I have a duplex. I live in one unit and rent out the other. As my rent is less than my mortgage and expenses, I just deposit my rent checks into my personal account and pay everything from there.
I have been searching in vain for a bookkeeping system that will allow me to track my rental income and expenses so I can easily generate a P&L report to give to my CPA for a schedule E at tax time. I want the ability to track both expenses and income from just the rental unit (e.g., if I repaint the unit between tenants, 100% of that cost goes to the rental unit).
I also need to be able to track expenses that are shared across the whole property, and to designate how much of those expenses should go to the P&L (e.g., the rental unit is 60% of the total property, so 60% of my landscaping costs and roof replacement costs should be assigned to the rental unit). Once I set the percentage that is rental property, my mortgage, property taxes, insurance, etc., should all also get divided appropriately.
I am sure there are lots of other owner-occupant landlords out there (including house hackers) who want a simple bookkeeping system.
It would be a real lifesaver if you could build this in if/when you add the ability to track expenses by individual unit!
I saw another wish list item to get properties broken down by unit so you can assign expenses at that level. That might solve some of your problems. I’m house-hacking starting in February and will be running into a few of these issues. I planned to use Stessa to report anything that I do to the rented unit and not add transactions for the expenses for the unit I’ll be living in. It does get tricky if you have a 60% split. I’m thinking I’ll mark big things, like new shingles, as capital and just know that come tax time next year I’ll have to split those.
Am new and was hoping that feature was included. How can I track a percentage of total utilities for just the percentage used by the room I rent out. Can’t include it in transactions because Schedule E requires both amounts. I’m going to look for a better solution.
I’m new to Stessa and I plan to use it on my Duplex which I house hack. As I set up my property and all… I don’t think the software is optimized to handle house hack at the moment.
For example I put myself in one units but I have to “kind of” put that I’m paying my mortgage as “rent” because If I dont put an amount it counts the property as 100% vacant. Also that “rent” is included in the income column. (which is not income) There are some things that should be updated to be able to be properly used by landlords who occupy one of the units.