I thought I’d share a quick example of a tool we’ve found helpful for managing rental properties. I’m excited to see others improve on it!
What is the goal of your workflow? What problem does it solve, or how does it help you?
The goal here is to help us track income and expenses for a rental property. This is a common use case for personal finance spreadsheets I hear from others too.
How did you come up with the idea for your workflow?
Of course we already were using a spreadsheet to track a rental, and this report makes it easy to see the status of one or many rental properties on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. My colleagues here gave me some ideas to improve it further, and here we go!
Please describe your workflow. What are the sheets? Does it use any custom scripts or formulas?
For each rental property you own, you will use three Category Groups in the Categories sheet to track:
Income
Expense
Deposits (these can be type Transfer they are not income or expenses)
In the Categories sheet, create as many Income, Expense, and Deposit categories you want per property. Each property should have its own categories, so you might use the property number as the first part of the name.
Assign each of these Categories to the correct Category Group for the property.
Now you are ready to setup the Rental Manager sheet.
For each property, add the Overview information in rows 8 to 14. This is just for your own reference so you stay organized.
Also for each property, link the correct Category Group to each Rental in Rows 18 to 20.
If you want to add more rentals, add 3 columns to the right of the sheet (before the hidden columns.) Then copy and paste the Rental property columns (for example, G,H and I) into the new blank Columns. You will need to update the Overview and Group Setup columns for each rental.
You can adjust the time frame of the reporting period in B3 to include everything, this month, last month and other options.
As you categorize rental property transactions, those numbers will appear in the Rental Manager sheet.
Is it ok for others to copy, use, and modify your workflow?
Please build on it, make it better, or share your tricks for managing rental expenses and income.
Update here is a revised spreadsheet with Jon’s improvements from the thread below…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LmF8H--6xLNbe1QyveWXqKCPyrdMNzYbYi6ZYJrctlM/template/preview
Here is a walk through video too.