Property Books and rent

If a company owns rentals, switch on property tracking and a Properties area appears beside its books: the portfolio, the tenants, the rent, and the paper trail, all riding the same ledger as everything else. No second system.

The Registry

One row per property: address, the name your manager's statement uses, class, management fee, manager, occupancy and status. Search by anything, filter by manager or occupancy, and stack attribute filters ("pool, in an HOA, at least 1,200 sf"). Each property's profile carries its parcel number, key dates, valuations, financing, and the recurring obligations you expect to pay (water, trash, HOA, insurance), so a missing bill is noticed, not discovered.

Leases and tenants

The Rent tab is the working board: every tenancy with its scheduled rent, deposits held, and what needs attention next. A lease holds the schedule (rent, recurring extras), the tenant contact, and its deposit history. Nothing about a lease is mandatory, so a half-known tenancy can be recorded today and completed as you learn more.

Rent, two ways

• You collect the rent: the charge engine turns each lease's schedule into that month's invoices, on time, with a permanent record per charge. Auto-invoicing is per tenant's choice; months that need a decision wait in a queue instead of guessing.
• A manager collects for you: kBooks watches instead of billing. Mark who is behind, record notices, and track each case; the manager's statements reconcile against what the books expect, and the owed management fee (a percent of rent or a flat monthly amount) is checked against what was actually taken.

Deposits, move-outs and notices

Deposits are real accounting: received into a held liability, applied to the final month or itemized at move-out, with the itemization doubling as the letter you send. Notice periods and eviction steps follow your state's rules for the tenancy (including assistance programmes with their own longer notices), and the Coming up tab surfaces every deadline while it can still be met.

Reading your manager's statement, and mapping rules

Upload the monthly statement your manager sends and kBooks reads it, proves it against the totals printed on its own last page, and drafts the entries. Each line has to land in one of YOUR accounts, and a mapping rule is what decides which one.

A rule has two halves:

• What it matches. The words on your manager's statement, not anything from your books. "Category" is their own filing word: a line they filed under "Maintenance: Parts" is matched by Category is exactly Parts. You can also match on the payee, the description, the reference or check number, and the type, and combine conditions with all or any.
• Where it posts. The account in your books that matching lines go to, shown with its full path so "Maintenance:Parts" is plainly the Parts account underneath Maintenance.

One condition can accept several values. Pick contains any of (or is any of) and the box turns into a list you add to: Category is exactly Repair AND Payee contains any of Gary Elmore or Ricardo Franco is one rule, and either name satisfies it. The negative versions read the way you would say them out loud: contains none of wants neither. This is how you say "these two vendors, for this category" without writing the rule twice.

Brackets, when one rule needs an "either". Press Add a bracket ( ) and you get a group with its own All / Any, drawn inside real parentheses. That is how you write a rule that is otherwise impossible:

Payee contains Oasis AND ( Category is exactly Commissions Paid OR Description contains Lease Fee )

The All / Any at the top combines the top-level entries; each bracket carries its own. The sentence under the rule always reads back with its brackets, so what you built is what you can check.

Type each value in full and press Enter. A name with spaces goes in exactly as it is written - no quotation marks, no commas, nothing to separate them yourself. Each one becomes its own chip, and the x on a chip removes it. The difference between contains and contains any of is only how many values it will accept: one, or as many as you add. The ? beside the operator explains all eight with an example.

To change where a rule posts, click Edit rule beside a line and pick a different account under Posts to. Changing a rule only affects the next statement kBooks reads; entries already posted stay exactly as they are. If you would rather fix one line without touching the rule, change its account on the line itself and choose Save entry only.

A green "Rule set" chip means a rule claimed that line. If instead you see an amber Rule did not fit, a rule exists for that category but its other conditions do not match this particular line - a different payee, say - so it left the line alone and the account is still yours to pick. Open it and the rule window ticks off which conditions fit and which did not, and says what this line has instead. A blue Apply this rule button means the rule fits but was made after these entries were generated, so nothing was filled in yet: press it and the account the rule posts to drops into the line. The button goes away once the line has an account.

No account fits? Make one without leaving the page. Type the name you want into the account box and pick Add account at the bottom of the list. It joins your chart straight away, on the right side of the books for that line (an expense on money going out, income on money coming in), and the line is filled in with it. The same Add account sits in the rule window's Posts to picker.

One condition, several names. When a rule already tests a field and you press the suggestion chip for that same field, the value joins the existing condition rather than adding a second one. That matters: two separate Payee conditions under all could never both be true, so the rule would quietly match nothing. Adding to the list is what you meant.

A property will not post while any of its lines has no account. The Post button stays greyed with a note saying how many are still waiting, because a half-mapped property is not something to post and find out about later.

Owner statements

For any property or the whole portfolio, generate an owner statement: the money by property, the rent roll, what is outstanding and what is held. Print it or save it as PDF for partners, lenders or your own records.