Customer Reviews

Quicken Rental Property Manager

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I've been managing rental property for about 15 years, starting with 2 buildings and 10 units at the beginning and now with 25 units in 5 buildings, containing a mix from studios and 1-bedrooms up to 4-bedroom apartments.

I recently decided to update from a very old version of Quicken, and since they had this program specifically for rental properties, I thought I'd found a perfect match. I couldn't have been more wrong.

You would think that a company that has made accounting software for this long would understand the most basic needs, like a running total alongside each transaction (which even my 7-year old edition of Quicken had). Nope. There is only a single running total. Make a mistake, and it is virtually impossible to backtrack and find. How about a field for your check number, the singular way to identify your checks/transactions? It doesn't have one. One of the 8 or so automatic fields they do give you is unit number. Problem is, it's a simple numeric assignment based on the number of units you input when you create each building's account, and it can't be altered. Apartments lettered instead of numbered, numbered in partial sequence, alpha-numeric, by floors, cardinal direction, etc? Tough luck. These are just a few of the problems or basic design flaws I've come across. It took several painstaking hours to transfer the entries from my old software and books into this new software, and now I'm stuck until I either find the time to transfer the data to something I trust, or I continue to use this program until the end of the year. It's half baked, and that's putting it lightly. I wouldn't recommend it for even the most entry-level rental property owners or managers. I can't imagine a big firm using it. Regular quicken costs half as much (though even that's getting horrible reviews on Amazon). The previous reviewer said it's no better than a simple excel spread sheet. I'd go further and say it's worse. Save your time and money, and just create a simple excel file.

Poor program. It is not compatable with any other quicken software, and does not allow for any bank/ccard downloads. You need to enter each item individually, making it very time consuming. This is no better than a simple excel spreadsheet.

This Rental Property Manager is like having one register for each property to track credits and debits. Some reports. Thats it. Using the regular Quicken Basic, with a Banking account and a Property/Asset account, works better and gives you a way to compare operating expenses, income, mortgage/loan information, and property value. Since its scope is limited, having shorter lists of categories and tax schedules and lines to worry about than in the regular Quicken software, but the limited scope and higher cost for a focused subset of Quicken Basic? Not so useful.

QRPM is a stand-alone software program for tracking rental income and expenses. It does not integrate with Quicken, Quickbooks, or Excel. It does allow you to export to TurboTax, but that's the extent of integration.

QRPM is designed to replace paper-based systems, such as ledgers, envelopes, scratch paper, and checklists. This is not a full-fledged accounting software, so if you are looking for robust bookkeeping features (online banking downloads, bill payments, cost basis accounting), you are better off spending a few hours to customize Quicken or Quickbooks.

Otherwise, for what QRPM does, it does well. In Version 2 you can add up to 100 properties and up to 100 units per property. You can name your units anything you want (such as "24A," or "Garage"). QRPM is designed to track rents and basic expenses. You can quickly see which tenants have paid, who hasn't paid, who has paid late, and which leases are expiring. QRPM is great at tracking this basic information. For anything more advanced, you'll want to develop customized categories (in Quicken) or accounts (in Quickbooks) along with customized reports to get a quick overview of your rental properties.

I own 100 units and wanted to move from a custom spreadsheet to a software package. I selected this because it was from a known company: Quicken. What a mistake.

The first month for every tenant is brain dead. It ignores all payments made because, as tech support told me, all landlords prorate the first month differently. Therefore, they just ignore the information. What should we do with prepays? What about migrating in new apartments? All they needed was a dialog so I could tell the software how much to charge the first month. DUH!

Also, this thing has bugs. The "tenant balance due" form which is a critical part of managing each tenant, shows payments for the wrong apartments.

After spending hours converting from my spreadsheets to this software, my office manager and I both concluded we are better off to toss it in the garbage. That is what I have done. Back to spreadsheets and a search for software that works.

Do not purchase this product. Quicken should be embarrassed. They are a better company than this. Like all the other posters out here, I wish Amazon would allow me to give it fewer than one star.

Be very aware of the marketing going on with this product. This is a poorly done rental property manager program integrated with Quicken 2010. If you have a prior version of rental property manager (e.g Version 2.3) the information cannot be imported into the 2010 version. It has to be imported manually. Quicken fails to clearly disclose these issues when you review the product on their website.

Intuit is unethically pretending Quicken Rental Property Manager (QRPM) is a supported product when it is not. For example, mileage rates up through 2005 are hard coded into the program (a very poor practice) so that tax results are incorrect for years after 2005. The Help section addresses this by saying "The rate changes periodically and is updated when you update your software." However, there has been no substantive update since 2005. (The update from 2.3 to 2.5 only permitted running this deficient software under Vista). There are other deficiencies (see QRPM forums). No phone or email support is available either!

They stopped supporting this product about a year ago. There is nobody on the forums. Dont Buy!

The program makes far too many assumptions for me. The worst thing is if you make a mistake with a rental payment and delete it, When you re-input the correct payment the program defaults the payment to the next month. Three mistakes means it will attempt to place this months rent three months from now. When this happens the program will not track upcoming rents when making future forecasts of income. The program show $0.00 in the future times the number of times you have corrected mistakes. If you correct rent inputs 3 times then the next 3 months in the future will show $0.00 rent will be due. This makes it difficult to forecast future income.

Why was I capable of creating both excel sheets and C# programs that did a better job than a large company like this?

This POS is an absolute fraud. It suffers from so many glitches, bugs and failures of data integration that I couldn't begin to count them. I manage some 20 properties. Thank the Lord that I kept all of my self-written Open Office Spreadsheet documents and reports while entering into the POS. After several days, my Temp data entry gal threw up her hands and told me that even if I had to send her back to Randstad Temps, she wouldn't deal with this POS again. I reviewed her work almost hourly and sure enough even an experienced data entry person can't get essential data to enter or to process. Finally, I asked our accountant about it and she made a gagging sound over the telephone and told me she was on her way to my office to hit me.

We deleted all traces of this program the next day and have reverted to our old standby, Open Office running on Ubuntu Linux. No problems, no blue screens, no failures. I just heard from our accountant and she is finished with the taxes and the company is going to be a fat cat again. Oh, and I hired that Temp gal full time.

I say Again, avoid this product like the Clap.