How to manage your expenses and extras?

The expenses and extras management allows you to enter and track any expenses or additional sources of income outside the rental activity. 

This article will cover the Expenses and Extras in:

• Expenses and Extras (in Financial Reporting)
• Owner Statements
• Reservations
• User Permissions
• Public API

Expenses & Extras section

In Financial Reporting, you will find a new tab called Expenses & Extras.

There, all the existing expenses and extras found inside existing owner statements will appear. Any other new expense will also appear there.

Columns and Filters

By default, we show the most interesting columns, but there are more.

Columns can be dragged & dropped and ordered.

The selection of columns and filters will be stored in the browser, so you will see the same when you come back to this section. This means other Users will not see the same selected columns.

The filters are:

1. Concept (text)

2. From and To of the expense&extra date

3. Categories: Help to track expenses and extras

4. Listings

5. Reservations

6. Owners: recently added; it is possible to assign an expense (for instance a property management fee) to an owner

7. Owner statements

Actions

The possible actions are:

1. Add expense: Values can be negative (generally expenses) and positive (generally extras). These expenses or extras will appear in Owner Statements when a new statement is created, filters are changed there or a manual refresh is requested, and only if Date + Listing or Date + Owner match the Owner Statement

2. Attach a file

3. Edit

4. Duplicate

5. Delete

None of the actions done in this section will automatically update existing owner statements. However, opening an owner statement will invite you to do so if we detect that a compatible expense was added or an existing one (in the OS) was edited or deleted.

Download Report

This option will generate a CSV file. As usual, you can filter the results if you want before downloading it.

Importing Expenses and Extras

We added an option for bulk-importing expenses and extras, so you can register them in a separate spreadsheet and easily add them to our system.

Here you can find the template - It is important that:

• You respect the column names
• Fill all mandatory fields
• Use comma-separate format
• Respect the format

In the Owner Statements

From now on, Owner Statement will auto-populate the Expenses and Extras section and table (and thus, affect the Owner statement Total) based on 2 conditions:

1. Listing + date: The date and the listing need to be part of the owner's statement

2. Owner + date: The date and the owner need to be part of the owner's statement

For existing owner statements, we will keep them as they were. We keep them as a “snapshot”, even if they were not compliant.

But from now on, when you update a statement (filters, assigned owners), we will apply Expenses and Extras that match the Owner Statement.

In addition, any time you open a statement, we’ll check if there is any discrepancy between the saved statement and the main table.

There it is possible to update:

1. Only rental activity

2. Only selected expenses&extras

   1. Recently added

   2. Recently deleted

   3. Recently edited (it will show what changed)

3. All (also possible outside)

• Creation is the only action that pushes data to the main table
• Editing (including attaching etc.) doesn’t, it stays in the OS

Sometimes, you might want expenses only for accounting purposes but don't want them included in the owner statements. In these cases, it is possible to Hide them, and they will be excluded.

They can be recovered by clicking on “X expense(s) hidden”

The expenses and extras table now allows selecting columns, giving more customization options

In Reservations

We added a sub-section in reservations to reflect any related expenses

A financial field can also be found there. It can be used to operate or show in financial reporting when needed

User Permissions

The highlight here is that we added a specific set of permissions for Expenses&Extras. To see the section, view permissions for expenses&extras will be needed.

Also to operate with them (create, edit etc.) inside owner statements. So some users (accountants, assistants etc.) may need this permission after this new functionality is launched.

If a user has access to view owner statements, he will still see the section.

Public API 

We added support to the public API. Now it will be possible to:

• Retrieve the expense and all the data it contains
• Update the expense and any data that can be updated via the dashboard: concept (mandatory), category (if we don’t have that category, it will create a new one), date (mandatory), reservation, listing (listing will correspond to the one from the reservation if not provided), owner email and id, amount
• Delete any expense
  
  

Tasks can now automatically generate expenses when completed

As part of the expenses management improvements we added an option to auto and manual tasks to create an expense when a task is marked as “done”.
The expense will consider the task cost (applying a negative value), the task description will be the expense concept and the reservation and/or listing will also be automatically assigned. The Expense date will correspond to the date when the task was marked as done. Categories can be assigned as well.
Once the expense is generated, it is still possible to edit it if needed; but changes to the expense will not affect the task. Editing the task (for instance the cost or the description) when it has already been completed will not update previously generated expenses.