
How to Budget Multiple Rental Properties on YNAB?
I buy and sell mobile homes...weird, I know. I hate Quickbooks. It's not user friendly and I've wasted hours of my life trying to problem solve the smallest of issues. YNAB seems to be an almost perfect fit for my business. HOWEVER, I can't quite figure out how to make it work for tracking expenses on multiple properties where I've setup a rent-to-own situation with tenants.
I like to track each property separately so I can calculate the return on investment of each home and see the numbers clearly. However, at the end of the year I'm going to have about 10 different properties with 10 different Utilities, Rental Income, Contractor Payments, etc. in separate columns. So the alternative (I think) would be to track every home's utilities, rental income, contractor payments, etc together under one Expense Category but then I can't run the numbers on each individual home.
The one benefit QB has over YNAB is the class system. In QB I can just type each property into a class in QB and run a report where I can see the PnL of each home that way.
Does anyone have any ideas how I can best make this work for me? I really hate QB and don't want to keep going with that system. The budgeting part of YNAB really helps me know what I can and can't afford right now with my company and I love it. I'm sure there's a way to make it work, I'm just still new enough with this system that I haven't figured it out...yet.
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Much as it may not sound great, having a category group for each rental would be the easiest when trying to pull reports. So rental 1 would be one group, rental 2 would be another, and each group will have the same categories. Then you could easily see the expenses for just that category group and compare to the income for that property.
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Another idea I had was to basically add each home as a manual bank account and just enter everything in manually. I don't have an insane amount of transactions. So I could easily keep up with it. Anyone think that might work? I saw a video with a guy a few years back who had real bank accounts setup for each home he was renting out but I don't want to actually setup a separate bank account for each home b/c sometimes I sell them for cash. And sometimes I sell them on payments.
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Hi Drew! We have two suggestions for handling rental properties, depending on how you have things set up. Sounds like option two will work best, based on what you've mentioned!
If you have a separate account for each rental/flip property:- Create a separate budget for each property.
- Add only the accounts pertaining to that budgets' property.
- Create categories for each expense associated with that budgets' property, including any maintenance expenses, mortgage, utilities (if being covered by you), paychecks to any maintenance individuals, taxes, any Home Owner Association fees that may be required of some properties, etc.
- Lastly, we recommend creating a category for your net income; how you handle this net income is up to you!
If you use the same account for both personal expenses and your rental/flip properties, follow these steps:
- Create a separate category group for each property.
- Add expense categories to those category groups (such as the examples listed above) for each individual property. This can become a little trickier to manage because you won't be able to track the rental income as easily.
- When you receive rent payments, create a new Payee for each rental property and categorize the income as Inflow: To be Budgeted.
Now you can use the Income v Expense Report to track your income and expenses for those properties, like KaraBoo's screenshots. If you have any questions at all, please let us know. We're always happy to help!
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I've never posted on a forum before so I don't know if this will ever be seen and if I can combine topics. I too HATE Quickbooks and am a Property Manager and am preparing to switch to YNAB for the new year. So far I LOVE IT! AS IN REALLY REALLY LOVE IT!!
What I have done is created a budget very similar to Violet's for the first property (off of my taxes so it's easy to report) and then found the 'Make a Fresh Start Button' so I can quickly transpose those fields into the next property and I just rename it to the new address. It seems to work wonderfully BUT I want to ask you all, who have been using it for the long-haul if this creates any kinks? I have 22 properties to go.
What I am currently trying to learn is how to track rent paid. Sometimes it comes in unproportionately and sometimes there are fees. In QB I would create an invoice and as the tenant did partial or full rent payments it was automatically tracked. Looks like I need to do a monthly scheduled transaction in their individual checking account so I can watch for it to come in but what if they only do a partials payment? Looks like I can't do a monthly income in Budget? I'm so confused on this. Please help!