If you sell or stop managing a property, you should inactivate it to ensure it no longer shows up on reports. However, there is more to inactivating a property than just ticking the Inactive box on the property screen.
Note: You can't directly inactivate an owner, but if you inactivate all of their properties, they will be hidden under Owners > Owners. If you are trying to inactivate an owner or indicate that you no longer do business with them, you can still follow these steps.
Close Out Financials
You should run an AR report, such as a Delinquency report, to identify any unpaid charges, unapplied credits, or unapplied prepayments. You may want to apply or write these off.
You must determine what will happen with the tenant deposits on file. As a best practice, you should click the deposit refund button on each tenant to zero out the deposit on the screen. If you aren't actually cutting refund checks for them, you can safely delete any refund payables that are created by this process.
You should also run an AP Aging report to identify any outstanding payables at the property you intend to inactivate. You may want to delete or zero out any payables that you do not intend to pay.
Finally, run a trial balance for your property. Determine if there are any other adjustments you need to make to the balance of those GL accounts to close out the books. You would typically create journal entries to make those adjustments.
If this property shared a bank account in Breeze with other properties that you will continue to manage, you need to indicate what is happening with the balance of the cash GL accounts. For example, if you intend to pay any remaining cash out to the owners, you can create a payable and pay it.
Note: It is very important to address the cash GL balance during this step. Not doing so can make bank reconciliations challenging moving forward.
Unpublish from RentCafe
If you were using RentCafe at this property, you should completely unpublish it. This means turning off the Tenant Portal and the Advertise on RentCafe ILS settings inside Breeze. If you're a Breeze Premier user and you had a property or company website set up, you should ensure this property is removed from those as well.
Turn off Online Payments
Online payment setup is controlled at the bank account level, not the property level. If you won't be using the property's bank account anymore at all, your SPOC user can deactivate the entire account.
They should navigate to the Company Settings screen and then click the KYC/Payments Portal button. Inside the portal, they should click View/Edit Bank Accounts and then click the Deactivate button beside the bank.
If this property shared a bank with other properties, and you need to continue providing online payments at those properties, reach out to our support team. We can help you shut payments off at specific properties.
Note: This step is critical to ensure that all recurring payments from tenants are stopped.
ResidentShield
If you were using ResidentShield at this property, reach out to your ResidentShield account manager to ensure all insurance policies are correctly inactivated. If you don't know who your ResidentShield account manager is, please chat with us and an agent can locate that information for you!
Owner Portal Users
You should delete Owner Portal users if you will no longer be doing business with the owners of the property you're deactivating. If you'll still be working with them on other properties, you can skip this step.
Click Owners and select the owner you want to work with. Then, select the Owner Portal tab on the left. You can click the delete button (
) to the right of their owner portal user to remove it.
Inactivate the Property
Navigate to Properties > Properties and review the property. Click edit. Tick the Inactive checkbox.
If there are unpaid transactions at the property, this message will appear. This is a soft warning, so you can click OK to proceed anyway, but it is recommended that you review those unpaid transactions and address them.
Finally, a Date Inactivated field will appear below the Inactive checkbox. Fill in the date the property was inactivated and click save.
What happens to inactivated properties?
You cannot create transactions or move tenants in or out at inactive properties.
By default, inactive properties do not show up when you navigate to Properties > Properties. They are also hidden when you drill into the Property filter on any screen, e.g. when running a report. However, most screens have a tickbox or a toggle you can flip to make inactive properties visible, so you'll always be able to look at your historical data.
You don't need to take any extra steps to ensure that inactive properties pull into 1099 calculations. The data is still present in Breeze, so you will be able to generate your 1099s for the next tax year. However, if you need to make changes to those transactions, you may need to temporarily reactivate the property.