Rental Return on Investment (ROI) Question

[Ryan Moore]

For calculating ROI on a rental property, I assume my closing cost to be part of my initial investment number. On my closing costs, I paid 1 year's insurance, 1/2 year taxes, and some HOA. Normally those are part of the operating expenses, thus impacting the cash flow numbers.

So do I not include those in my cash flow numbers for the first year of operations since they were paid upfront?  

For that year, I ended up booking those expenses on their respective line items in my P&L.... should I have not done that and left them off operating expenses all together since they were paid at closing?

Thanks