Whats the best way to record rent roll and yearly operating expenses??

Question

Other than creating an excel spreadsheet, does anyone use a detailed rent roll and expense sheet that easily creates a year end operating statement. Is there a cool app that I could access from my IPhone and/or home PC? If not, does anyone have an excel SS they would mind sharing? Id be happy to answer any construction related questions in return for some good geek info :) Gracias

Account Closed · Answer

QuickBooks will generate a rent roll by you selecting the correct Report.  You can do rent roll by tenants individually, a rent roll by the individual property or unit.  However, you want to do a "Rent Roll" you can tell QuickBooks and your wish is its command.

What's fantastic about QuickBooks is that when a tenant is late, QuickBooks will let you know.  It will let you know if the tenant is one day late with a yellow circle next to their name, and the later they become the circle changes color, all the way to screaming red!

And you will know how many days late they are.  It just doesn't get any better than that!

You can do a Profit and Loss report by Class, which will give you the total income less expenses per rental property, any time of the day, hour, month, year.  Type in the date, choose what property you are interested in and voila, the Genie has granted your wish yet again.

Nancy Neville

Bob B. · Answer

Costco $175 plus tax and free shipping after rebate

Account Closed · Answer

As far as accessing your info via your phone, you could buy a home wireless router that has a USB drive on it.  I just bought one myself.  Mine is a Netgear cable modem/router (wireless).

What you do is put the USB drive in the router, then you go to the website that is the router's IP address.  The USB drive will be listed, and you can access the files.  I haven't used this feature yet, except to see the USB drive listed - I haven't tried accessing files on my USB flash drive yet.

The online utility is called Netgear Genie.  I also downloaded their utility to my computer called Netgear USB Control Center.

Anyway, I literally just hooked it up day before yesterday and haven't tried to access it with my phone, but I bought it with that in mind - to be able to transfer photos and videos from my iPhone to the router USB drive, then I could transfer from there to my PC.

Anyway, check it out.  That might work.  The system is called ReadyShare.  Here's a link to it.  I'd assume other routers have the same feature.

http://netgear.com/home/discover/apps/genie.aspx

http://www.netgear.com/home/discover/apps/readysha...

In fact, this is one of the modems that Charter Cable uses.  You might try renting one to see if it would work first, from your cable company?  Or just buy one from somewhere you can return it, like Staples, if it doesn't work.

Account Closed · Answer

Curt you are correct in a way.  Life gives us two options.  We can learn everything on our own, or pay someone to teach us.

I have been using QuickBooks since 1997 and around 2005 I thought I knew everything about QuickBooks that one could know.  And,  to prove to myself that I did know everything I took an exam to become a Certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor.   WHOA !!!  Well, needless to say, I only thought I knew everything about QuickBooks.  Took the exam again and passed it and every year to be Certified I must take an exam!

Because I have always enjoyed working with figures, and since I loved being a Landlord, and loved QuickBooks, I put the two together and designed a lot of stuff that I know us landlords would want to see.   I became the Peanut Butter mixed with Chocolate Advertisement.  We became a perfect fit.

But what I know didn't come free.  But then again, what I ended up knowing, saved me more money in the long run by what I learned!    What I learned was priceless.  And that about sums up life.  You only get out of life, what you put in, and are determined to get,  and sometimes that means paying  for an education to become better today than you were yesterday.  But how do you know something exists for you, that you need, if you don't know it exists or what it does?  And that is why I'm writing this post.

Therefore,  here are some examples of how to use QuickBooks.

The screen shot below  is a screen shot of the Customer Center from a while back that I did as a demo file.  You can see that the overdue column has a red dot meaning this account is way past due.  743 days past due to be exact, and the rent was $700.00.

The day an invoice is generated for rent due,  the dot would be yellow, then orange and then red, the more past due it gets.

To create this vision in the Customer Center you would right click anywhere on this part of the screen in QuickBooks and then choose Customize Columns

Now you are able to choose what you want to see in QuickBooks.  How many columns?  Several, a couple, you choose and QuickBooks will show you what you want to see.

Scroll down the Available Columns to the left and click on the Add button in the middle to send it to the right.  And if you don't like whats on the Right, remove it to the left.

As you can see I chose to see

• Name, 
• Overdue,
•  Days Overdue and 
• Balance Total. 
• A total of 4 coloumns.

See, that wasn't hard at all was it.

RENT ROLL

Reports can be ran on mostly anything we want to run a report on.  By clicking in the Customer Type Field in the Additional Info Tab of the Customer's File in the Customer Center, we can type in what type of report we want to run.  So I setup a report called "Tenant"

You can see to the right in the Customer Fields that I have created what I want to see on Invoices and Receipts I send my tenants.

I want to see

• the move in date, 
• the Security Deposit paid, 
• the Rental Amount, 
• the Move out Date and
•  Lease Expiration Date. 
• What would you like to see?

To run a Report called a Tenant Roll you will click on Reports on the upper task bar of QuickBooks and choose Profit and Loss Report by Job.

MODIFYING A REPORT

Here we need to do some modification.

• Click on the Filters Tabs
• Choose Customer Type
• Choose Tenant (remember you just created that) from the drop down list.
• Click ok

And a report will generate a Profit and Loss Report per tenant.

THE POWER OF QUICKBOOKS is like a hidden treasure.  Nobody knows what they have in their hands, until someone comes along and shows them.  I hope I have been instrumental in guiding you to understanding QuickBooks a little bit better.

Nancy Neville

Account Closed · Answer

I usually buy mine from Amazon.com (Usually the Cheapest) but I see that Bob Beeler gets it cheaper yet through Costco.  But you have to be a member of Costco.  Either way,

don't forget   IT'S A TAX WRITE OFF.  You will use it as an Office Expense.  I have a special sub account called Software, office supplies, continuing education, etc.

Nancy Neville

Account Closed · Answer

QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, Accountant.

Online I don't believe has the class feature.  It's not as elaborate as the desktop.  Very limited.

Premier will work fine for you.  Create a new company file for rentals.  Setup the Class Feature in the Accounting Preference Section.

When you create customers in their tenant file, under Type, add Tenant as a Type, and you can run Rent Rolls based on Customer Type, e.g., tenants.

Nancy Neville

Jake Landry · Answer

thanks for all the feedback. Very helpful

Aly W. · Answer

I love Quickbooks, and was waiting for @Nancy Nevilleto post about it :) Thanks for all the screenshots!

It is a learning curve, but I had a consultant set mine up and that has helped get me far more organized than I thought I was with the spreadsheet I had. I found money was going places I never considered....and not in my pocket. It's a very worthwhile investment.

Curt McClements · Answer

I've been using QuickBooks for several years to do payroll and financials for a small business. I have never considered using it for rent roll (I have never seen some of the features that are described above). QuickBooks is a good program, but not the most user-friendly and has a learning curve (sorta like Photoshop). Sounds like it has potential for this application, but even as an experienced user, I'd be looking for a book or tutorial on an effective way to set this up.

Whats the best way to record rent roll and yearly operating expenses??

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