C business and rentals = schedule E business.  If you need something more sophisticated, then Quicken probably isn't the right tool regardless of the version.  You can run a rental business out of the Schedule C side, but all the standard categories for rentals already in the product will be schedule E categories.  So you'll have to use the business ones, which you can rename and setup your own tax links to the schedule c parts you use.  It takes a little bit of time, but it can be done.

Here is how I manage properties using the rental property part of Quicken HBR:

Create each property in the rental section using the add property dialogue.  That will also create unique tags for each property.

I never had luck letting Quicken put everything into one set of rental categories, so I created a unique set of categories for each rental.  You can do it with the tags alone pretty much, but I just found having the extra catagories made reporting easier, etc.

I NEVER use the 'enter rent' or 'enter expense' from the rental property manager screen.  It's just too limiting.  I enter the transaction manually in the register (or download it from my bank more often than not), and in the transaction, you can then split any transaction amount both categories as well as tags.  

Unknown

Michael Jones said:

I use the rental property part and honestly have never tried to make it work with the 'business' part.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, they do NOT interact.  Some people here seem to have made the invoice part 'work' with the rental side from the business area, but as far as I know (and I've been using rental manager since the start), they aren't meant to work together.

So as noted above, for Quicken business = schedule C business and rentals = schedule E business.  If you need something more sophisticated, then Quicken probably isn't the right tool regardless of the version.  You can run a rental business out of the Schedule C side, but all the standard categories for rentals already in the product will be schedule E categories.  So you'll have to use the business ones, which you can rename and setup your own tax links to the schedule c parts you use.  It takes a little bit of time, but it can be done.

Here is how I manage properties using the rental property part of Quicken HBR:

Create each property in the rental section using the add property dialogue.  That will also create unique tags for each property.

I never had luck letting Quicken put everything into one set of rental categories, so I created a unique set of categories for each rental.  You can do it with the tags alone pretty much, but I just found having the extra catagories made reporting easier, etc.

I NEVER use the 'enter rent' or 'enter expense' from the rental property manager screen.  It's just too limiting.  I enter the transaction manually in the register (or download it from my bank more often than not), and in the transaction, you can then split any transaction amount both categories as well as tags.  

Can I do this in Premiere or do I need the next step up to capture rent income and typical rental expenses? Just have 1 prop. And no other business. Just a retired lady w 1 rent house someone else manages.

q_lurker

Michael Jones said:

I use the rental property part and honestly have never tried to make it work with the 'business' part.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, they do NOT interact.  Some people here seem to have made the invoice part 'work' with the rental side from the business area, but as far as I know (and I've been using rental manager since the start), they aren't meant to work together.

So as noted above, for Quicken business = schedule C business and rentals = schedule E business.  If you need something more sophisticated, then Quicken probably isn't the right tool regardless of the version.  You can run a rental business out of the Schedule C side, but all the standard categories for rentals already in the product will be schedule E categories.  So you'll have to use the business ones, which you can rename and setup your own tax links to the schedule c parts you use.  It takes a little bit of time, but it can be done.

Here is how I manage properties using the rental property part of Quicken HBR:

Create each property in the rental section using the add property dialogue.  That will also create unique tags for each property.

I never had luck letting Quicken put everything into one set of rental categories, so I created a unique set of categories for each rental.  You can do it with the tags alone pretty much, but I just found having the extra catagories made reporting easier, etc.

I NEVER use the 'enter rent' or 'enter expense' from the rental property manager screen.  It's just too limiting.  I enter the transaction manually in the register (or download it from my bank more often than not), and in the transaction, you can then split any transaction amount both categories as well as tags.  

@cathy bryant:  You could do it with Quicken Deluxe or Premier.

Beijing Mac

Michael Jones said:

I use the rental property part and honestly have never tried to make it work with the 'business' part.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, they do NOT interact.  Some people here seem to have made the invoice part 'work' with the rental side from the business area, but as far as I know (and I've been using rental manager since the start), they aren't meant to work together.

So as noted above, for Quicken business = schedule C business and rentals = schedule E business.  If you need something more sophisticated, then Quicken probably isn't the right tool regardless of the version.  You can run a rental business out of the Schedule C side, but all the standard categories for rentals already in the product will be schedule E categories.  So you'll have to use the business ones, which you can rename and setup your own tax links to the schedule c parts you use.  It takes a little bit of time, but it can be done.

