Accounting & Bookkeeping & Small Business Forum

[randian]

I've seen suggestions to make "Customer = Property" and "Job = Tenant" for rental properties. How does this make for better reports, or better accounting, than using classes for classifying your income and expenses?

[Hnygrl]

I do the accounting for a small property management company. I thought I would share with you how we are set up and see if that might help.

First, each entity is it's own QB file; however, there are other options if you wanted to have all the units fall into one data file.

Our tenants are simply set up as "customers". I use the memorized transaction list each month to generate the monthly rent or any other recurring charges. If I'm entering in a security deposit or a one time entry, then I just entered it through statement charges.

Some of the entities have more than one apartment complex so then I use classes to seperate out the different apartment buildings. All transactions are assigned to their class and therefore when we run reports, they can be generated for the entire entity or the individual apartment complexes.

Also, just an FYI, by making each tenant a customer, we can define custom fields within the customer data file to list specific items such as move-in date, roommate info, etc.


Sarah