How to straighten out Invoice & Payment mess

Marketing Guru

I have used Quicken H&B for a long time but I haven't taken good care of one of my invoice registers that we use to track rental income via our property management company. In order to process their payments to us, I create a monthly invoice that has a line item for the rental income plus a negative amount line item for their management fees and any other pass through expenses. The problem is I haven't been real good about applying the deposits as payments to each individual invoice as they come in.

What I've done, which is probably wrong, is simply take the deposits from the management company as they occur and record them as Transfers to the Rental Invoices account.

However the account is out of whack. While the bottom line balance is correct ($0), some invoices are cleared and payments applied correctly while some aren't. I'd like to bulk clear everything but that doesn't seem to work through Find & Replace. And the cleared field is not directly accessible in the register. Yet some are cleared.

So how should or could I clean this up?

hpllc

As you have realized it will be difficult for you to accurately report or reconcile owner rent due with the correct months.  I have used QH&B 2017 for a similar situation and will share my process after proposing a process for you to clean up the outstanding and unapplied payments. 

I understand you have deposits and those deposits use the category assignment for your accounts receivable account.  The deposits when entered need to match the customer name used in your AR account when creating the invoice.  So assuming there are a series of deposits that are reflected in the AR account if they have any amounts not yet applied to an invoice the cleared column will be blank.  Those that have been fully applied will have a "c" in the cleared column.  To clear all payments and clean up your register:
1. Select the option - new customer payment from the pull down
2. Enter your customers name
3. After clicking into a field other than the customer name the open invoices will populate as well as the field "Existing Credits".  If there are unapplied payments the check box will be available to "Apply existing credits".
4. Check the "Apply existing credit" box and select enter.
The payments will apply to the oldest invoices first until all the credits are exhausted.  All payments should then be marked with a "c" and your invoices will show payed.

What I have done in the past is to create an invoice by property in the AR account for the full rent.  Then create a payable bill in the AP account for the management fees.  When the owner rent due checks came in along with the property management statement I would:

1. Create a customer payment in the AP account for the full rent as reflected on the property management companies statement.  The funds would go to a Pending Deposits account used to collect check, cash etc. to ultimately deposit to the checking account.
2. Pay the AP invoice created for the management company for their fees which is detailed on the property management statement.  Of course this should match the contract, but if there is more or less then this step catches the discrepancy.  The funds come from the Pending Deposits account.  Essentially this leaves a pending deposit amount left equal to the tenants rent collected minus the management fee.
3. Then in the Pending deposits account I would create the actual deposit to the checking account which may be an individual check or may be combined with other checks.  Essentially the Pending Deposits account serves to pull together multiple items into one deposit which is the way transactions download into my checking account register.

Marketing Guru

I got it straightened. I ended up opening each Cleared Payment and reapplied that to the appropriate month's invoice. The register had gotten way off for two reasons. One, there were a couple of inconsistent names so Quicken didn't see them belonging to our prop management company. Second, some payments were applied out of order. The frustrating thing was that if you accidentally unapplied a transfer payment, it would $0 that transaction even though it had been reconciled in the source account. Also, if I wasn't careful, Quicken would make a NEW payment instead of simply apply an existing credit.

As to your suspense account approach, I used to do that but it proved too much work. Now that I've got my direct transfers from deposits worked out, I just have to stay on top of them.