Converting from QuickBooks to Quicken Rental Properties 2018?

Unknown

We have 9 rental properties, each is its own LLC, and each has its own bank account.  6 of them are owned by the same 4 owners, and 3 are owned by these 4 plus one additional owner.  

We currently manage this with QuickBooks, one company file per property.  I would like to know if the Quicken 2018 Rental version will accommodate this structure, and allow us to generate P&Ls and Balance Sheets for each property.

Also, is there a mechanism to add adjusting journal entries, which are done by the accountant after the tax returns have been prepared?

q_lurker

We currently manage this with QuickBooks, one company file per property.  I would like to know if the Quicken 2018 Rental version will accommodate this structure, and allow us to generate P&Ls and Balance Sheets for each property.

You would likewise want to and be able to set it up as one file for each one company (LLC) in Quicken.

The Q-HBRP edition will generate Balance Sheet and P&L statements as part of its "Business" functions.  It will be doing so on a LLC basis rather than a property basis supporting the possibility that a single LLC could own multiple properties (not your current case).

Also, is there a mechanism to add adjusting journal entries, which are done by the accountant after the tax returns have been prepared?

You can "adjust" the entries effectively making general journal entries, though there is not a general journal ledger.  Now the caveats.

Quicken in all forms is personal finance software, not accounting software.  As such, accounting considerations such as double entry and general journal entries are foreign or hidden concepts.  Tax support is oriented toward Form 1040 schedules (B, C, E, etc.).  The personal nature also goes the direction of not closing a period; the user can essentially go back to any transaction and make a change.  While that is far easier than making a double entry general journal entry, the idea is frowned upon by serious, responsible, and ethical accountants.

Also in the personal context, the program does not conveniently support ownership draws, multiple ownership interests (capital accounts), and K-1 preparation.  

You have not identified the number of rental units per property -- could be one, could be 100.  I'll suggest that the rental property aspects are more in line with an individual (personal) managing some rental investment property (a duplex, a couple of rental houses, a six unit apartment, etc.) rather than a company managing a 100 unit apartment complex.  

Payroll, if these LLCs have employees, is also not a feature managed within the Quicken program.  The program can handle you writing payroll checks, but not internally manage the calculations for the payroll.  You'd want a separate payroll package.

Final caveat:  Although I have used the Rental property edition, I am not a serious experienced rental property investor and I am not currently using that aspect of the program.  Much of my bias with regards to those features comes from reading questions about those features on this site (and its predecessors). 

Some regular posters to this site do manage their own rental investments without using the top-end Q-HBRP edition - again personal rather than corporate interest.  That is, they had not found the rental property features advantageous for what had been a significant price premium.  The 2018 program is the first to bring the rental features into the Home&Business package; rental had been a separate package.

My recommendation: You did not indicate why you were interested in a change, but I would likely stick with QuickBooks as a professional, corporate accounting package better in tune with LLC needs.  I do not believe the rental features are a compelling draw.

Unknown

q.lurker:  Thanks for the very detailed response.

By way of clarification, the 9 properties break down into 1 x 6 flat, 2 x 2-flat, and 6 single family homes.  

The main reason for considering a switch is the desire to create consolidated reports across all 9 properties (not possible if each one has its own file), and the fact that we are using QB 2016 Pro Desktop, and based on past experience, we're going to be forced to shell out to upgrade to the latest version.  Going to QB Online is prohibitively expensive - one license per EIN!

Another reason was to automate rent collection.  Seems like Q-HBRP sends out rent reminders, but it's not clear at all how useful this feature really is, since it doesn't appear to allow a tenant to pay the rent via the reminder.

A good reason not to switch is that our accountant logs in remotely to prepare the tax returns for each entity, and then again to enter the adjusting entries.

Looks like with your help I just convinced myself to stick with QB. :-)

Thanks again.

q_lurker

Allan Kirson said:

q.lurker:  Thanks for the very detailed response.

By way of clarification, the 9 properties break down into 1 x 6 flat, 2 x 2-flat, and 6 single family homes.  

