Community Discussion: Business & rental property does not show totals of rent paid or late

Business & rental property does not show totals of rent paid or late

Found at:

The original poster is concerned that the new tenants he added to his new properties (which existed prior to his use of Quicken), are not showing any overdue rent ... though apparently, in the real-world, some of the tenants had overdue rent ... prior to being entered in Quicken.

I would say that both the original poster and the Quicken moderators are confused in the above discussion.

The user is confused: Quicken does show rent paid and late rent - when Quicken has the necessary information to do so.

But the most important confusion is on the part of the Quicken moderator(s), as evidenced in this statement: "If there were overdue payments from prior to the date the tenant(s) was added in Quicken, those amounts will not reflect as overdue in Rent Center and therefore won't show the Overdue column." Followed later by this: " ... [Quicken] will only track what is due after the date the tenant was added into the program."

That statement is technically true, but only if one accepts Quicken's default treatment of rent and Rent Reminders (scheduled rent transactions).

When a new tenant is assigned to a property, Quicken automatically creates a special type of Reminder for the rent for that tenant/property. That automatically created rent reminder has always been problematic - its biggest flaw is that it can not be edited by the user. And that flaw comes into play for the situation described by the original poster.

The Quicken automatically created rent reminder has an initial due date for the next rent payment due after the real-world date the tenant is assigned to the property - regardless of the start-date of the lease, or the tenant move-in date.

So if a tenant is first assigned to the property on January 20, 2021, the lease is for a year, the lease began on October 1, 2020, and the lease calls for rents due on the first of each month, the initial rent payment due date (created by Quicken) will be February 1, 2021. And that "reminder" date can not be changed. The Quicken "Add Tenant" process has no idea whether any previous rent payments have been made ... so Quicken assumes there are no overdue payments.

The way to deal with the problem, is to delete the Quicken-created rent Reminder, and add a user-created rent reminder ... with an initial "Date due on" of the first payment that is "overdue". Care must be taken to insure that the user-created rent reminder adheres to all the rules for a valid rent reminder: correct payee (tenant) name, valid rent income category, correct property Tag, correct rent amount, and correct start date and interval.