Entering Expenses

Once you've entered your properties, you can assign expenses to them or you can assign costs to the portfolio as a whole.  *Please enter mortgage information into the Finance Manager.

Creating an expense

Go to Property Manager > Expenses > Add Expense.  You will be presented with various fields to complete:

Supplier: The person or organisation that money is owed to.  Use +Add Contact if they are not in the dropdown list.

Date: Date of the receipt/invoice.

Due Date: Date the receipt/invoice is due to be paid.

Reference: Use this to record the description on your bank statement to help with the bank reconciliation process.

Cost Type: This section has five options:

1. Item Cost: For one-off purchases like washing machines or light bulbs.
2. Service Cost: For continuing costs like insurance or broadband charges.  The software will be able to pro-rata these payments between different years where applicable when using the accruals method of accounting.
3. Capital Cost: Properties and direct costs associated with it e.g. stamp duty.
4. Property Purchasing Costs: For recording things like solicitors fees.
5. Property Selling Costs: For recording things like advertising and estate agent fees.

The final three options (Capital Costs, Property Purchasing Costs and Property Selling Costs) are all used for the Capital Gains Tax Report.

Cost Included in Rent: If this cost is something that is included within the tenant's rent, i.e. utility bills or servicing costs, tick this box to indicate that the cost is covered directly by part of the rent.

You can upload a copy of the receipt using the Attach link.  Your file will appear under Attached Documents.  Upload a file or select one already loaded into Document Manager.

Item: This is a list of expense items that most landlords would need and that your expenses can be assigned to.  Each one is matched up to an expense account and are for helping you choose which one your expense should go in.  If you can't see somewhere to place an expense, you can create a new item using the + Add New Item option at the top of the expense item dropdown list.  Please note this is not a required field and you can leave it blank if you want to.

Description: Enter more details about the expense in here.

Quantity and Unit Price: If you bought 3 of something at £80 each, you can record 3 in the Quantity box and 80 in the Unit Price box, rather than recording that you spent £240 on a particular product.  The system will do the sums.

Account: This is a list of expense accounts which link to relevant sections on your tax and accounting reports.  The Item will determine which account the expense will go under, though as that is not a required field, you can just select the account if you know what you are doing.

Property: Select the property that the cost is attributable to.

+ Add New Line allows you to add another entry to this receipt, which will allocate it to the same supplier, date and cost type as you've already entered.  If you want to assign expenses to a different supplier or cost type, you will need to create a new expense.  

Each line can be assigned to a different property if required.

Tick This expense is paid to record the payment of the expense if this has already happened.

Press Save to create the expense.  Please note that if you have not ticked the This expense is paid box then it will appear as unpaid and no entries will be written to the LV bank account or to any cash-based reports until a payment is recorded against the expense.

Press Add Payment to record a payment against the expense.

To speed the process along, you can get the software to fill in some of the information for you, either by uploading your receipt or importing your bank statement.  Use these to create the expense.