I have been using Quicken for over ten years and recently acquired Quicken Rental Property Manager 2019 to help me manage a 20 unit apartment house. After several month’s experience with the package, I believe the package would benefit from several enhancements. Specifically:
· Calculate late fees. The software should add the late fee to the amount owed instead of merely showing a flag that indicates the rent is late.
· Apply payments in accordance with lease rules. In several units the tenants don’t pay the amount due every month. Some get behind and make multiple partial payments while others pay ahead when they have extra money. When a payment is received it should applied in the order below:
o Amounts due from prior month(s)
o Late fees
o Current month rent
o Future rent by month
Currently, I have to allocate monies received manually.
· Report payments by unit by month. In the example above, it would be really helpful to be able to generate a report for each unit that shows the date each payment was received and the way the funds were applied.
· Group payments to match bank deposits. I collect 12-15 checks right after the first of the month. Rather than making individual deposits, it is easier to make a single deposit into a checking account and use tags to track the apartment that made the payment. This is straightforward with regular Quicken but not possible if the rents are entered through the rental property component. As I understand it, that part of Quicken requires each rental payment to be entered separately and does not allow them to be grouped into a single bank deposit. Clearly, one of the advantages of Quicken is the ability to track all monies deposited in the bank and all payments made.
· Show more than 4 files. I have more than four entities, each with its own bank and or brokerage account. It would save time if more than four Quicken files were displayed at the bottom of the File tab. Ideally, each user would be able to determine the number of Quicken files to display
· Eliminate the plus sign in apartment names. Rental Property Manager puts a plus sign between the apartment name and the apartment number. This makes data entry more time consuming when using regular Quicken to enter rents. Please make it simpler but using an apartment name with a unit number with no plus sign.
I would appreciate it if you would put the requests above into the development schedule. If you would like any clarification on the functionality, please contact me.
I have used quicken for over 20 years. I purchased the rental package several years ago, and found that it is too hard to use. I have 28 rental properties.l I'd suggest that you form a group of rental property owners and have them provide feedback.
I see from your signature that you are very active on the Quicken forum. Thanks for taking an interest in this topic. I moved from Quicken Business to Rental Property Manager a year ago as a tool to manage a 20 unit apartment building.
After experimenting for a while, I found so many limitations in the Rental Property portion of the tool that I stopped using it. Currently, I use the regular Quicken only but it does really support my property management needs.
In answer to your questions.
1. At the simple level there would be a single late fee of X dollars after Y days where X and Y would be established by the user. It would be better to establish this individual apartment rather than for an entire building to allow for one fee for a small apartment and a higher fee for a larger apartment.
So if the rent was due on the first of the month with a 5 day grace period and a $25 late fee, if the rent is not deposited by the 6th of the month, Quicken would automatically generate a $25 late fee. Clearly, there would have to be the capability for the landlord to void the late fee at management discretion.
This is a fairly straight forward calculation based on a rule and a date. I could build it in Excel but that defeats the purpose of having a rental property tool.
2. Most leases specify that rents are applied to the oldest outstanding amounts due first. In most leases and therefore in most rental property software, rents are applied in the following order:
o Amounts due from prior month(s)
o Late fees
o Current month rent
o Future rent by month
If a property manager doesn’t want this, it would be simple to turn off the feature and do what Quicken does now and accept rent as it is received without allocating a payment in a particular order.
3. Payment by month is currently available through the regular Quicken functionality. To get it, tag each payment by unit and report on payments by tag. That will give payment by month. I had hoped that the Rental Property portion of Quicken would provide a more robust functionality such as showing for an individual apartment both:
o The date each payments was received
o The way each payment was applied (see point 2)
While it is reasonably straightforward to accomplish this in Quicken, it requires creating two reports and then pasting them into a single document to give to a tenant.
4. Thanks for the suggestion on “undeposited fund.” I searched the forum and talked to the people on the help desk but have not found anything that helps. Depositing multiple checks on a single deposit slip is easy with regular Quicken. However, I cannot figure out how to do it through the rental property portion of Quicken. Creating a payment in Rental Property allows only a single payment for an apartment.
If I am missing something and you have a way to make it work, I would very much appreciate a direct link or conversation
5. Show more than 4 files. This is probably easy and would improve my user experience since I regularly use more than four files.
