Landlords

If your business is an agency or you are managing property on behalf of other landlords then you should use the Landlords section to create, manage and produce landlord statements showing monies due between your business and the landlords you are managing.

Getting Started

To get started, you first need to ensure your company profile is correctly set up. Then you can record details of landlords, their portfolios and start creating and producing landlord statements to track the financial position of each landlord.

Set up your Business Setup

Click on the Admin link at the top of the page and then click on the Business Setup link. Make sure your company/business is correctly described. In particular, if you are an agent or are managing property on behalf of other landlords then you should:

• Enable account tracking on the Cash & Bank Accounts tab. This will allow you to track the funds for your clients separately to actual payments to/from your business accounts.
  
• Set up the cash and bank accounts for your business. As an agent, you would typically have:
• One or more bank and cash accounts for client funds. On the Account dialog you can record this by using the checkbox called For Client Funds.
• One or more bank and cash business accounts for funds owned by your own business.

See the Organizations topic for more details on the Organization and Account dialogs.

Record Landlord and Portfolio details

Click on the Landlords link at the top of the page. Here you can record details of the landlords that you manage and you can access their statements.

When you create a new landlord record, you can use the Create Portfolio checkbox to automatically create the first portfolio for the landlord. You can create additional portfolios and also record details of the property units for each portfolio from the Properties page. When recording new portfolios, make sure to set the owning landlord on the Management tab of the Portfolio dialog.

Record Tenancies

Once Landlord, Portfolio and Property Unit details have been set up, you can then create Tenancy records. Click on the Tenancies link at the top of the page and use the links on the left-hand side of the page to create Tenancy records. Refer to the Tenancies topic for more details.

Managing Landlord Statements

Once you have recorded details of landlords, their portfolios and tenancies then you can start to record financial transactions and produce statements showing your financial position with respect to each landlord.

Transaction Types

It is important to understand the different types of transactions supported by the system. There are fundamentally two major types of transaction:

• Regular Transactions: Income, Expenditure, General
  These describe logical movement of funds between financial parties such as tenants, landlords and your own business. The majority of the system understands these types of regular transactions.
  
  
• Account Transactions
  These describe actual movement of funds between the accounts of financial parties. Account transactions are only available when account tracking has been enabled in your business setup (see the Getting Started section above).

If you are using the system to manage your own portfolio then there is usually no need to enable account tracking. However, if you are using the system to manage client portfolios (e.g. as an agency) then it is important to track logical transactions separately to actual movement of monies through your business accounts and through to clients. For example, as an agency:

• You will need to track a rent payment from a tenant to a landlord (this is recorded as a regular Income transaction record), separately to the actual payment from the tenant to one of your client fund accounts (this is recorded as an Account Transaction from the tenant to one of your client accounts). For each Regular Transaction, you can record multiple Account Transactions to track actual payment of funds across accounts - for example, a tenant may make a rent payment as part cheque, part cash, in which case you would record two Account Transactions. However, it is more common to have one Account Transaction for each Regular Transaction so the system makes it easy to enter this information. See the Recording Transactions section below.
  
• You will need to record payment of funds from your client fund accounts to the landlord in order to pass on the rent income you have collected on their behalf (less any fees and expenditure). This is recorded as an Account Transaction from one of your client accounts to the landlord.
• You will need to record transfer of funds from your client fund accounts to your business accounts in order to collect the management fees you have charged. This is recorded as an Account Transaction from one of your client accounts to your business account.

Recording Transactions

You can record Income, Expenditure and General transactions in various different parts of the application. When creating a transaction and account tracking has been enabled, the transaction dialog will include additional fields on the right hand side for conveniently recording an Account Transaction. This allows you to easily record an Account Transaction to go along with the Regular Transaction. See the Transactions topic for more details.

Recording Account Transactions

As described in the previous section, Account Transactions can be easily created as part of recording a new Regular Transaction. In addition, it is possible to explicitly record Account Transactions directly from the statement page for a landlord using the link called Record Account Transaction on the left-hand side of the landlord statement page. Examples of when you will need to explicitly record Account Transactions:

• Recording a payment of rent income due to a landlord (less fees and expenditure). This will typically involve an Account Transaction from one of your client fund accounts to one of the landlord accounts.
  
• Recording a payment of management fees earned to your business. This will typically involve an Account Transaction from one of your client fund accounts to one of your own business accounts.
• Recording a transfer of funds across accounts.
  

See the Account Transactions section below for further details of all its fields.

Landlord Statements

To view and manage a Landlord Statement, click on the Landlords link at the top of the page and then click on the link for the landlord in question. This will display the statement for the landlord, defaulting to the current month. There are a number of sections to the Landlord Statement:

• Summary section: Shows the date range for the statement, landlord details, opening balance, interim totals for Regular Transactions, interim totals for Account Transactions and the final closing balance.
  
• Transaction Details section: Shows the Regular transactions for the specified landlord and date criteria - Income, Expenditure and Other Transactions.
• Account Transaction Details section: Shows the Account Transactions that have been recorded on behalf of the landlord in context. The list of Account Transactions can be filtered to show transactions for all accounts or for one specific account.
• Tenancy Balances section: A list of tenancies for the specified landlord and date criteria, and, for each one, a summary of the opening balance, payments due, payments made and closing balance.
• Payment Due Details section: A list of payments due for the selected landlord and date criteria.
• Payment Received Details section: A list of payments received for the selected landlord and date criteria.

The Tenancy Balances, Payment Due Details and Payment Received Details sections are not displayed by default. Use the Display options to include them.

Landlord Statements can be exported to PDF, MS-Word or Excel formats using the links on the left-hand side of the page.

Options

You can use the Options link on the left hand side of the page to control how the statement is displayed. The available options are as follows:

Specifying the scope of the statement

The controls on the Landlord Statement page allow you to choose the information that is displayed:

• Landlord/Agent: Allows you to switch to a different Landlord.
• Date Criteria: Allows you to restrict the statement to a particular date range. You can either choose a month from the drop-down or specify a custom date range.
• Account: The Account selector at the top of the Account Transaction Details section allows you to filter which account transactions are included. By default it will show account transactions for all accounts.
  

When you change the criteria, the list of transactions in the statement is automatically updated and the summary totals recalculated.

Statement Opening and Closing Balances

The system will automatically calculate the opening balance of a statement from the transactions that have been recorded prior to the start date of the current view. There are two additional ways for more explicitly controlling the opening balance:

• For each landlord you can record additional overriding starting balances. To do this, edit the Landlord record and select the Statement Settings tab. These overriding starting balances are saved and will be reused for any future statements for that Landlord and provide a useful way to start managing existing landlords with the application.
  
• You can also temporarily change the opening balance by clicking on it and then typing a new value into the edit box that appears.

The system calculates the closing balance of a landlord statement as follows:

• It starts with the opening balance as described above.
• It adds all credits from the Transaction Details section.
• It deducts all debits from the Transaction Details section.
• The balance thus far is displayed as the Interim Balance field in the summary section.
• It deducts all credits to the landlord accounts.
• It adds all debits from the landlord accounts.
• The resulting amount is the closing balance of the landlord statement. If this is a positive number then it reflects the amount due to the landlord. If it is a negative number then it reflects the amount due from the landlord back to your business.

As an agent, you would typically use the closing balance as the amount to pay to (or demand from) the landlord in order to settle the account. Once this payment has been made it would be recorded as an Account Transaction between an account of your business and an account of the landlord.

Account Transactions

Each Account Transaction record describes an actual movement of funds between accounts of financial parties (tenancies, suppliers, landlords, your business). An account transaction has the following attributes: