How to setup Quickbooks for Personal Rental Portfolio

[Justin R.]

I officially started using quickbooks to help organize my accounting.  I wanted to share with you how I set it up, and was looking for feedback on how others may organize/account themselves.

1. I added my business banking/credit cards

2. Created "classes" which are essentially property address's (not units). I am debuting using "sub classes" for my individual units

3. Created "locations" which I separated my portfolio by state

4. Added my Property Managers as "clients"

5. Added my Payees as "Vendors"

6. Created my lists of "Expenses"  IE; Cap Ex, Property Management, Taxes, ETC

One issue which I will have is each month I get paid by my property managers in a lump sum, which includes all properties they manage (which I can go in each month, do some math, and "Split" which is time consuming. In addition, the property managers cover some of the expenses such as repairs, PM fees, etc. So, essentially my "Income" which quickbooks registers is more of a Net Income, prior to my expense; Which throws off my actual numbers. What is the best approach to circumvent this?

Hopefully this helps others who are looking at setting up a quickbooks online account, as well as myself.

[Cathie Kovacs]

As the owner of a bookkeeping firm and someone that uses QuickBooks all day, every day, I’m going to respectfully disagree with Josh. 

You book your gross rent and then put negative amounts in the deposit screen to reflect the expenses paid by your PM. Net deposit amount to your bank account should match the net check received by you. 

Your net income will be correct and OpEx will be correct when done this way.