How do I get *Security Deposit Liability* to track decreases when the landlord retains it?

javamolly

The tenant moves out before the end of his lease term and has not paid rent for several months. His security deposit is retained by the landlord to cover unpaid rent. When I record this in Rental Property Manager it does not show a decrease in the liability account "Security Deposit Liability." How do I get it to do so?

Tom Young

I don't use the RPM version of Quicken so I don't know if there's some "programmatic" way of handling this situation but the accounting itself is easy enough. 

Assuming you have access to the liability Account's register, I'd debit (decrease) the liability by the amount of the security deposit with the offset being a "transfer" to the checking Account.  Then I'd credit (decrease) the checking Account by the amount of the security deposit, with the offset being the rental income Category.  The net effect of all this is that the liability Account is reduced appropriately, cash is unchanged, and rental income is recorded.

UKR

I'm not sure about the whole process. The only action I can see that you can do is to go into the tenant's Edit Rental Property Tenant dialog, Security tab and fill out the Security returned portion of the dialog. But that only records a transaction into the *Security Deposit Liability* account and nowhere else. What happened to the real money when the tenant moved in? What category or bank account did you put it in? And then there's an Income category, Security Deposit Forfeit, which should come into the picture at some point in time ...

I'm puzzled. Where are the real RPM expert users when you need one? This is over my pay grade.

javamolly

I'm using Quicken Rental Property Manager. I did finally find where it says you are not supposed to make entries directly into the liability account Quicken creates called "Security Deposit Liability." In any case, I tried it and it doesn't work. I finally found a little popup that implies that you have no alternative but to mark the full deposit as "returned" in order to post an entry in the liability account that offsets the original security deposit. Very clunky and not well-documented. You then can go into your checking account or wherever you have entries for rent and create an entry for the amount of the security deposit that was retained by the landlord and mark the category as "Security Deposit Forfeit."

UKR

Hmmm, thanks for the answer, @javamolly

Looks to me as if the entire process of receiving and returning a renter's Security Deposit is in need of some improvements:
How to correctly record a bank register transaction "Security deposit received" and
How to correctly record a bank register transaction "Security deposit returned to renter" and/or "Security deposit forfeited (retained by landlord)"

Quicken Anja

Hello All,

I went ahead and changed this post to an Idea so other users who have the same or a similar request can vote on the idea by clicking the up arrow (see below).

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CYaccount

RE: Javamolly's response, that is the only way I'm finding as well but then how do you record the check that was written to tenant? That amount is the security deposit less the amount retained by landlord - that's the amount that should be recorded in the checking account, but if I do that then the forfeit amount is not recorded anywhere.....for a property management software the inability to do this basic function is pathetic!