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

flywire flywire0 at gmail.com
Sat Mar 5 03:20:43 EST 2022


Excellent question Arthur. This isn't a budget issue and you have no idea
if tenants are in front or behind unless you compare it to payments
due. Adrien seems to have presented the GnuCash features the best using a
scheduled A/R.

I've used a different approach with quickbooks for this purpose because it
has classes allowing one set of accounts to be tagged to different tenants
but it should be equivalent with GnuCash. Accounts include: Income/rent,
bond (contra), Expense/water (partially reimbursable), various misc income
and expenditure relating to tenants. It's easy to miss seldom used accounts.

My concern is A/R is a lot of work just to get tenant statements if it's
not used elsewhere. It is similar to the issue raised last month regarding
tracking vehicles except for the regular rent due:
https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2022-February/099785.html
As described GnuCash has filtering on tags (eg report a single tenant) but
no grouping (eg reports for every tenant and everything else). This is
important to ensure all transactions are accounted for with tags.

Alternative Process:
1. Upload bank transactions to GnuCash
2. In GnuCash terms, run a transaction report sorted by say date and split
notes (assuming it contains a tag) with payments
3. Open report in a spreadsheet with sheets for each tenant having: Date,
Due, Payments, Balance Owing
4. Append date and payments to each tenants sheet
5. Append date and amount due for each period
6. Sort by date and payments then copy balance owing formula down for
running total
7. Check header and footer then print rental statement

The spreadsheet ends up as a template that is updated. It's a
simple process but it's manual so it carries a risk of mistakes. While
GnuCash doesn't support grouping in reports the advantage of open source is
the whole thing could easily be automated under piecash to generate reports.

A dozen transactions would make a handy demo dataset.


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