Quicken Home & Business vs Quicken Rental Property

[Lovey S.]

I only have one property. I don't anticipate buying more anytime soon.

For personal finances, I used MS Money and now Quicken. I don't have a lot of maintenance, other than replacing appliances over time. I self-manage and I just give my accountant for tax forms and total for whatever I spend in appliances or anything else.

I need to upgrade my Quicken 2014 Home and Business. Does it make sense to switch to Quicken Property Manager?

I know how to use QuickBooks but don't like it for personal finance because it doesn't track investments automatically. I like seeing everything in one place.

[Jeff Bridges]

Originally posted by @Mayes White:

@Lovey S. What are your thoughts on Quicken Rental Property?

 I can share my thoughts: I've used versions since 2013 and now use 2018. I self manage 3 units and track expenses on 7 units that are professionally managed (to record any expenses not paid by the property manager). I like the system as a good desktop alternative to cloud based offerings. I can setup new properties easily and all of the tax categories are already setup in a dropdown for each transaction. So basically the application downloads my credit card and rental bank account transactions once a week automatically, then I take 5 minutes to tag each transaction with the matching property and then categorize with the expense/ income type. Each is a dropdown. At the end of the year, you have the ability to generate a schedule E form export in spreadsheet or PDF form after a little bit of tweaking the export settings and then send that to your CPA, and they take care of the rest. It also allows you to run cashflow reports so you can monitor your overall cashflow across all properties. Very helpful. It costs around $160 on amazon and comes with a 27 month subscription that allows you to download your transactions and once it expires, you need to buy an upgrade that will let you renew for a new period. So its about $80/year for bookkeeping software but the cloud PM offerings are all much higher on an annual basis. Sometimes it goes on sale for less during the year. They used to offer 3 year subscriptions, but after intuit sold quicken, the new owner wanted to increase revenue and shortened the support periods between upgrades. If you go direct to quicken website, the subscription is even shorter and more expensive. Includes free dropbox storage where you can store your quicken backups for extra protection. I dont know any cloud offerings with transaction download that are less than $400/ year. I didnt need to set any classes or anything like quickbooks as it was ready to run with real estate and its still less than that offering. I'm still price sensitive and not yet prepared to pay 200-500/yr for a cloud-based bookkeeping offering when this does the job nicely and I'm backed up to the dropbox cloud for data protection. let me know if you have other questions. 

Update: It looks like they wrapped in the rental property features into the "Home and Business" package and eliminated the separate rental property version. It sells for $140 for a 2 year sub on the quicken website. things are changing often it appears... Still $160 on amazon however with a 27 month sub.