Property Management Software Can't Export Transactions

[Jim Workman]

Sorry for double posting, but most did not understand the point.  This is not about QuickBooks so much as about exporting detailed info from property management packages.

Am I the only investor who wants to track my properties' income vs expenses in QuickBooks? My property managers act like they have never had anyone ask them for a spreadsheet of monthly activities. I would think that a detailed CSV export would be a standard part of any property management software package. It looks like Buildium may have some export options, but PropertyWare and AppFolio don't make it easy. My newest PM uses AppFolio, but doesn’t even bother to put the expenses into it.

It’s not that I am a great fan of QuickBooks. For a program that has been around for many years, it is amazingly limited in what it can import from a spreadsheet. But at least it deigns to accept simple journal entries from a CSV file.

I have 22 doors with my Kansas City PM so I spend a lot of time converting a PropertyWare report printed to Excel into an IIF file to import into QuickBooks as a journal entry. Last month I wrote a tutorial of all the steps for my wife. I go through over 30 steps to convert the data, make sure that it matches my Owner's Statement, and is in balance. That sounds like more trouble than it is worth, but I would rather do that than typing each transaction into QB.

One perk is that I am forced to understand each transaction so that I can classify it properly. A $20 income for ‘Other Interest’ turned out to be a parking fee. (PropertyWare doesn’t have parking fee income.) Sometimes the PM doesn’t classify expenses the way that my CPA would so I have to be responsible for recognizing capital expenditures, etc.

I post monthly mortgage, insurance, and property tax amounts to get a good feel for how each property is performing. (I keep the mortgage separate because not all properties have the same percentages.) I was surprised to find that my single-family houses in Birmingham were performing better than my multifamilies in KC. The utilities for one building were astronomical last winter, and will be watched closely this year.

After a year of out-of-state investing, I am finally getting a picture of how my properties are performing. I would think that other investors would want to have a clear financial view of their properties each month.  Does anyone else try to track their rental activities?

If so, please demand that your PMs give you simple detailed spreadsheets including all transactions. Then maybe they will complain to the property management software companies to include those export features in their packages.