Lesson 41-- Rental Management

This lesson shows you how to handle rental properties with the Goldenseal rental management software. If you don't own or manage rental properties, you can skip this lesson.

NOTE: You can also use the rental management features for long-term equipment leases. For short-term equipment rentals or for leases that include sales tax, use Sales transactions instead.

Rental Payment Terms

To enter payment terms for rental units, follow these steps:

Choose Payment Terms from the Options menu, then choose Rentals from the submenu.
Click the New button.
Enter details for the payment terms.

Leases

When you sign a lease with a tenant, first create a Customer account for them (unless you already have one). To do so, follow these steps:

Choose Customers from the Accounts menu.
Click the New button.
Fill in details for the tenant.
Hit the Enter key to save the record.

Then create a Lease transaction. To do so, follow these steps.

Choose Leases from the Income menu.
Click the New button.
Enter the tenant's name, and the property they are renting. NOTE: You can rent real estate or lease equipment.
Enter the rental unit, and a brief description of the lease.
Enter the rent amount.
Enter the time period of the lease.
Click the More Info button to enter details about damage deposits, and the payment terms.

HINT: Goldenseal warns you if this lease overlaps an existing lease.

Lease Tracking

When you have signed a lease, change its status to Active.

When the lease is over and all payments have been completed, change its status to Completed.

If you cancel a lease, change its status to Void.

Rental Transactions

Rental transactions are a record of rent that is due. You can also use rental transactions for deposits, for damages or other charges, and for refunds or reimbursements that you give to your tenants.

To enter a rental transaction, follow these steps:

Choose Rental Transactions from the Income menu.
Click the New button.
Enter the tenant. Goldenseal automatically enters the property, rental unit and usual rent amount.
Enter a brief description for this rent amount.
Enter the type of payment and the payment method. You can also enter any comments you have about this item.

HINT: You can use the Billing command to automatically create rental transactions for damage deposits, last-month rent and regular rent (see Lesson 42).

Rental Expenses

Enter maintenance expenses for rental properties the same as any other expense (see Lessons 33 to 35). Enter Real Estate into the Job Class field, and the rental property into the Job field.

The Job Costs command will show you expenses vs. income.

Other Rental Management Tools

You can use the following Goldenseal features to help manage rental properties:

Appointments-- keep track of appointments with tenants and prospective tenants.
Contact Log-- record phone calls and other contacts with tenants and prospective tenants.
Escrow Accounts-- manage escrow accounts for damage deposits.
Problem Log-- track progress on repairs and other problems.
Project Accounts-- for new construction projects and major repairs of rental units.
Purchase & Work Orders-- write purchase orders for supplies, and work orders for repairs and improvements.

Finishing Up

In this lesson you have learned how to use Goldenseal software for rental property management.

You might want to take a break now and ponder how you would handle some unusual rental situations. For example, if you owned the White House, would you file eviction papers if the President's rent were overdue? Would his or her party affiliation make a difference? If you owned the Golden Gate Bridge, what color would you paint it? If you owned the Statue of Liberty, would you rent out the plaques for advertising?

Speaking of the Statue of Liberty, isn't that a darned chic hat that she's wearing? To create it required over 1,500 person-hours of work by skilled metal workers, plus 600 kilograms of copper plating and eighteen jumbo rolls of monument-grade duct tape.