Help with Business questions for HOA

Question

Hi, none of the sales people for Quicken are very knowledgeable so I thought I would ask the community for help.  We are a small HOA and are looking to use Quicken Classic for Business & personal for the following:

1. Link Bank accounts

2. Track bills paid and expenses for the HOA

3. Provide a ledger with a summarization of expenses/bills and account balance annually.  Would be great if this was by category like electric, water, snow removal, etc.  or vendor name is fine also.  XXX electric company, XXX Water co, etc.

4. Pay bills using Bill pay. If not an option we can just manage through each companies billing site.

5. Invoice HOA members for annual fees

6. Allow HOA members to pay invoice electronically.  By electronically, I mean paypal, venmo, apple pay, Google Pay.

Can anyone confirm what is available in the business version?  Specifically #6!

Jim_Harman · Answer

If you have a single deposit that includes several payments and a PayPal fee, you could to set it up as a split deposit with one split line for the full amount of each payment, including the Tags or however you are identifying each unit. Then you would have another split line that you charge to an expense Category of PayPal fees or whatever.

Another, probably better, way to do it would be to set up an offline PayPal account in Quicken and deposit the payments and record the fees there. When you make a deposit to your bank account, you would record a transfer from the PayPal account to the bank account for the amount of the deposit.

Quicken also supports an online connection to PayPal, which might help to automate the transactions. See this discussion

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7946646/paypal-and-categories

MeJayn · Answer

I manage our HOA's finances for a small community of 77 homes.  We invoice only once a year and this year I opened a PayPal account to offer another method of payment to my neighbors. It was well received but I ran into trouble with accounting for the PayPal fees for the transactions.  Essentially, we were charged $6.17 for each payment made through PP and as I'd not anticipated it (I thought there wouldn't be as much interest in this method as there turned out to be) had to write off those fees.  I've still not figured out how to do this properly and plan to get on the phone with support if someone in this community hasn't got a good idea. I need to credit the invoice with the write off amount without it creating a deposit on the bank register. I also want this expense to show up in the Operating Costs reports.

As to your questions. I've done all but #6 successfully with it and saved our HOA ~$800 this year by getting us off of Quick Books. I did however, make an accounting mess for myself as there are a couple of things that aren't as easily done in Quicken or I haven't figured it out yet (clearing the invoice and the bank deposit of that payment when the deposit is a combination of several invoices is the other one).  I want to believe there is a good solution and like the application for most things (I've used it for my home finances for many years).

Jim_Harman · Answer

* Check with the bank to see if it supports downloading to Quicken. The answer may be different depending on whather it is a personal or business account.
* Should be no problem
* Should be no problem
* Depends on the bank, Using the biller's Auto-pay and/or the bank's website may be your best option.
* This should be possible by setting up the HOA as a multi-unit rental property and tracking "rent". There has been some discussion here recently about how best to do this. See for example this discussion

*

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7911364/what-is-the-best-way-to-set-up-an-hoa-that-collects-dues

6. Depends on your bank, this is not supported directly by Quicken.

I edited your title to make the question more specific.