Building Leasing Automation Into Quickbooks

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If you work with or are an organizations that enter into leasing transactions as lessors you may find the following method of recording leases in Quickbooks helpful. This is appropriate for leasing companies with 50 or fewer tenants who have not already invested in ledger software specific to that industry. Consider this for organizations that own small office buildings, office parks, retail outlets or shopping centers. 

Quickbooks includes the memorize transaction function for setting up recurring entries which can be accessed from the edit menu. What I have found works well is that you can create a recurring invoice which posts automatically on the 1st of each month which can be used to record the rents associated with the lease and can also be used for billing purposes. To create the recurring transaction select to create a new invoice and select the appropriate tenant. Date the invoice for the next month and set the due date to the fifth day of the month or as appropriate under the lease terms. I then itemize the invoice by rents, utility charges, CAM charges, marketing charges, etc. Once the structure of the invoice has been setup I select memorize transaction from the edit menu. From there you need to select to automatically enter. In the how often field select monthly. For next date select the month following the month selected when setting up the invoice. For number remaining, refer to the lease to determine when the last payment under the lease is due.  Also if the lease calls for escalations or concession period then only count through the beginning of the next escalation period. You will then set up a separate recurring transaction for each escalation period using the method above. The last step is to enter how many days in advance to enter the memorized transaction, which I use two weeks before the rent is due to provide for time for billings to go out and then save the transaction. Also be sure to check the 'To be printed' box on the invoice. By doing this, after the memorized transactions batch post you can then simply select to print batch and the entire monthly tenant billing will run.



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