6. This is an ease of use feature. While it is not hard to add a plus sign it does require holding down the shift key every time I enter a rent or a late fee. While not difficult, it requires several extra key strokes.
If you have any suggestions regarding getting the Quicken development team’s attention I would appreciate it.
"2. Most leases specify that rents are applied to the oldest outstanding amounts due first".
In Quicken, rents are applied according to the transaction date of the rent payment transaction. To adjust for any differences in the date or amount paid, use the "undeposited funds" account suggested by NotACPA.
"5. Show more than 4 files. ... I regularly use more than four files".
Users (of all Quicken Editions) have asked for that for a LONG time; I would not hold my breath.
You can create a separate desktop icon to open each file; and/or put the Open File icon on the Quicken Toolbar and use that.
"6. This is an ease of use feature. While it is not hard to add a plus sign it does require holding down the shift key every time I enter a rent or a late fee. While not difficult, it requires several extra key strokes".
Entering rent should not require any "key strokes" to designate the property when you use a Rent Reminder: properties are selected from a dropdown in the reminder. I'm guessing you could use reminders for late fees as well.
[I suggest you use your own rent reminder, rather than the one Quicken creates.]
At the end of the day, modifications to Quicken will have to pass a cost/benefit test; and I believe rental property users are a very small percentage of Quicken users. The rental property features were grafted, rather clumsily, onto the Business version of Quicken, long after Quicken began. I think Intuit hoped that having some rental property features available would draw more new users to Quicken, which I don't believe happened to the degree hoped.
And I suspect that the rental property features were added with small mom-and-pop landlords in mind, whose rental property dealings were a secondary source of income; not those running rental businesses for their livelihood.
Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list
I read past posts from other users with the same issue. If a renter pays early and it is received as a transaction in my checking account, the rental property function will not show it for the month that it is due. So, it looks like the renter is overdue on his rent when he/she actually paid early. Surely, Quicken can do better by allowing users to assign the rental month to the transaction. One past comment was to change the checking account transaction date to match the rent due month but that is adding to the problems not solving them for the users. If we do that, we will have problems reconciling with the bank's balance as of the earlier month. Has any one come up with a better solution?
@JD116 in the older versions of Rental Property Manager 2.0 & 2.5 that functionality was there you could enter a received date and an applied month for rent received. It is missing in this 2020 version. I find the 2020 version to be missing many of the basic functions in the earlier versions of RPM. I hope through this forum and my many calls to Support we can get the functions needed as well as eliminate screens and key strokes.
Comments
I
have been using Quicken for over ten years and recently acquired Quicken Rental
Property Manager 2019 to help me manage a 20 unit apartment house. After several month’s experience with the
package, I believe the package would benefit from several enhancements. Specifically:
·
Calculate late fees. The software should add the late
fee to the amount owed instead of merely showing a flag that indicates the rent
is late.
·
Apply payments in accordance with
lease rules. In several
units the tenants don’t pay the amount due every month. Some get behind and make multiple partial
payments while others pay ahead when they have extra money. When a payment is
received it should applied in the order below:
o Amounts due from prior month(s)
o Late fees
o Current month rent
o Future rent by month
Currently,
I have to allocate monies received manually.
·
Report payments by unit by month.
In the example above, it would be really helpful to be able to generate
a report for each unit that shows the date each payment was received and the
way the funds were applied.
·
Group payments to match bank
deposits. I collect 12-15 checks right after the first
of the month. Rather than making
individual deposits, it is easier to make a single deposit into a checking
account and use tags to track the apartment that made the payment. This is straightforward with regular Quicken
but not possible if the rents are entered through the rental property
component. As I understand it, that part
of Quicken requires each rental payment to be entered separately and does not
allow them to be grouped into a single bank deposit. Clearly, one of the advantages of Quicken is
the ability to track all monies deposited in the bank and all payments
made.
·
Show more than 4 files.
I have more than four entities, each with its own bank and or brokerage
account. It would save time if more than four Quicken files were displayed at
the bottom of the File tab. Ideally,
each user would be able to determine the number of Quicken files to display
·
Eliminate the plus sign in apartment
names. Rental
Property Manager puts a plus sign between the apartment name and the apartment
number. This makes data entry more time
consuming when using regular Quicken to enter rents. Please make it simpler but
using an apartment name with a unit number with no plus sign.