Here is how I manage properties using the rental property part of Quicken HBR:

Create each property in the rental section using the add property dialogue.  That will also create unique tags for each property.

I never had luck letting Quicken put everything into one set of rental categories, so I created a unique set of categories for each rental.  You can do it with the tags alone pretty much, but I just found having the extra catagories made reporting easier, etc.

I NEVER use the 'enter rent' or 'enter expense' from the rental property manager screen.  It's just too limiting.  I enter the transaction manually in the register (or download it from my bank more often than not), and in the transaction, you can then split any transaction amount both categories as well as tags.  

as mentioned, you could create a unique category for your rental property and use that unique category to track the income and expenses for the property.  The QRM version adds a 4th dimension with the tags that enables you to be more versatile with reporting and tracking and has some built in reports that help you in understanding your property cash flow.  This especially helps if you have multiple properties.

Michael Jones

Michael Jones said:

I use the rental property part and honestly have never tried to make it work with the 'business' part.  In general, to the best of my knowledge, they do NOT interact.  Some people here seem to have made the invoice part 'work' with the rental side from the business area, but as far as I know (and I've been using rental manager since the start), they aren't meant to work together.

So as noted above, for Quicken business = schedule C business and rentals = schedule E business.  If you need something more sophisticated, then Quicken probably isn't the right tool regardless of the version.  You can run a rental business out of the Schedule C side, but all the standard categories for rentals already in the product will be schedule E categories.  So you'll have to use the business ones, which you can rename and setup your own tax links to the schedule c parts you use.  It takes a little bit of time, but it can be done.

Here is how I manage properties using the rental property part of Quicken HBR:

Create each property in the rental section using the add property dialogue.  That will also create unique tags for each property.

I never had luck letting Quicken put everything into one set of rental categories, so I created a unique set of categories for each rental.  You can do it with the tags alone pretty much, but I just found having the extra catagories made reporting easier, etc.

I NEVER use the 'enter rent' or 'enter expense' from the rental property manager screen.  It's just too limiting.  I enter the transaction manually in the register (or download it from my bank more often than not), and in the transaction, you can then split any transaction amount both categories as well as tags.  

Yes, you as q.lurker said you can do it in the lower versions as well.  Just create your own categories for tracking your rental stuff yourself.  You should be able to link those categories to tax lines as well, though I'm not sure if the Schedule C ones exist in Premiere or not.  Not a huge deal, since the only thing that affects is export to TurboTax for the most part and some reporting functions.  Keeping your rental stuff in separate accounts, assuming you are doing that, makes it even easier. 

If you need to do what the OP needed, you could make 2 categories of properties, 1 for the direct property transactions and one set for the indirect ones.  

Unknown

I also use Buildium's property management software and I have been using Quicken for general accounting and tax preparation.  Every year I look at Quicken to see if they have made the property management tools more robust to be able to manage multiple properties and multiple units.  Sadly, even 2018 they haven't made any substantial improvements to the Quicken software.
In my Opinion, Quicken is pretty good at keeping track of expenses and associating income and expenses with customizable categories.  There are a handful of reports that Quicken provides that can be used to summarize the rental expenses.  These reports are ok for what I need but they are not very flexible or customizable.  Even using the "tax reporting tags", I don't find the schedule C report or the Schedule E report to be useful and I would be surprised if anyone was able to use these reports effectively while still being able to manage your rental business.
It takes me about a day to print and validate my 1099s through quicken (done manually with the Quicken 1099 applet.)  It takes me a day or two to prepare my tax data by using some rudimentary Quicken reports.  I take a highlighter and highlight similar categories and aggregate them together so that they can be inserted into TurboTax manually.  It's not slick, but it gets the job done.
My biggest disappointment with Quicken is that each annual version doesn't add much functionality.  I think it has always been a bill pay subscription service and by upgrading you are simply giving yourself another year of compatibility with bill pay.  I am hopeful we will see a functionality upgrade with Quicken soon so we can get some real benefit and possibly make the rental property manager a useful tool.  If the developers are looking for a roadmap for this, they need only look at the Buildium subscription cloud service.

Unknown

NotACPA - QW HBRP 2019 said:

All of those expenses can be tracked in Quicken Windows 2018 "Home, Business, Rental Property"

Any one know why the rental property started running so slow?