Overview
One part of property management is to pay out rental profit to your owners. In DoorLoop, you record this by creating an Owner Distribution.
If you are using DoorLoop to manage your own properties, and you take money out of the property's bank account, you still need to record this with an Owner Distribution. This way, your removal of these funds from the property is reflected on the property's balance sheet and your accounting will be correct.
Note: Owner Distributions are not available to Starter Plans. Consider upgrading to the Pro or Premium Plans to access this feature.
The Steps
Tip: In order to record an Owner Distribution for a property, you need to first add an owner(s) to that property. For steps on how to do this, check out the article: Add a Property Owner to a Property
Creating the Owner Distribution
Step 1 - Starting the owner distribution wizard
To start the owner distribution wizard, click on the + Create New button in the upper left corner and select Owner Distribution in the Owner Transactions section.
Step 2 - Recipients
On the Owner Distribution wizard, in the Recipients section, select whether you will be doing distributions for All Properties, Some Properties, or Portfolios. Selecting Some Properties or Portfolios will require that you make selections in the dropdown menu.
Next, select whether you are distributing for All Owners or Some Owners. If you select Some Owners, select those owners using the drop-down menu.
Click Next to continue.
Step 3 - Account Review
On the Account Review step, you'll see a list of all the properties you're currently managing. You'll notice that some properties may show that there is Missing Info, either the property is missing an Owner or it's missing an Opening Balance.
This could be that the property is owned by you and doesn't need an owner, or the property isn't owned by you and the information just wasn't entered beforehand.
Note: This step will be skipped if none of the properties require any changes. That means they already have an owner added, an opening balance entered, and have no undeposited funds. The wizard will automatically send you to the next step.
If you are missing info and want to add that info, click on the Missing Info button on either the owner column or the opening balance column. (Note that you are required to add an Owner to move on. However, you are not required to add an Opening Balance.)
Also, notice the Undeposited Funds column. If there are any undeposited funds associated with the property, you will see that total here. Click the Deposit Funds link to see what the undeposited funds are and then correct it by depositing those funds.
(Note that Undeposited Funds can come from payments that were received manually, but not deposited, or from ePays that haven't yet been deposited into your bank account. Refer to the article: How to Remove Undeposited Funds and Deposit Them Into Your Account.)
You will be able to continue with owner distributions even if you don't deposit all the undeposited funds.
For any property that you are not distributing an Owner Distribution for, click the X on the right-hand side of each property.
Click Next.
If you choose not to add the missing information for the Opening Balance, you'll see a warning message popup:
"Are you sure you want to continue? Some of your accounts do not have an opening balance logged in the system. We recommend ensuring all accounts have an opening balance before continuing."
(Note that you cannot continue if you do not have owners assigned to a property. That means if one of your properties you are trying to make a owner distribution for does not have an owner assigned, you cannot continue to the next step.)
Clicking Review Accounts takes you back to the Account Review step while clicking Continue will move on to the next step. You can click Continue to move on.
Step 4 - Fund Allocation
On the Fund Allocation step, you'll see information here on the properties you chose for owner distributions and the financial data associated with them. Here you can see each property's available funds, what bank account they are associated with, the available cash for each account, and what the distribution amount will be.
Note: Only properties with available cash will be selected with the blue checkmark on the left side. Any property that doesn't have funds available will not be checked. However, you can manually select those if you still want to run owner distributions on them
You might notice the new "As of date" feature that lets you run your Owner Distribution as of a certain date. For instance, you can run your owner distributions for last month up to a certain date and it'll take into consideration the available funds up to that date.
Next, to see more detailed information about each property and what will be distributed, click the little expansion arrow on the right side.
Notice that the left side (property account summary) of the property will show a breakdown of the Cash Balance, minus the undeposited funds, security deposits, and property reserves, giving you a "Cash available to distribute for the property" balance.
The right side will show the Bank Account's total available cash. If needed, you can select a different bank account using the dropdown menu if a different account is used for owner distributions.
If you have multiple owners on a property, this is where you would see their percentage of ownership and the amount they'll each be receiving. Note that you do not have to use the amount that is shown and can change this amount manually if needed. You can also choose not to distribute to certain owners if needed.
Once all the information has been reviewed, you can click Next to continue.
Tip: You can still send out an owner distribution even if there are no funds available in the bank account. You can just manually add an amount and still create one.
Step 5 - Distribution Method
On the Distribution Method step, you'll be able to set the payment method.
Tip: You can consolidate payments by turning on the Consolidate Payments toggle. This will allow you to send one payment to each owner instead of several smaller payments separately if they own multiple properties.
Click the expansion arrow on the right side of each owner to show more detail.
From the details, you can select the Payment Method for each distribution. That means you can send one owner a payment through check, a second through ePay, and a third via cash if you wanted to.
Check - Enter a check number if you already have your own checks sent outside of DoorLoop. Otherwise, select "Add to Print Queue" if you plan on printing the check out in DoorLoop. Read: Print a Check for more information.
ePay - Choose this to send a payment electronically if you have already signed up for Checkbook.io.
All other payment method choices require payment outside of DoorLoop.
Add any additional information in the Add memo section.
Click Finish.
You'll now see a brief summary of the Owner Distribution you created. There are various links you can click on and some other buttons depending on the payment method chosen.
View transactions report - takes you to the transaction report to view the expenses created for each owner distribution. Make note of the Batch # if you want to pull up this report later.
View owner statement - takes you to the Owner Statement report. Click Run Report to generate the owner statement for the properties you made distributions on.
Print Checks - If you chose Checks as the payment method and chose to print later, you can click this button to take you directly to the Print Checks section of DoorLoop.
Complete ePay - If you chose ePay as the payment method, then clicking this button will take you to the Send Payments section of DoorLoop to complete the process of sending your payments to your owners via eCheck.
That's it. If you chose ePay as a payment method, remember that you still need to send out the ePay. Please refer to the steps below to complete the process.
Next Step: If you choose ePay as the payment method, send the electronic payment to your recipient. To do so, follow the instructions here: Send a Payment to a Tenant, Vendor, or Owner
Owner Distributions can not be sent by direct deposit, only via eCheck with Checkbook.io.
Things to Consider
If you plan on releasing money to an owner, you would record an owner distribution to show that you are giving funds back to the owner.