Iwould appreciate it if you would put the requests above into the development schedule.
If you would like any clarification on the functionality, please contact me.
Do you have any reaction to the suggestions above?
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
I see
from your signature that you are very active on the Quicken forum. Thanks for taking an interest in this
topic. I moved from Quicken Business to
Rental Property Manager a year ago as a tool to manage a 20 unit apartment building.
After
experimenting for a while, I found so many limitations in the Rental Property portion
of the tool that I stopped using it. Currently,
I use the regular Quicken only but it does really support my property
management needs.
In
answer to your questions.
1. At
the simple level there would be a single late fee of X dollars after Y days
where X and Y would be established by the user.
It would be better to establish this individual apartment rather than
for an entire building to allow for one fee for a small apartment and a higher fee
for a larger apartment.
So if
the rent was due on the first of the month with a 5 day grace period and a $25
late fee, if the rent is not deposited by the 6th of the month,
Quicken would automatically generate a $25 late fee. Clearly, there would have to be the capability
for the landlord to void the late fee at management discretion.
This
is a fairly straight forward calculation based on a rule and a date. I could build it in Excel but that defeats
the purpose of having a rental property tool.
2.
Most leases specify that rents are applied to the oldest outstanding amounts
due first. In most leases and therefore
in most rental property software, rents are applied in the following order:
o Amounts due from prior month(s)
o
Late fees
o
Current month rent
o
Future rent by month
If a property manager doesn’t want this, it would be simple to
turn off the feature and do what Quicken does now and accept rent as it is received
without allocating a payment in a particular order.
3. Payment by month is currently available through the regular Quicken
functionality. To get it, tag each payment
by unit and report on payments by tag.
That will give payment by month. I had hoped that the Rental Property
portion of Quicken would provide a more robust functionality such as showing for
an individual apartment both:
o The
date each payments was received
o The
way each payment was applied (see point 2)
While it is reasonably straightforward to accomplish this in
Quicken, it requires creating two reports and then pasting them into a single
document to give to a tenant.
4. Thanks for the suggestion on “undeposited fund.” I searched the forum and talked to the people
on the help desk but have not found anything that helps. Depositing multiple checks on a single
deposit slip is easy with regular Quicken.
However, I cannot figure out how to do it through the rental property
portion of Quicken. Creating a payment
in Rental Property allows only a single payment for an apartment.
If I am missing something and you have a way
to make it work, I would very much appreciate a direct link or conversation
5. Show more than 4 files. This is probably easy and would
improve my user experience since I regularly use more than four files.
6. This is an ease of use feature. While it is not hard to add a plus sign it
If you have any suggestions regarding getting the Quickendoes require holding down the shift key every time I enter a rent or a late
fee. While not difficult, it requires several extra key strokes.
development team’s attention I would appreciate it.
"2. Most leases specify that rents are applied to the oldest outstanding amounts due first".
In Quicken, rents are applied according to the transaction date of the rent payment transaction. To adjust for any differences in the date or amount paid, use the "undeposited funds" account suggested by NotACPA.
"5. Show more than 4 files. ... I regularly use more than four files".
Users (of all Quicken Editions) have asked for that for a LONG time; I would not hold my breath.
You can create a separate desktop icon to open each file; and/or put the Open File icon on the Quicken Toolbar and use that.
"6. This is an ease of use feature. While it is not hard to add a plus sign it does require holding down the shift key every time I enter a rent or a late fee. While not difficult, it requires several extra key strokes".
Entering rent should not require any "key strokes" to designate the property when you use a Rent Reminder: properties are selected from a dropdown in the reminder. I'm guessing you could use reminders for late fees as well.
[I suggest you use your own rent reminder, rather than the one Quicken creates.]
At the end of the day, modifications to Quicken will have to pass a cost/benefit test; and I believe rental property users are a very small percentage of Quicken users. The rental property features were grafted, rather clumsily, onto the Business version of Quicken, long after Quicken began. I think Intuit hoped that having some rental property features available would draw more new users to Quicken, which I don't believe happened to the degree hoped.
And I suspect that the rental property features were added with small mom-and-pop landlords in mind, whose rental property dealings were a secondary source of income; not those running rental businesses for their livelihood.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list
@Quicken_Tyka