QuickBooks for property managers, where almost none of the money is yours.

No. Rent collected on an owner's behalf is money passing through your hands, so it belongs in a trust liability account — an other current liability — because you owe it onward. The only part that is genuinely your revenue is the management fee you earn on it. A file that books gross rent as income reports a company several times larger than the one you actually run, and pays tax on money that was never yours.

Connecting the trust bank account to QuickBooks and letting the feed categorize deposits. QuickBooks has no way of knowing that an incoming rent payment is not your earnings, so it books each one as income by default. The result is overstated revenue on top of owner money mixed into the company's own records — the two failures trust accounting exists to prevent, both introduced by a convenience feature.

It is the proof that three balances agree: the trust bank statement, the trust liability recorded in the books, and the sum of every individual owner and tenant ledger. Two-way reconciliation only proves the bank agrees with your books; it says nothing about whether the money is allocated to the right people. All three legs matching is what shows every dollar is accounted for and attributable.

QuickBooks has no native concept of a property or a tenant, so the structure is built from what it does have. Properties are set up as customers and tenants as sub-customers beneath the property they occupy, which gives you activity per property and per tenant. An owner is both a customer, because you invoice them for the management fee, and a vendor, because you disburse their share to them.

As liabilities, per property, and never as income. A security deposit is the tenant's money held until the lease ends; a repair reserve is the owner's money held against future work. Neither has been earned by you. Both belong in liability accounts and both form part of the total the trust bank has to cover.

It must not, and the ledger structure is what prevents it. Each owner's balance is tracked separately and no owner balance should ever go negative — a repair on one property is paid from that owner's funds, not from the pooled cash that happens to be sitting in the trust account. A trust account can reconcile to the bank perfectly while one owner is quietly funding another, which is exactly what the per-owner leg of the three-way tie catches.

Yes, and if they do not, one of the two is wrong. The monthly statement you send an owner is a claim about what was collected, what was spent and what is owed to them. When the sum of those statements does not equal the trust liability on your balance sheet, the discrepancy is real money somewhere, and finding it later is far more expensive than reconciling it monthly.

No, and we are firm about that line. How trust funds must be held, how quickly they are disbursed, what reporting your state requires and what your broker's license obliges are set by your state's real-estate regulator, not by us. We build and reconcile the structure in QuickBooks and keep it consistent with what your regulator, your CPA or your attorney tells you. We will not assert those rules or claim to keep you compliant with them.

Yes, and the catch-up can come first. Management files fall behind because the transaction count is high, the money is not yours, and the person who knows which property a repair belonged to is the one out on site. A catch-up rebuilds the per-owner ledgers, attributes the historical receipts and disbursements, and gets the three legs to agree before anything else is trusted.

Neither. Your management software runs leases, work orders and tenant communication, and we work alongside it rather than replacing it. Your CPA sets tax positions and files returns. What we own is the accounting record — the trust liability, the per-owner ledgers, the management fee revenue — so it is accurate, current and provable.