A rental property chart of accounts in QuickBooks follows Schedule E: rent and other income at the top, then the expense lines the IRS asks for (advertising, cleaning and maintenance, insurance, management fees, mortgage interest, repairs, taxes, utilities, depreciation), with each property, loan, escrow balance and security deposit carried on the balance sheet. Keep it short, about forty accounts, and use one file per LLC or one location per property inside a file. What the template pages leave out is the second layer: the management company that collects the rent, the money owed between the LLCs, and the portfolio total that none of the files can show on its own.
Eleven doors, six LLCs, six charts
Eleven doors. Six LLCs: two duplexes, a fourplex, three single-family houses, and a management LLC that signs the leases and collects the rent. Three lenders hold the loans. A bookkeeper set up the first two files four years ago, a second bookkeeper set up the next three, and the owner set up the last one herself on a Sunday. One file has "Repairs", another "Repairs and Maintenance", a third "R&M". The management company's file shows $214,800 of rent it does not own. Nothing here is wrong in any single file. It is only wrong when you try to add them up, which is the moment the portfolio starts to matter.
A chart of accounts is the list of accounts a QuickBooks file uses to sort every transaction: the income lines, the expense lines, and the balance sheet accounts for what the LLC owns and owes.
The pages that rank for this search are single-file templates, and three of the top nine are property-software vendors whose argument is that QuickBooks is the wrong tool. We disagree with that. QuickBooks Online is fine for one LLC's books. What it does not do is show six of them together, and that is a different problem from the chart.
The rental property chart of accounts, in Schedule E order
Schedule E is the form attached to a personal return on which rental income and expenses are reported, one column per property. Its expense lines are the list every rental chart should copy, because the bookkeeper's coding then becomes the tax preparer's mapping with nothing in between. Stessa's template, updated April 2025, recommends the same approach and points at Form 8825 for partnerships.
| Type | Account | Schedule E line |
|---|---|---|
| Income | Rental income | 3 |
| Income | Other rental income (late fees, pet rent, application fees) | 3 |
| Expense | Advertising | 5 |
| Expense | Auto and travel | 6 |
| Expense | Cleaning and maintenance | 7 |
| Expense | Commissions | 8 |
| Expense | Insurance | 9 |
| Expense | Legal and professional fees | 10 |
| Expense | Management fees | 11 |
| Expense | Mortgage interest | 12 |
| Expense | Other interest (HELOC, seller note) | 13 |
| Expense | Repairs | 14 |
| Expense | Supplies | 15 |
| Expense | Property taxes | 16 |
| Expense | Utilities | 17 |
| Expense | Depreciation | 18 |
| Expense | Other (HOA dues, bank fees) | 19 |
| Asset | Operating bank account; escrow held by lender | Balance sheet |
| Asset | Land; building; accumulated depreciation; due from manager | Balance sheet |
| Liability | Security deposits held; prepaid rent; due to manager | Balance sheet |
| Liability | Mortgage payable, one per loan; HELOC | Balance sheet |
| Equity | Member contributions; member distributions | Balance sheet |
Prepaid rent catches most owners. It is a liability, not income, until the month it covers arrives. Land catches the rest: it sits in its own account because it is never depreciated, and Stessa's example of a $125,000 purchase with $93,750 financed comes to about $4,000 a year of depreciation once the land is carved out.
Fewer accounts, more locations
The common template advice is one income account per property, and sometimes one repairs account per property too. That triples the chart by the third building and defeats the roll-up. The better tool is the one Smythe LLP's January 2025 guide describes: "use Locations for properties and Classes for types of income/expenses", which "eliminates the need to create separate accounts for each property in the chart of accounts". Every transaction carries a location, and the P&L by location gives you each building on its own column with the same forty accounts.
The limits are real. Intuit's usage-limits page, updated 5 August 2026, allows 250 accounts and 40 combined classes and locations on QuickBooks Online Plus, and none at all on Simple Start or Essentials; Advanced removes the caps. Plus is $140 a month at the list price set on 1 August 2026 and Advanced is $340. An owner keeping several LLCs in one file with a location per property and a few classes reaches 40 faster than the plan page suggests.
One file per LLC, or locations in one file
The rule from one LLC per rental property still holds: each EIN gets its own file, because each LLC has its own return, its own bank account and sometimes its own partner. The BiggerPockets threads on this land in the same place. The counter-case is several properties inside one LLC, where locations do the work and one file is right. Separate files or classes for multiple LLCs goes through the tax-time cost of getting this wrong.
That makes seven files for the owner above: six property LLCs and the management company. Six carry the chart in the table. The seventh needs a chart that almost nobody templates.
The management company's chart
The management LLC collects every tenant's rent, pays contractors, and charges each property a fee. Its chart has three accounts the property files do not. Management fee income. Rent collected in trust, a liability, because the $214,800 belongs to the property LLCs. And a due to and due from pair for each property.
