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Rent payments not credited to Tenant

daowens

I have a rental property account and am having trouble allocating payments to the tenant. In the rental property tab, the row for this particular tenant has all the values grayed out. What is strange is that for all the previous months this year, the values are double the rent amount. Future months show the expected amount. For what its worth, a separate rental property/tenant row shows the expected behavior; each month has the correct amount in black, not gray. I've searched all my Quicken accounts for the tenant's name and see all that all the expected transactions have been coded as expected, including payee, category and tag. What am I missing?

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mshiggins

" ... the row for this particular tenant has all the values grayed out.

A grayed out cell in the Rent Center indicates that rent has not been "paid" by that tenant for that month.

Which comports with your other comment that, " ... a separate rental property/tenant row shows the expected behavior; each month has the correct amount in black, not gray". That row is where the "missing" rent for your tenant has been applied.

The above indicates that there is something incorrect in your rent payment transactions for that tenant/property.

Generally, the rent payment transactions, at a minimum, require the following:
- the transaction "Date" must not precede the beginning data of the rent period, nor follow the end date of the rent period (*).
- the transaction "Payee name" must exactly match the "Tenant name".
- the transaction "Category" must be a rental income category - it must have a Schedule E rent income tax line item assigned.
- the transaction "Tag" must exactly match the Property tag".

In your case, it sounds like there may be more than one incorrect rent payment transaction.
The months that show double the rent likely have two rent transactions for the same date/tenant/property.
The months that show rent for the tenant, but not in the correct property row, likely have rent transactions that do not have the correct Property Tag.

One thing that often causes problems for Rental Property users is using the Rent Reminder that Quicken creates automatically when a Tenant is assigned to a property. Those Quicken-created rent reminders are not like regular reminders, they can get out-of-sync, and the user has very little control over them.
[You can easily tell if you have a Quicken-created rent reminder: Edit the reminder in the Bill & Income Reminders List and if the "Edit Rental Property Tenant" dialog appears, that is a Quicken-created rent reminder.

In my opinion the best thing to do is to delete Quicken-created rent reminders, and create a regular rent reminder from scratch. A user-created rent reminder should have the following characteristics:
- A "Due next on" date that falls on, or after the start of the rent period; and on, or before, the end of the rent period
- A Frequency that corresponds to the real-world rent frequency
- A "Pay to" name exactly equal to the Quicken "Tenant" name
- A "Category" that is an Income category with a Schedule E rental income tax line item. The out-of-the-box Quicken category, "Rental Property Income:Rent Income" works fine.
- A "Tag" equal to the Quicken "Property Tag"
- An "Amount due" equal to the agreed-upon rent for the period
- A "To account" with the name of the Quicken account where the real-world rent is deposited
- You can give the rent reminder an "End date" of the last rent payment due for the current "lease", if desired (in the same dialog as that for "Frequency")

-JP

All comments

UKR

I'm not much of a Rental Properties user, but …
is it possible that Rent Center "thinks" that payments each month were not on time, before or after Due Date and/or rent has been prepaid?

Or perhaps the lease End Date has been reached?

mshiggins

-JP

daowens

Thanks for the suggestions. I should have explained a little more about the second row containing correctly applied rent. This second row is for a different property with a different tenant. I only mentioned it to highlight that I think what I have been doing is working for one tenant/property but not the other. In fact, even the property that is giving me trouble has worked fine for the past couple years. The only change to my workflow has been to follow the advice listed here regarding entering checks into a "For Deposit" offline account in order to work around my bank listing the actual deposit as the sum of both checks.

I have confirmed:

Transaction dates meet the criteria mentioned above
Tenant name is correct
Category is correct
Tag is correct
Rent reminders have been deleted

In the past, I had a problem with the doubled amounts (they were black though, not gray) and I realized that I had counted the rent twice by categorizing/tagging a payment in two different accounts; one where the rent was deposited and another which was the result of a transfer. All that has been cleaned up many months ago. But it did teach me to search for the tenant name in all accounts to make sure I didn't accidentally double record anything. I've searched for the tenant in this case and see exactly one payment each month with all the fields mentioned above set correctly.

One other bit of relevant information is that the two properties/tentants we've been discussing are the reason for my post regarding "Split rent payments". The process is working fine for one property but not the other and I'm at a loss for what is causing problems since, from what I can tell, I'm recording each of the two transactions in a similar manner.

Thanks for your help.

mshiggins

The advice you got from SuperUser UKR seems basically correct to me:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7950469/split-rent-payments-from-two-different-checks

You say, "The process is working fine for one property but not the other ....".

I can't really determine from your remarks why the transactions for one property would work, but not the transactions for another property.

When Rent Center rent amounts paid for a given tenant/property are different than what you believe was actually paid, I can think of no other explanation than incorrect, or extra, transactions.

If, for example, the Rent Center shows twice as much rent having been paid as was actually paid; duplicate rent transactions would account for that. The duplicates would, virtually by definition, have correct values for Tenant, Property and Amount (and Dates in the correct range). If you look for transactions affecting the incorrect rent amount paid, make sure you look in any possible "hidden" Quicken accounts.

Regarding the basic approach:

I think you should have your Rent reminder transactions posting to the intermediate account (UKR's "suspense" account).

While the actual deposits you receive should post to the Quicken account associated with the real-world account (typically a checking-type account) where the check(s) were deposited ... categorized as a Transfer FROM the Quicken intermediate (suspense) account.

[To enable the actual rent deposit transaction for multiple tenants to provide more information, you could make the deposit a split transaction with one split line per tenant/property, with each split line being a transfer FROM the intermediate account, with the tenant/property in the Memo field. But that "split" data would only be for your information, it would not affect payments being applied to the correct Tenant/Property: that occurs in the intermediate ("suspense") account. When the transfers from multiple lines in a specific split transaction arrive in the intermediate account, they will create a single transfer transaction (for the total of the originating split lines) TO the rent deposit account.]

[Technically, if you receive a payment for a single tenant/single property for a single rent period, you could record that payment in the Quicken checking account categorized directly to your Rent Income category. But handling the deposit of one check for a single tenant/single property differently than the deposit of one check for multiple tenants/multiple properties would mostly just make additional work for no additional benefit. So I personally would employ the intermediate account for every rent transaction.]

-JP

daowens

I double checked the rent Reminders and there was one still active. Deleting the reminder seems to have resolved everything. I didn’t have to edit any transactions and there weren’t any duplicates. Thanks for the help.