Quicken or Quickbooks for rental property management?

"seattlechaz" wrote

Your properties, or are you a PM? How many properties? Are you incorporated? Who is preparing your tax return? Do you have employees?

Ummm, could you be more specific about what you want an application to do. Track maintenance? Print eviction notices? Manage tenant contact info? Update a website? Create flyers and other advertising? Run credit reports? Print leases and other rental management forms? Track depreciation? Do you need a relational DB to correlate properties with related info such as schools, subdivisions, utility COs, etc? Manage payroll? Track vendors? Write tenant correspondence or newsletters? Generate mailing labels? Invoicing with automated fee schedules?

I use Q2002D to track loan amortizations, income, expenses, assets & liabilities (both real & chattel), and equities. Q creates almost every type of report my businesses or my Creditors require. I have several hundred tenants.

For what I use Q to do, I am lacking for nothing...

BUT!...

The items I mention in my 2nd paragraph I accomplish with other software since these are not things that Q does well, at least not my version.

I use QuickBooks to track income and expense data for multiple properties. It performs that limited function quite well, if you use classes to separate the properties. If by 'manage' you mean bill rent, cam, sundry escalations, etc, you need a more robust product, such as Timberline.

"Z Man" wrote

escalations,

Many years ago, I looked at QB for this purpose. I went with Q instead since QB could not handle loan amortizations. Does it now?

BTW, Q handles classes the same way, and I separate properties with classes.