A due from account is an asset recording money another company you own owes to this one. A due to account is a liability recording money this company owes to another you own. Glencoyne's September 2025 setup guide has them as an other current asset and an other current liability, one mirrored pair per counterparty, reconciled monthly. The owner's version of due to and due from walks through the entries.
Each property LLC's file mirrors the manager. Rent collected by the manager is rental income for the property and a due from manager balance, which falls when the manager passes the money through. The management fee is an expense for the property and income for the manager, and it has to cancel when the portfolio is added together, or the group's income counts it twice. One company paying another's bills covers what happens when the manager pays the plumber and nobody records it in the property's file.
The same names in every file
Every file must use the same account names and types, down to the capital letters. The reason is arithmetic: a roll-up adds "Insurance" in file one to "Insurance" in file two, and if file three calls it "Property insurance" it either lands in a separate row or gets mapped by hand, and the map is the first thing that breaks when the bookkeeper changes. Discipline is the second reason. A bookkeeper cannot code the same insurance bill three ways if the three files offer only one place to put it.
Navigator reads each LLC's QuickBooks Online file as it is, read-only, without asking you to standardize the charts first, and shows net operating income by property and cash across every account each morning. The roll-up with the management fee canceled between the entities is on the Pro plan. Whether the files are clean enough to read that way is what the free accounting health check tells you first.
The lines the P&L hides and the lender needs
Net operating income is rent and other income less operating expenses, before mortgage interest, depreciation and capital improvements. It is the number a lender divides by the loan payment to test coverage.
A rental P&L shows interest but not principal, and depreciation but not the roof. The balance sheet holds both, in the loan account and in the building account, which is why reading a balance sheet matters more for a landlord than for most owners. It is also why improving DSCR before an annual review starts with the balance sheet: the bank adds depreciation and interest back and subtracts what you took out, so the chart has to keep those lines separate.
Twenty minutes with each existing file finds the same four errors most of the time. The fourplex is typical. Its monthly mortgage payment of $2,318 was coded entirely to mortgage interest, when $1,486 was interest, $712 was principal and $120 was escrow, so interest is overstated by $9,984 a year and the loan balance never falls. A $1,850 security deposit sits in rental income. A $14,600 roof sits in Repairs, when it belongs in the building account and depreciates at about $531 a year. And an "Ask My Accountant" account holds $3,200 nobody has looked at since March. The file shows a $3,870 loss for the year. Corrected, the fourplex earned $18,333 from the same bank statements.
The method has a limit. A clean chart shows you each LLC. It does not show the portfolio's cash, which sits in seven accounts, and a 2016 JPMorgan Chase Institute study of 597,000 firms found real estate businesses held a median of 47 days of cash, the most of any industry and still under seven weeks. Adding the seven balances is a separate job, and it is the one that gets skipped.
Questions owners ask
What accounts do I need for a rental property in QuickBooks?
Rental income and a line for other income such as late fees, then the Schedule E expense lines: advertising, auto and travel, cleaning and maintenance, commissions, insurance, legal and professional, management fees, mortgage interest, other interest, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities and depreciation. On the balance sheet, the bank account, escrow, land, building, accumulated depreciation, security deposits held, prepaid rent, one liability per loan, and member contributions and distributions. About forty accounts in all.
Should each rental property have its own QuickBooks file?
Each LLC should. One file per EIN is the rule that holds up at tax time and with lenders, because each LLC files its own return or schedule and has its own bank account. Several properties inside one LLC do not need separate files; give each property a location in that LLC's file and run the P&L by location. A file per property inside one LLC multiplies subscriptions for no benefit.
Are security deposits income?
No. A security deposit is the tenant's money that you are holding, so it is a liability on the balance sheet until you either return it or keep part of it for damage or unpaid rent. The part you keep becomes income at that point. Deposits coded to rental income overstate the property's revenue and, at tax time, put money on Schedule E that was never yours.
How do I track a mortgage in QuickBooks for a rental?
Set up one long-term liability account per loan and, if the lender holds escrow, one asset account for the escrow balance. Split every payment three ways: principal to the loan liability, interest to mortgage interest expense, and the escrow portion to the escrow asset. When the lender pays the tax bill from escrow, move it from the escrow asset to taxes. Reconcile the loan balance to the lender's statement each year.
How many classes can I have in QuickBooks Plus?
Intuit's usage-limits page, updated 5 August 2026, allows 40 combined classes and locations on Plus, and 250 accounts. Advanced removes both limits. Classes and locations are not available at all on Simple Start or Essentials. A portfolio that uses a location per property and a few classes for income and expense types reaches 40 sooner than most owners expect, which is when the file either moves to Advanced or splits.
Related
The structure decision behind all of this is in one LLC per rental property. For the intercompany balances the management company creates, read due to and due from accounts explained, and for what the bank does with the numbers once the chart is right, how to improve DSCR before your annual review.
If you would like to see NOI by property and cash across every LLC without rebuilding a single chart first, the trial connects each file in a few minutes and needs no card: navigatorhq.ai.
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Published . Last updated . Reviewed by a CFO on the Navigator team.