CAM reconciliation with QuickBooks Online

Why a CAM reconciliation needs more than the general ledger

This is not a criticism of the software. A general ledger records what was spent, correctly and in detail. A CAM reconciliation needs something the ledger has no way to know: which of those expenses a particular lease makes recoverable, at what share, against which base year, under which cap, and after which exclusions.

Those facts live in the leases. The ledger has no field for them, and classes and locations — useful as they are for scoping expenses to a property — cannot express a cumulative cap or a gross-up provision.

So the gap gets filled by a person and a workbook. That is the part worth replacing, not the accounting.

What the integration actually does

• Reads your chart of accounts, classes and locations, so recoverable expenses can be scoped using the structure you already have rather than one imposed on you.
• Pulls the year’s actual expenses for the property being reconciled, instead of anyone exporting and re-keying them.
• Keeps the classification once you have made it, so next year’s pool is assembled the same way this year’s was.
• Posts the recovery back once a year is locked, as each tenant’s billing in QuickBooks Online, so nobody re-keys it. It never reclassifies or edits the expenses it read.

Ledgerstone reads your expense data from QuickBooks Online and posts the finished recovery back to it. It isn't a second general ledger. Your chart of accounts stays yours, your bookkeeping process is unchanged, and your accountant keeps working where they already work.

A typical setup

• Connect. Authorize the QuickBooks Online company. Ledgerstone reads accounts, classes and locations.
• Map once. Say which accounts are operating expenses for which property, and which are never recoverable — capital items, leasing commissions, the owner’s financing costs.
• Capture the lease terms. Share and denominator, recovery group, base year or expense stop with its figure, cap type and rate, gross-up provision, named exclusions.
• Run the year. Expenses come from the books, rules come from the leases, and the result shows how each figure was reached.
• Lock and send. The recovery posts back to QuickBooks Online and the statement reaches the tenant, who can see how it was calculated and pay the balance.

Questions people ask about this specifically

Will I have to change my chart of accounts?

No. The mapping adapts to your structure. A product that requires you to restructure your accounting to suit it has the relationship the wrong way round.

Does it work with QuickBooks Desktop?

No — QuickBooks Online only. The integration is built on the Online API and there is no Desktop equivalent of it.

What if my properties aren’t separated by class or location?

Worth raising on a call before you commit. Scoping expenses to a property is the one thing the reconciliation genuinely needs from the books, and how your company file is organized decides how much setup that takes.

Can two people reconcile against the same company file?

Yes. The connection is to the company, not to a person.

Read further

• CAM reconciliation software — what to evaluate, and where a spreadsheet stops working.
• What a CAM reconciliation actually involves — the sequence, with a worked example.
• What lease administration covers — where seven of the eight reconciliation inputs come from.
• Setting the books up for recovery — the chart of accounts, classes and locations, before any of this works.
• Doing the reconciliation in your accounting system — how far it gets you, and where it stops.