[GNC] Keeping tenant accounts on Gnucash - periodic 'rent owing' ?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Arthur,

Yes. You can do this, but you'll need to decide based on your situation 
the best workflow.

What you are describing is Accounts Receivable (AR). The Rent is due at 
a certain date and thus owing to you. Ideally, you want to 'book' the 
rent payment as due in the AR account as of that due date.

Here is what that transaction would look like:

dr. Accounts Receivable
cr. Income/Revenue:Rent (not sure how you've named this account)

The amount for each 'split' or each 'side' of the transaction should be 
equal. Money is thus 'flowing' from your Income/Revenue account, 'to' 
AR. (an asset account)

When you receive payments, you would decrease AR and increase the 
respective asset account. (Cash/Bank, etc.) thus:

dr. Cash/Bank
cr. Accounts Receivable

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Now, this is just a general overview. And in this simple case, you 
aren't separately tracking individual tenants.

In order to do so, you have to make a choice as to how in GnuCash you 
are going to accomplish this. Each method has its benefits and drawbacks.

1. Manually for everything.
2. Using Scheduled Transactions (with careful attention to auto-firing 
and previewing/editing before they are posted)
3. Using the Business Features

Which one you choose will more than likely be dictated by how many 
tenants (and properties) you have.

If it is more than 5-10, maybe even more than just 5, I'd skip #1.

#2 can be set up easily enough, but better to use this for a small # of 
tenants. Maybe less than 20. (and that may be too much) The reason here 
is that you'd need a separate sub-account of AR for each tenant, create 
the SX to apply to those subaccounts, and track payments somewhat 
manually. (though you can craft reports to help)

#3 is probably the way to go, but you don't get 'automatic' postings. 
You *can* however, import 'invoices' for 'rent due' an a regular basis 
for all tenants at once. If you have just a handful of tenants, you can 
manually use the 'Duplicate' function to repeat previous 'rent invoices'.

In this scenario, 'Tenants' are 'Customers'.

Using the Business Features this way, will allow you to print 'Customer 
Reports' which are the same as 'Account Statements' *and* those reports 
can show which payments applied to which period's rent.

Read over the Help & Tutorial documents concerning setting up your 
Customers and Invoices.

If you run into any snags or have questions, chime back in and we'll try 
to speed you on your way.

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*IMPORTANT - avoid making manual or SX entried to the system-provided AR 
account. Leave that alone for the Business Features to deal with. If you 
need to make manual entries, create another account called AR-Other or 
similar and make it of 'type' Asset *NOT* of type A/Receivable. (there 
can be only one of the A/Receivable type accounts) Then if you are 
manually tracking tenants, create additional 'asset' type accounts as 
children of AR-Other.

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As for over/pre-payments, when you Process Payment from a Customer, you 
get the option to apply it to an invoice, or not. If not, it is 
considered a pre-payment and can be applied later. (by using the same 
Process Payment window again, but this time, simply linking the existing 
pre-payment to the new invoice)

If an over-payment, the remainder will be available to apply to a future 
invoice in the same way.


Regards,
Adrien

On 3/4/22 5:44 PM, arthur brogard via gnucash-user wrote:
> No. Sorry. Didn't put the question right.  I mean automatic post to the account showing what's owing so that I can see (and print out) at any time (on week by week steps) the balance of the account at that date.
> Because in fact they're frequently in the red.
> And frequently in front, ironically, because they never match payments up with owings.  So when they come from behind they may finish up with balance of an amount like maybe $27.50 ,  not enough for a week's rent but nevertheless by law I must consider it rental money.
> I guess if we credit their account with the monies they pay in then I'd be talking about an automatic debit of the rent amount each week.
> Would that be right?  Save me the trouble of entering it on the due date every week.
> Or am I going about it all wrong?