How to apply a rental payment to the correct month (when it is received in a different month)

ene777

In Quicken Business and Rental I receive rent payments to properties added in the rental tab.
However sometimes the tenants prepay a month early, and sometimes they pay a month late.

The only way to make the rent apply towards the month it should apply to is to change the transaction date to that month. This of course screws up reconciliation for any given month (even though looking at the entire picture everything reconciles ok)

I have to make monthly reports for the property owner, and he puts them in quickbooks. if I give him a report for January and then collect rent for January in March I need to change the transaction date to make it apply to January's rent. Now that transaction doesn't show up on the March report. He doesn't want to have to go back some number of month and re-enter data into quickbooks, and I of course would like the accounts to reconcile monthly/not move transactions around.

Please help! This seems like basic rental software stuff and it doesn't seem to do it.

Quicken Sarah

Hello @ene777

Thank you for taking the time to share the details of this issue with the Community, although I apologize that you have not yet received a response.

Quicken is designed to manage properties and rental payments under the assumption that rent is due and collected on a regular monthly schedule and that any payments entered should be applied as the current months due rent. 

There is an allowance to account for and include late fees when entering the payment if the tenant has paid late, but not for early payments I apologize.

Alternatively, I would recommend entering the rent payment on the day the funds are received, then edit the transaction in the rental income account register to add a second tag to indicate which month the payment is for.

I hope this information is helpful, but please let us know if there are any further questions/concerns.

Thank you,

Sarah

ene777

Sarah,

That is a very bad assumption, that is like assuming you never have to evict a tenant! Which every Landlord I know (about 30 of them) has had to evict/collected month over a month late. Not only that, when evicting you need a register to show monthly rents paid, so it is a bad time to have your "rental management software" all over the place, and where I live judges may throw the case out because your accounting method is to confusing!

But let us assume I do what you said to do, let me make sure I understand it I will have "real" transactions entered on the day they were collected, and then some other "fake" account called the "rental income account register", which I have to create, to actually track the months that rent was paid went towards?

The problem with that method is I need the "real" transactions to show up on schedule E and itemized reports correctly for a property owner. But if I tag them to the properties then they will show up in the rental center tab along with the "fake" entries that I created to actually monitor the rents.... therefore throwing the numbers in the rental center all over the place. I already have a pissed off owner since January reports were do to him February 15th and I have spent 100s of hours trying to do this. Giving him a report that doesn't show rent and the associated property it goes with will make me lose my client since he needs that for tax purposes.


We wont get into the TON of extra work this makes since I now must download and tag real transactions, and then manually enter and do the math on fake ones (I have tenants that pay $100 here $100 there as money is available). I could save hours by using a spreadsheet (and the only reason I don't want to is because I have done the first 2 months of this year using quicken and now it would be a giant pain to switch back). I have about 100k of expenses and rents tracked from the last 2 month to redo them all again now would take 2 straight weeks.


So I guess lets figure out how I can use your method, and next year I will switch to buildum or something, but this year lets find a way to use your method and have the monthly reports show up correctly. Suggestions?

Jason C3

I agree with the OG poster. Can we put this under suggestions or improvements? Honestly adding features like these could help Quicken fill in the Small Business / Landlord niche.

Edit: Check out the comment below for a possible solution.

NotACPA

How about using an Intermediary, or Suspense, type account?

When you tenant pays early, deposit the check .. but show the Intermediate account as the "From" account/category.

THEN, when the due month comes along, record the payment in the Rental account ... but direct it also to that Intermediate account.

Those 2 transactions will wash against each other ... and your records will show what actually happened.