Where should I categorize my rental property payment to the bank?

Unknown

I'm just starting with Quicken and I have a couple rental properties. I set the properties up but do not know how to categorize them correctly.  

Tom Young

The loans that you have with the bank that financed the purchase of those rental properties should also be established in Quicken.  Each time that you make a payment to the bank against the loans you "split" the dollar amount of the transaction; one part of the payment goes to pay down the principal of the loan, reducing its balance, while the other part of the payment is classified as an expense using an interest Category. 

If you have a personal mortgage against your residence you'd want to keep the interest payments against your home loan separate from the interest payments against the rental properties since the deductions for taxes end up on separate Schedules.  The interest for the loan securing your home is a Schedule A item whereas the interest for the loans securing your rentals goes to Schedule E.

When you establish the loans against the rental units - if you haven't yet - you should set them up as "manual" loans, i.e., where the information regarding payments isn't automatically downloaded from the banks.  Doing so gives you a little more flexibility and control over the entries.  Quicken's loan "wizard" can calculate the amortization schedule for the loans and create "Reminders", reminders that you can have automatically entered in your bank Account prior to the actual payment, properly splitting the payment between principal and interest.

I've never used Quicken's "Home & Business" version which I expect has a few more bells and whistles regarding "rental" activity, but you might want to take a look at that version if you're using either the Deluxe or Premier versions and see if it's worth the additional cost to your.

Unknown

This is CPA talk.. Can you give me an example?

hotscotch

Any luck yet?  I think Quicken made this very hard.