How to Use an Account Journal

By managing a wide range of properties, you will quickly be building up a lot of different payments, both to and from tenants, vendors, and owners. Trying to keep track of all these transactions across checks and credit cards and different bank accounts is time consuming and unorganized, letting important transactions fall through the cracks without you noticing. By compiling every possible transaction in one comprehensive account journal with an online property management system, always stay on top of your financial situation!

Account Journal Features

An account journal in an online property management system is a collection of every transaction made across the system, from things like tenants paying rent to you paying a vendor for their maintenance to everything in between. If there was a payment connected to the software, it is listed in the account journal. All of these transactions also say who the payment was from or to, the amount of the payment, the payment method and the account it’s going to, the date of the payment, the specific building and unit associated with the payment, and additional descriptive details about this payment. Any information that you need about any specific transaction can be found listed on the account journal, so you don’t have to go wading through messages or old maintenance requests to find the info you need, and can instead get it all on one page. From here, you can also view any attachments and send the transaction as an email if someone is requesting this information from you. Whatever you need or want from these payments, the account journal is sure to have that information for you!

Journal Filtering

When you have a large amount of units, tenants, vendors, and owners, you will shortly have a large amount of transactions to sort through. Even though everything is more organized and collected here than spread across all the different pages and sections of the online property management system, it can still be difficult to find the exact payment you are looking for. Luckily, there are lots of options to filter the journal down so that you can find the information you need right away. First, you are able to select which transaction types you want to see, for example invoice and invoice payments only, or transaction void or refunds. You can select as few or as many as you would like, and will produce a list just using those transaction types. You can also sort by the category of what the transaction was for, so different types of expenses or incomes or equities, for example if you want to see only rent payments or late fees, or want to see maintenance payments to vendors. Finally, you can sort based on which bank account is being used as well as which company or owner the transactions are related to. All of these different filter options can also work in tandem with each other, so if you want to see the administration fees that were refunded for one specific company, you can do that! Whatever your needs are for sorting or finding specific transactions, your account journal is built to search!

Customizations and Additions

Like any other part of the online property management system, the account journal can have categories added and changed to whatever your company’s specific needs are! If you need to add a new account or a new journal entry, you can do that with ease. You can also create new categories that transactions can be labeled as, and can then be sorted through the account journal, such as the rent and late fee types that we discussed earlier. And within each of these new and existing categories, you can edit how they appear in the account journal, what companies they link to, and whether or not they are tax exempt. These additions make the system completely customizable to your liking; you can create as many different categories as you want and have them displayed in any number of ways. Whatever best helps you to categorize and organize your accounts, online property management software can help!

Why an Account Journal

No matter how many different payment categories you have, or how many vendors and owners and tenants you manage, these transactions will quickly add up. By having complete control over customization, sorting, and appearances, going over your finances will be a lot less stressful and a lot more simple. Collecting all your transactions in one place is the first step in simplifying your accounting, a necessary step to reducing stress and increasing your time to focus on other areas of your company. Here at Property Matrix, we’re focused on building a system that works for you, not the other way around. Schedule a demo with Property Matrix today to see how else we can simplify your property management!