and now we will learn how landlords manage their items list what is an item well an item is a
service or product that one sells to a customer in this case our tenants an item is something
that you would list in the body of a sales receipt or an invoice when you make that sale each item is
connected to an income type of account in the chart of accounts every time an item is placed
on an invoice the income account for that item goes up for example Holden wants to list late
fees on a tenant's invoice separately so that the tenant can see how much she or he is being charged
specifically for late fees compared to the rest of the regular rent he also wants to track the income
from late fees separately so he can know the total he earned just from late fees he wants to be able
to compare that to how much he earned from the overall rent he must create an item on the items
list called late fees and when he creates this item he must connect it to the income account
in the chart of accounts called income from late fees so if you look at the diagram on the right is
the pretend invoice that we would imagine giving the customer the tenant to ask them to pay for the
rent now when we list the monthly rent $500 that means when we record this particular invoice this
account in the chart of accounts should go up by $500 because that's where it gets recorded
however if we add a late fee for a dollar-fifty that means that that dollar 50 should instead be
recorded in this account income from late fees this way he can get the separate totals of each
account and know how much he earned from Wren compared to how much he earned from late fees so
let's take a look how to put it into QuickBooks from the main menu click list items list now as
I mentioned before when we were talking about the chart of accounts the bottom left button of every
list window controls the list click in the bottom left where it says item and then click new and the
new item window opens up now almost everything a landlord would ever do for a tenant is a service
so we click service then the item name will be rent due because that's how it appears on the
invoice and the account or the income account that we will connect it to will be it has to be
an income type of account rental income earned so if you see this item for a certain amount on
the invoice the money amount on that same row will get recorded into this account now we're
going to click Next and then we're going to type in late fees and that particular item is going
to be recorded into income from late fees if we ever have to put a late fee on an invoice click
ok and congratulations you've finished setting up your items list you can change the column width
by moving them the mouse pointer up to the top here till it becomes the double arrow and then
you can click and drag you can even see here's the name of the item as it will appear on the
invoice or sale receipt and here's the name of the account that it will go into as part of by
the way these accounts are only the accounts in your chart of accounts that we had set up
before it's going to be one of these two but it will show which item goes into which account