Overview
Your tenants likely pay you a lease deposit (security deposit, pet deposit, etc.) which you hold through the duration of their lease. This deposit either gets paid back at the end of the lease, or withheld for other lease charges. Because lease deposits aren’t your money, they exist as liabilities on your balance sheet until you pay them back or withhold them for charges and they become revenue.
To record the payment for a lease deposit correctly, the charge on the lease will be to a liability account rather than a revenue account. By default, we have security deposit, last month’s rent, prepaid rent, and pet deposit liability accounts. You can create more liability accounts in your chart of accounts if needed.
The Steps
You may have already added a charge for a lease deposit when you originally created the lease. If not, you can create the charge for the lease deposit after creating the lease through the following steps.
From the main menu, click Leases and then click Active Leases.
Find the lease you want to charge a deposit for, and click on it. You can either sort the list by the various columns and filters or use the Search leases search bar.
Click on the Transactions tab and then the Post Charge button.
Enter the following information:
Category: choose the deposit liability account for the charge. Normally this would be a Security Deposit, Pet Deposit, etc.
Description: enter an optional explanation for the deposit charge. What you enter here is what the tenant will see on their lease ledger in the tenant portal. If you leave it blank, the tenant will just see the word “Charge.” You will also see this description in the “Memo” column in relevant reports.
Amount: enter the amount for the deposit charge.
Due Date: change the due date for the deposit charge if needed.
Add memo: add an optional note for your reference when reviewing the charge later.
Add any relevant files (optional) and click Save.
That’s it! Once the tenant pays the deposit charge online or you record a lease payment that pays off the charge, you can go to the Deposits tab to review the deposits held.