Housters 2.8 has been released on http://housters.com and will make its way to the Android and iOS mobile apps in the upcoming week.
This release introduces big changes to how we do accounting. When adding transactions the old way, you would simply pick a type (rent payment, repairs, etc…), enter the amount, enter some other details and then save. This approach is fine for many and is still the default way to add transactions in Housters, however it’s lacking in that it doesn’t allow the user to input where the money is coming from or going to.
On the Account > Preferences page we’ve now added a new option called “Double-Entry Accounting”. After enabling this preference, adding transactions allows you to input all of the individual debit and credit lines that make up a transaction. For example, adding a rent payment would debit a certain bank account asset and credit the income – rent payment account. This means that ANY transaction can now be added into Housters, where it’s for receiving money (income), sending money (an expense), or transferring money from one account to another. On the transaction list we now display each debit and credit line, as each transaction really is a combination of debits and credits.
We’ve also added the ability to customize your transaction types. From the new Manage Transaction Types page you can add new types and categorize them as income, expenses, assets, liabilities, etc… For those who are going to leverage the double-entry mode, you can add your actual rental bank accounts as assets and your rental credit cards as liabilities.
This naturally leads us to bank statement reconciliations. Now that you can specify for each transaction which account the money came from or went to, we’ve added a new Reconciliation page that allows you to enter an account, date range, starting balance and ending balance (which you will copy from your bank statement). You can then go through and check off the boxes of each transaction and ensure that the ending balance in Housters matches the ending balance on your bank statement. If it doesn’t then you’ve missed adding at least one transaction into Housters. Once it does match, you can then post the reconciliation, which will save it. Next month, you can go back to the Reconciliation page, it’ll automatically set the date range to the month after the last post, and set the starting balance to the ending balance from the last post.
That’s about it, feel free to drop us an email if you have any questions on the new functionality. A big thanks goes out to one of our users, Chris, who is an accountant and guided us through how to implement these new features in a way that would adhere to accounting rules. This release wouldn’t have happened without Chris!