Reflect Customer Paid Expenses on Invoice

[Michael Kerins]

Property Management.

I have used GC for a number of years to manage the books for a number of rental properties I own, but have yet to find a clean solution for this problem.

I use the business functions and each property is represented as a Customer.  I invoice each Customer monthly for rent but also need to reduce the invoiced amount by the expenses that were paid for by the Customer.  These expenses are my Expenses, not the Customer's, and need to be reflected as such in the appropriate Expense accounts.

For example:

In the simplest case, I invoice Customer Alpha  $1,500 for rent.  However, Customer Alpha paid $200 for a plumbing repair and is taking that off this month's rent.   That $200 for plumbing is my expense.  What I would like to do is to invoice Customer Alpha for the full Rent, $1,500, then add a line item to the invoice which decreases the amount of the invoice by $200 and adds an entry in the Expenses:Property Alpha:Repairs account for $200.

The result would show Assets:Property Alpha:A/R $1,300, Income: Property Alpha:Rent $1,500, and Expenses: Property Alpha:Repairs $200.   This would all be correct and would balance once the invoice was paid.

There are other properties where many expenses are paid by the Customer:

Customer Beta, is in a rental pool and pays many expenses on my behalf.   Water, Electricity, Linen Replacement, Cable TV, etc...  Again, these are all MY expenses and the total amount invoiced by me to the customer is reduced by total of these expenses.

In the physical world, what is happening is that instead of the Customer sending me a rent check and then me turning around and sending them back another check to reimburse them for the expenses they paid, I simply deduct the amount they paid for each expense on the Invoice.

Since GC does not allow me to select an Expense category when adding entries to an invoice, how does one correctly reflect this situation without extraneous manual manipulation?
Thanks!


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