The main reason for considering a switch is the desire to create consolidated reports across all 9 properties (not possible if each one has its own file), and the fact that we are using QB 2016 Pro Desktop, and based on past experience, we're going to be forced to shell out to upgrade to the latest version.  Going to QB Online is prohibitively expensive - one license per EIN!

Another reason was to automate rent collection.  Seems like Q-HBRP sends out rent reminders, but it's not clear at all how useful this feature really is, since it doesn't appear to allow a tenant to pay the rent via the reminder.

A good reason not to switch is that our accountant logs in remotely to prepare the tax returns for each entity, and then again to enter the adjusting entries.

Looks like with your help I just convinced myself to stick with QB. :-)

Thanks again.

the desire to create consolidated reports across all 9 properties (not possible if each one has its own file), 

Quicken will support multiple businesses in one file for those cases where an individual runs more than one business interest or husband and wife each have their own businesses.  To apply that to 9 separate LLCs would create a potential mess of massive entanglements.

If a Quicken user were to ask about consolidating data from 9 files into one presentation, I'd suggest exporting relevant reports to a multi-sheet Excel file and letting the consolidation take place there.  I have no idea how that might relate to QuickBooks.

Good Luck.  

Unknown

That’s how I’m doing it now, very tedious process: open company, generate report, export to excel, close company. Repeat 9 times, then futz with the excel workbook, because every time the report is generated, the bottom line comes out on a different row, depending on which accounts were used during that period.

Michael Jones

I've been a long time user of Quicken Rental Property since it was released as a stand-alone product.  I managed 3 single family homes and a multi-family unit.  I'm down to one now, and frankly, I could have done most of it from the Business version and maybe even Premiere/Deluxe back in the day.  Rental Property is just a specific 'view' of the business functions.  But it's nothing particularly special overall.  It has gotten better, but it's still pretty simplistic.  

You can put links to get paid in an invoice template if you use an external service (like PayPal, etc.) but there is no specific link managed by Quicken that you can use for payment.  Intuit used to have such a service for QB, and I assume it's still there (used to pay my daughter's music lessons that way).  And you can with 2018 output a nice receipt to print/email, which wasn't there before.

It will certainly allow you to have multiple properties and manage them in one file, with P&L for each and overall.  Without setting up your own accounts /categories for each property, however, it will tend to put them all in one set of 'generic' rental categories.  

It also does not track debts particularly well against rental properties like mortgages, etc. especially when it comes to splitting them for tax reasons.  It will again tend to want to lump them all together in one 'mortgage interest' account on a memorized transaction without allowing you to override it to a property-specific one.  If you are okay looking at the tables you get from your mortgage company every month and adjusting the transactions, you can work around that.

You can manage basic info about your tenants, attach documents to their records for tracking, etc.  It has some peculiar handling of deposits in a specific 'impound account', and some other slightly odd features.

And lastly, it only understands cash accounting, no accrual-based accounting.  

Let me know if you have any other specific questions that I might be able to answer.

Michael

Unknown

Thanks, Michael.  The more I learn, the less I'm inclined to switch.

q_lurker

Michael Jones said:

I've been a long time user of Quicken Rental Property since it was released as a stand-alone product.  I managed 3 single family homes and a multi-family unit.  I'm down to one now, and frankly, I could have done most of it from the Business version and maybe even Premiere/Deluxe back in the day.  Rental Property is just a specific 'view' of the business functions.  But it's nothing particularly special overall.  It has gotten better, but it's still pretty simplistic.  

You can put links to get paid in an invoice template if you use an external service (like PayPal, etc.) but there is no specific link managed by Quicken that you can use for payment.  Intuit used to have such a service for QB, and I assume it's still there (used to pay my daughter's music lessons that way).  And you can with 2018 output a nice receipt to print/email, which wasn't there before.

It will certainly allow you to have multiple properties and manage them in one file, with P&L for each and overall.  Without setting up your own accounts /categories for each property, however, it will tend to put them all in one set of 'generic' rental categories.  

It also does not track debts particularly well against rental properties like mortgages, etc. especially when it comes to splitting them for tax reasons.  It will again tend to want to lump them all together in one 'mortgage interest' account on a memorized transaction without allowing you to override it to a property-specific one.  If you are okay looking at the tables you get from your mortgage company every month and adjusting the transactions, you can work around that.

You can manage basic info about your tenants, attach documents to their records for tracking, etc.  It has some peculiar handling of deposits in a specific 'impound account', and some other slightly odd features.

And lastly, it only understands cash accounting, no accrual-based accounting.  

Let me know if you have any other specific questions that I might be able to answer.

Michael

Thanks for the review, Michael.  Stick around if you can.  We don't have a lot of experienced RPM uses active here.  

volvogirl

One thing I didn't see mentioned (might be in there) is that you can not convert from QB  to Quicken.  You can go from Quicken to QuickBooks but not the other way around.  

Michael Jones

Allan Kirson said:

Thanks, Michael.  The more I learn, the less I'm inclined to switch.

You can always buy it and try it out and then return it if it doesn't work (assuming you get it from a place you can return it).  Regardless of where you buy it, Quicken offers a 30 day money back guarantee.  So you could try it fairly risk-free.  

It's funny, because one of the new 'features' from the website is this:  
    E-mail rent reminders and custom invoices with logo and payment links.

But the only way I've been able to find to mail reminders is as invoices, and the requires you to setup a business as far as I can tell.  The ability to do the above sentence does not appear in the help file anywhere.  

Here is how the 'help' file talks about it:
    Email an invoice to customers

   NEW. If you are a Quicken Home, Business, & Rental Property user, you can email     your invoice directly to your customers. You can also choose to attach a PDF of 
    your invoice to the email.

Very subtle that they don't say the same thing.  If you click the 'How do I use it?', the very first instruction is 'click on business'.  There is nowhere in the rental interface to 'send an invoice' and you can't get to it in the Business section without actually setting up a business.  

Maybe it's coming soon in one of the continual rollouts they are doing under the new model of enhancements (which I kinda like, but they need to do more to show you where the new features are, not just in obscure release note lines).

Michael Jones

volvogirl said:

One thing I didn't see mentioned (might be in there) is that you can not convert from QB  to Quicken.  You can go from Quicken to QuickBooks but not the other way around.  

Yeah, limitation that Intuit made many years ago to try and force you up to QB if you went there.  I assume it was because QB was always a higher priced product than Quicken, and the assumption that if you 'graduated' to QB why would you want to go back?  Too many problems to do so, since QB is much more powerful and much more 'accounting' based.  

Michael Jones

Michael Jones said:

I've been a long time user of Quicken Rental Property since it was released as a stand-alone product.  I managed 3 single family homes and a multi-family unit.  I'm down to one now, and frankly, I could have done most of it from the Business version and maybe even Premiere/Deluxe back in the day.  Rental Property is just a specific 'view' of the business functions.  But it's nothing particularly special overall.  It has gotten better, but it's still pretty simplistic.  

You can put links to get paid in an invoice template if you use an external service (like PayPal, etc.) but there is no specific link managed by Quicken that you can use for payment.  Intuit used to have such a service for QB, and I assume it's still there (used to pay my daughter's music lessons that way).  And you can with 2018 output a nice receipt to print/email, which wasn't there before.

It will certainly allow you to have multiple properties and manage them in one file, with P&L for each and overall.  Without setting up your own accounts /categories for each property, however, it will tend to put them all in one set of 'generic' rental categories.  

It also does not track debts particularly well against rental properties like mortgages, etc. especially when it comes to splitting them for tax reasons.  It will again tend to want to lump them all together in one 'mortgage interest' account on a memorized transaction without allowing you to override it to a property-specific one.  If you are okay looking at the tables you get from your mortgage company every month and adjusting the transactions, you can work around that.

You can manage basic info about your tenants, attach documents to their records for tracking, etc.  It has some peculiar handling of deposits in a specific 'impound account', and some other slightly odd features.

And lastly, it only understands cash accounting, no accrual-based accounting.  

Let me know if you have any other specific questions that I might be able to answer.

Michael

YW.  I don't want to dissuade anyone, but want them to know what is there and what isn't!