2 property landlord looking for guidance/solutions

Hello there, @86RandyBarrerr. Welcome to the Community.

I'm here to share some insights about building your rental portfolio with QuickBooks Online (QBO) Essentials. With this, you're able to see the separate profit and loss of your properties and make sure your financial data is recorded accordingly.

You're right. The class tracking feature isn't currently available in QBO Essentials. You may set up a customer as the property and a sub customer as the unit work. However, this process will only let you view your income (profit) when running the Profit and Loss report.

You'll have to create a separate income and expense account for each of your properties. This will keep your books accurate and record your transactions for each property accordingly. To do this, you can refer to this article: Add an account to your chart of accounts in QuickBooks Online.

After that, I'd recommend pulling up the Profit and Loss report. From there, you'll have to make sure you select the appropriate distribution account for each property. Then, customize it to focus on the details that matter the most to you. Also, you need to save the report's current customization to pull up the same settings once you pull it up again. You can check out this article for the step-by-step guide: Memorize reports in QuickBooks Online.

In the meantime, I'm also adding this article to further guide you in managing the growth of your business using QBO: QuickBooks Help Articles. It includes topics about data security, banking, and expenses, to name a few. You can click the + More topics button to view other selections.

Please don't hesitate to let me know how it goes. If you have other concerns about managing your properties in QBO, I'm just around to help. Take care always.

Without using the Class function (which is not available unless you upgrade), you can definitely set up properties as customers with units and tenants as sub customers and sub sub customers.  Even when using class tracking this is still the setup for properties-units-tenants.

As far as your budget, if you had asked first, rather than Essentials in QBO at (retail) $40/ month I would have directed you to the desktop version street price $200 which includes class tracking. Good for 3 years, at the cost of 5 months of what you have now.

Thanks so much for the response. I considered the desktop version, but I read a few things making it seem like they’re phasing out that version of quickbooks. Not sure if I wanted to take time setting up if it’ll be obsolete in a year or so.

I’ll play with this and see how it goes. Thanks for the details : )