It is the 6th, 9:15 AM. August's income statement is on screen and it says the business made $11,200 across six buildings. The owner of Alder Court has sent one line asking whether her building is doing all right, and the honest answer is that you know, roughly, the way you know which coat on the rack is yours.
Look at what the number in front of you is. It has no address. Rent from six buildings posted to one rent account. The plumber, the roofer, and the landscaper posted to one repairs account. The blanket insurance premium posted once. The statement added all of it up correctly and reported a profit for a business, and a business is not a thing anyone rents. Buildings are. Every decision you make this month is about one of them: a fee, a repair, a renewal, whether to keep managing it at all.
So the answer lives in your head, and it is a good head. Maple Street carries the portfolio, you are fairly sure. Alder Court has had the boiler and a vacancy. The other four are fine, probably. The cost of "fairly sure" and "probably" is not the twenty minutes it takes to write the owner a careful reply. It is the fee on Alder Court that has not moved in four years while the building takes more of your hours than any two others. It is the capital repair approved because the portfolio could afford it, when the building could not. It is the renewal priced from the last increase rather than from what the building earns. It is the building you would sell if you knew, and the one you would buy more of. And it is the owner who is told "fine" in September and reads about a loss in the year-end package, from her accountant, after you.
Under all of it sits the arrangement nobody agreed to: the good building has been paying for the bad one all year, and neither owner knows.
The portfolio statement knows the business made money. It does not know which building did.
Give each building its own lines. Alder Court's rent posts to Alder Court's rent account; the boiler posts to its repairs account; its share of the blanket policy is split on a basis you wrote down once; your office and your software stay where they belong, on the business. The question "is my building doing all right" stops being a memory and becomes a filter: this building, this month. The answer for August is minus $850, one vacant unit and one boiler, with dates. The $11,200 becomes five numbers you can name and one you can explain. The fee conversation gets a number instead of a feeling. The next capital decision gets its own line. The owner hears about the loss from you, in the month it happened, with the reason attached.
Scaalr carries the property dimension as a property code on the account: link a building's accounts by its code, and the building's statement is the owner statement run for that building alone, income and expenses by account, the net at the bottom, the transactions behind every line on screen. The setup, the monthly procedure, and how to compare two buildings per unit are in Profit and Loss per Property: Which Building Makes Money.
For the full setup, from the property code to the per-unit comparison, see: Profit and Loss per Property: Which Building Makes Money.
The first 5 units are free, then $0.99 a unit a month, and per-property statements are on every plan.