How to book DRIE & SCRIE credits in QuickBooks

Disability Rent Increase Exemption (DRIE) is one of the benefits that your tenant may get. For the landlord it means that any rent increase over the certain amount will not be paid by the tenant, but instead reimbursed by the city in the form of tax credits. Here’s how to book it.

 

Create a new Discount item called DRIE, use Taxes Payable (Other Current Liability) account. 

 

When you create an invoice, use item Rent (Income Account) and enter tenant’s legal rent. Next enter item DRIE and enter the amount of monthly DRIE benefits. Since it was set up as discount item, invoice total due will show the portion of rent due from tenant.

 

Whenever you receive your next tax bill, go to Taxes Payable (Other Current Liability) account register and enter the amount of property taxes. DRIE abatement will be in Overpayments/Credits section of the bill. Make sure it matches your records.

 

If you pay the bill yourself, just create a check for the amount due and use Taxes Payable (Other Current Liability) account. This should bring your Taxes Payable to zero.

 

In case the bank pays property taxes from escrow account, go to Escrow (Other Current Asset) account register and create new entry decreasing Escrow for the amount of taxes paid against Taxes Payable (Other Current Liability) account.

 

Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE) is booked the same.

How to create identical forms (invoices, statements, estimates, etc) for different companies?

If you are a real estate/property management bookkeeper you will see that as a rule each building has its own legal entity.  So let’s say you want to create a nice looking form (invoice, statement, etc) for all those buildings. You can change the way form looks. You may want to add a logo, change the color scheme, change the font style or size, add company information, add a status stamp. Design and customization of even one template takes a lot of time. And you need to do it for all 20 entities moreover you want all of them to look alike. Here’s how. Keep in mind that I’m using QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 13.0.

TIP. Create ONE super nice looking form, let’s say invoice:

Click the Create Invoices icon.  Choose Formatting Tab at the top of the form. Click Manage Templates. Choose any basic template and click Copy. Rename the template e.g. Kristina’s invoice. Click OK. (If you already have a template you’d like to modify click the Customize Data Layout button).

Do you magic with Basic Customization and Layout Designer. Click OK to save.

Congratulations, you have created a perfect invoice for one of your companies. In order to use the same template for other companies follow these steps:

Go to Lists ->Templates. Pick the one that you have just created (e.g. Kristina’s Invoice). At the bottom of the page click Templates button -> Export. Save to desired location.

Open new company. Go to Lists ->Templates. At the bottom of the page click Templates button -> Import. Choose saved file.

Voila, you now can enjoy your beautiful invoice in all of your companies.

Your comments, concerns, questions are highly appreciated.

Introduction

Dear Followers,

Let me start from introducing myself. My name is Kristina. I started this blog to help fellow bookkeepers/QuickBooks users, share my experience and thoughts. I can’t stress enough how many useful features that program has and how underestimated they are. With the proper set up your bookkeeping is easy. When I face a problem, I do in-depth research on how to solve it. It takes a lot of time and digging. You now can enjoy the solutions right here at your fingertips. Let’s work together!

Let the magic begin!

Hooray, the web site is up and so is my blog. November 4th has been productive. The last final is over and Real Estate Finance Certificate from the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute is in my pocket as well. Time to celebrate.

Let the magic begin!