Setting Up Categories for Rental Properties

Babo47

What is the best way to set up in Mac-Deluxe? Just signed up a few days ago and want to do this right coming out of the chute! Also, suggestions on the best way to search topics (like this one)? Thank you!

jacobs

If depends what you're trying to track in Quicken. Unlike the higher-level Windows version which has tools built in for managing rental properties, you have to decide what you're going to want to track in Quicken Mac.

One thing many property owners use is a standard set of categories for rental income and expenses, with unique Tags for each separate property. That allows you to see your income and expenses in aggregate, but also dig down to do detailed reporting by property.

If you're tracking money owed to you and operating on an accrual basis, you can create an Asset account for Accounts Receivable. To record January rent for Apartment 1, you could create a transaction with an APT-1 tag in the Account Receivable account which credits your rental income category; when you get paid, you'd enter the deposit in your checking account, with a transfer to Accounts Receivable to reduce what's owed.

But that may be overkill, depending how many properties and transactions you have. Some users might just operate on a cash basis, recording income when a payment is received and bypassing the extra steps of having everything go through Accounts Receivable.

If you post back with a little more detail about the nature and volume of your rental business, I'm sure some other folks here will chime in.

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In terms of Search on this site, the built-in search can sometimes be fine, but can also be frustratingly bad. One thing to experiment with is the little triangle on the far right side of the Search box; click that and you can refine your search a bit, which can sometime be helpful. I often find I get better results with a Google search. Start in your browser's search box with "site:community.quicken.com" to tell Google to only return results from this site, followed by keywords or a phrase describing your search. So something like:
    site:community.quicken.com mac rental property categories