The Official AppFolio Blog

For those living in states with rental income tax, tracking and paying the tax adds yet another burdensome task on already busy schedules.

Thankfully, AppFolio’s Tax Authorities feature can help!

With this feature AppFolio automatically calculates and generates payables to Tax Authorities based upon the entered tax rate. The calculation is applied to the total amount received on any receipted payment. With this feature AppFolio users don’t have to manually manage entering and tracking tax due amounts, manually setting aside the funds to pay the tax, and manually entering and making the payment. This saves a lot of time!

The feature is easy to setup and easy to use, just contact the AppFolio Support Team to get the feature enabled for your account.

Once the setup is complete AppFolio will automatically set aside the appropriate percentage of income when monies are received on the property, and will also create a corresponding payable (bill) in the system to be paid to the Tax Authority.

When the time comes to pay the tax bill (monthly, quarterly, etc. per local requirements), users simply run the normal bill pay process and select the Tax Authority as the payee. The system will find the unpaid bills that were created and enable users to make payment.

Here’s an Example of how it works:

• User manages a property subject to 7% rental income tax and they are using the Tax Authority feature in AppFolio.
• Income is receipted for the property – AppFolio automatically sets aside 7% of that income and creates a corresponding bill payable to the Tax Authority for the correct amount.
• User pays the tax bill — Simply select the payee as the Tax Authority and AppFolio will return a list of the bills that were automatically created.
• The funds to pay the bill are in the property account and the user can select the bills to pay and complete the check writing flow to make payment.

There is no additional cost to use this feature and the benefits of using it can amount to a great deal of saved time, frustration and headache. If you are an AppFolio customer and are interested in having this feature enabled, please contact support@appfolio.com. If you are not a user of AppFolio and are tired and frustrated with how you have to manage this process, what are you waiting for! Contact us now so we can help you avoid those dreaded tax paperwork headaches!

As many of you know, late last year the Small Business Job Act was passed by Congress. What some of you may not know is that with it came a new “supercharged” version of Section 179.

Section 179 is the part of the tax code that governs what small businesses can treat as an expense and deduct in the year they purchase instead of depreciating over a period of years. Certain items like computers, desks, cars, and even software (like AppFolio!) can fall under this provision.

But what makes section 179 “supercharged”? Well, for tax years 2010 and 2011, they raised the limit of qualifying deductions from $25,000 to $500,000. So if you were hitting this limit before, now you have more room to deduct those expenses!

Here is a link to the specific page on the IRS site (http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/article/0,,id=177054,00.html). As always, please consult your CPA for specifics of how this new law will apply to your business.

Reports. I really find AppFolio’s reports useful. Why? Because they provide a user-interface to query data without having to know code. This means that even if you don’t know SQL, you can query your data at any time and for almost anything.

We often receive Support Requests from folks who are looking for customized reports. And, since you’ve asked, then you shall receive! We have provided you the most requested reports, but did you know that you could further customize them to suit your company’s needs? And, did you know that you can save these customized reports so that whenever you need the information, at a moment’s notice, all you have to do is click on your customized report?

Let’s go through a few examples.

Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary Report
What if an owner has decided to sell a property or manage it him or herself? You have gone through the process of wrapping up your books for the property, but there are still a couple of tenants who owe you for back rent. You would rather the hide the property, since you’ll no longer be managing it, but you still need to keep track of who owes you what. Allow me to introduce the Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary Report (Reporting > Reports > Tenant Reports)

When you open it, by default, it reflects any tenant unpaid charges for Current and Notice tenants, but you can customize it to include All tenants. To do so, look towards the upper-right portion of the report, to the Filters button.

Once you select the Filters button, you will be presented with a window displaying an array of filtering options. When you select a Tenant Status of “All”, past tenants (who might also be hidden) will be included in the report.

In addition to this, you can order the report by selecting the Group button to the right of the report. The Group button resembles a little, square window. When clicked, a drop-down will appear which provides you even more options for sorting your reports.

Saving a Customized Report
If you would like to avoid having to customizing a report each time, you can save a customized report as its very own report! Once you’ve filtered and customized the report to your needs, just click on the “Save” button which is located near the “Filter” button.

After you’ve renamed and saved your new report, it will appear at the bottom of the Reports screen (Reporting > Reports) under “Saved Reports”. Going forward, you can simply click on your new report to view it just as you’ve customized. If you want to delete the report, just click on the red, minus icon to the right of the report.

Tip: You can customize many of AppFolio’s reports just like this!

Tenant Directory Report
Another report you might find handy is the Tenant Directory (Reporting > Reports > Tenant Reports). The Tenant Directory Report functions very similar to a ‘roll call’. It lists all of your tenants, along with a variety of other information that you can also Filter and Group to suit your needs.

