| Greg | email | May 3 2017, 06:21 PM |
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Hello. I have been using this software for a couple weeks now and have been able to get the hang of it very quickly. A few bumps here and there but I'm usually able to figure it out. One bump I've hit and haven't been able to successfully find an answer for is tenants leasing multiple units. So here's my situation, I have a tenant leasing an apartment, and additionally leasing two of our storage units. I have his apt under the building and the storage units is under a separate building and each storage unit is individual. Under his tenant profile I added his apartment lease and the two storage unit leases. Under the leases, I associate each unit. But when I go into the storage units, it doesn't show. If I click on the storage unit to add the tennant, then they dissapear from the apartment unit. (also I have a tenant that doesn't rent an apt, but leases two storage units and I'm unable to associate them with both) Additionally, how would I make the accounting entry if they pay for their apartment and storage unit on the same check? |
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| Stephane Grenier | email | May 4 2017, 04:34 PM |
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Hi Greg, It's great to hear that you've been using the software for a couple of weeks and are getting the hang of it. Please find the answers to your questions below: 1. So here's my situation, I have a tenant leasing an apartment, and additionally leasing two of our storage units. I have his apt under the building and the storage units is under a separate building and each storage unit is individual. Under his tenant profile I added his apartment lease and the two storage unit leases. Under the leases, I associate each unit. But when I go into the storage units, it doesn't show. If I click on the storage unit to add the tennant, then they dissapear from the apartment unit. (also I have a tenant that doesn't rent an apt, but leases two storage units and I'm unable to associate them with both) You're coming into a more complex scenario. Firstly please note that you cannot directly add assign a tenant to two units, you can only assign a tenant to a primary place of residence. The association (selecting the tenant) is basically only to say who is currently residing in the unit. In essence it's a way of indicating the tenant's primary residence only. Now if a tenant is going to rent more than one unit, such as storage units, etc. then what you need to do is create leases for the additional rental units for the tenants. The benefit of doing this is that the Rent roll reports, as well as the Lease related reports and so on are all tied to the Lease. Therefore if the Tenant is renting 3 units (one to live in and two storage units) then they will have 3 rents appear on the Rent roll reports (assuming you entered 3 Leases). Not only that but this allows the Tenant to stop renting a unit at any point independent of the others, or to rent additional units without impacting the others. As well this greatly simplifies everything for accounting purposes which I won't get into now. 2. Additionally, how would I make the accounting entry if they pay for their apartment and storage unit on the same check? In this case you need to split up the payment into different Accounting Entries. Otherwise you'll run into all kinds of complicated issues that I just alluded to. For example what happens if the tenant only pays a partial amount of the rent? To which units do you apply them and how much per unit? This is just one example of the complexities, it can get quite a lot more complicated as you start to work through the scenarios. Therefore to keep everything simple and consistent you will need to break down the payment into different Accounting Entries. Regards, Stephan Grenier Founder LandlordMax Software Inc. http://www.LandlordMax.com http://www.FollowSteph.com |
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| Greg | email | May 4 2017, 07:03 PM |
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Hi Stephan. Thank you for the response. "Now if a tenant is going to rent more than one unit, such as storage units, etc. then what you need to do is create leases for the additional rental units for the tenants. " I did enter the additional leases, the only problem I was running into was when I went to the units tab, and looked up the Storage Unit Building. I guess I'm not that far into the software yet to know how to run a report or get a visual to see what units are vacant as I was assuming this would be the way? (list all vacancies for one building) So for example I have tenant Joe Smith in Apt Building 2, Unit 6. He also has a rental in Storage Building 1, Unit 13. I have current leases for both in his profile, associated with the units he is renting. If I look up the storage unit in the Units list, it doesn't show him under the tenant field, and it shows Storage Unit 13 in the vacancies report. So you're saying there's no way to associate him with the additional units, but if I have the lease setup, that will generate in a revenue report? I know, I'm still new to this software so please excuse my misunderstanding, it just seems down the road that could cause alot of confusion as I have 7 tennants leasing more than one unit with different scenarios. If there's no way to do that, is there an alternative such as creating additional tenants with the same name but listing as - apt or - storage 13? Or would that cause issues with accounting? |
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| Brett | email | May 5 2017, 10:07 PM |
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Stephane, I have a somewhat related question. Does a tenant need to be assigned to a unit to prevent that unit from being listed on a vacancy report? -brett |
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| Stephane Grenier | email | May 7 2017, 10:52 PM |
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Hi, Yes you are correct that the unit will display as vacant in the vacancy reports. Unfortunately this is one of the limitations of the current software. The software was not initially designed to manage people renting multiple units because this is fairly rare and only a small number of people need this functionality. As such we've added functionality into the software over the years to improve this support but yes the vacancy report still needs to be adjusted to cover multiple people renting multiple units. To be quite honest, the only solutions that we know of that support this scenario are going to cost you in the thousands of dollars PER year, we don't know of any solution anywhere near our price range that offers this. Again you're basically getting into a much more specialized and much much less common scenario which the software wasn't originally designed to support. We're improving it with every version and we're planning to add more support for this, but it's not yet available in the software therefore this is a workaround for the time being. If you absolutely need to manage people who rent 7+ units at a time you either need to do this with an external spreadsheet, understand the limitations of LandlordMax in this regards, or have to go with one of the multi-thousand dollar per year solutions. We just don't have the ability to fully manage this without some workarounds at our price range. Regards, Stephan Grenier Founder LandlordMax Software Inc. http://www.LandlordMax.com http://www.FollowSteph.com |
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