One question we are often asked is, “How do I tell which tenants have signed up for online rent payments (Tenant ACH) without going to each of their respective windows?” The Tenant Directory report offers the availability to group the report via Tenant Portal Login. You would activate this grouping by expanding the Group drop-down and checking the “Tenant Portal Login” box. The tenant portal column will then be added to the report.

Check Register Detail Report
The last report I’d like to discuss is the Check Register Detail (Reporting > Reports > Transaction Reports). The name is pretty self-explanatory, but did you know that you can filter the report to view only ACH-related transactions?

Click on the Filters button at the top of the window, and then select the drop-down for Payment Type. To narrow your report to reflect only ACH transactions, you would choose the “ACH Payments Only” option.

From there, you have the ability to further customize the report using Groups or Filters. And, just like the Tenant Unpaid Charges Summary report, you can save it as its own report so that you can come back to it at any time without having to re-filter or re-group.

Happy reporting!

A General Ledger is a record of every financial transaction for your property management business. It is here that all debits and credits, for every account number and type, are stored.

Many avoid using the General Ledger because it can feel overwhelming. That is, so much information can be viewed from this report, that many prefer to utilize custom reports. But, sometimes the custom reports do not contain all of the information necessary to research a misapplied payment or to locate a particular dollar amount within a specific date-range. Enter AppFolio’s flexible and customizable property management reports.

If you have a discrepancy (such as incorrectly applied transaction or unrecorded item), the General Ledger is a great place to review original transactions, since regardless of where in the system the transaction has occurred, it will always appear on this report.

There are a few ways to navigate to AppFolio’s General Ledger:

1. Reporting > Reports > Financial Transactions > General Ledger
2. Accounting > Journal Entries > Reports > General Ledger
3. Accounting > GL Accounts > General Ledge

Once you select the link to open the General Ledger, a Filter option will appear. It is here that you can narrow down your criteria by Property, GL Account, and date-range. So, in other words, if you are interested in viewing any income received during a specific time-frame and by property, you would: Select the property, choose the date-range, then using your mouse and “Ctrl” button on your keyboard, you can choose specific and multiple GL Accounts.

Should you desire to further organize the report, there is an additional filter/group button located at the upper-right portion of the report. Once you click on it, a drop-down will appear. From there, you can select the column headings you would like to see on the report. Maybe you want to view the property name, but do not want to see the transaction type. You would simply check the box to include the property name and deselect the box to exclude the transaction type.

When you run your cursor over the Show in Groups, an additional drop-down will appear. This feature allows you to sort the report via grouping.

Another wonderful thing about AppFolio’s General Ledger report, is that if you click on one of the column headers, it will sort the report using your selection; much like Microsoft Excel.

Speaking of Excel, if you need to further manipulate the date to include formulas and charts, you do have the option to export the General Ledger into Excel format. Just click on the Export button at the top of the window and save the file wherever you like.

Last, but not least, I wanted to mention two of my most favorite components of AppFolio’s General Ledger report:

1. You can click on any dollar amount to be taken to the respective transaction – these amounts are hyperlinked! This is so helpful when you are searching for something you need to eventually reverse or void. It also provides you with easy access to garner more detailed information surrounding the original transaction.
2. If you know the dollar amount you need to search for, but don’t know what property it’s associated with or who paid it or basically any information surrounding the transaction, other than the dollar amount, you can search for it.

To perform a search, look towards the bottom-left of your General Ledger where the Find field is located. Enter in the dollar amount, then click Enter on your keyboard. It will automatically search through every single transaction (Within the date-range and other search criteria you’ve selected) on the report and it will highlight it in yellow. If there is more than one transaction of that amount, they will all be highlighted in yellow and you can click Enter to go to each one of them.

One of the most interesting aspects of my role as the VP of Product Management is that I get to spend quite a bit of time listening to our customers describe their problems and learning about the process they go through to solve these problems on a daily basis. Many vendors in our industry also hear about these problems but often times respond by producing software that addresses each issue, one by one. But, as more technologies are released that help property managers run a more efficient business, it becomes really difficult to manage, integrate (and pay for!) all of these new mostly stand-alone technologies.

For example, a modern property management company will invest in:

• Property management accounting software
• Tools for posting vacancies (to Craigslist, the Internet, the business website)
• Online rent collection for residents
• Resident background check software
• A company website
• A portal solution for their Owners and Residents

During my initial conversations with residential property managers they talked about the challenges of getting all of these different software solutions to “work together” and their frustration at the cost and headache of managing multiple vendors. It became very clear to us that what property managers needed was a single and complete property management software solution so they could spend time focused on their business rather than solving technology compatibility issues. We also heard (loud and clear) that property managers are tired of paying extra for additional features.

We most recently announced online rent collection using ACH, integrated with AppFolio property management software and we are the first vendor to include it at no additional charge to our customers. In an industry where property managers typically pay their provider up to $1.50 per ACH transaction, it is pretty exciting to offer this service to our customers with zero additional monthly fees.

We have such an exciting opportunity to build property management software that matches to how property managers actually run their business!