Renting out home for a few months

[gary1861]

Taxpayer decided to rent out their home for 4 months - tourist reason.  They lived in the home the other 4 months.  I was thinking that I would enter the information on Schedule E worksheet and the program would allocate the expenses between the rental v. the personal.  The program doesn't like personal use days of 214 and maybe due to that, it won't calculate the "rental expenses".  Should I be using a different form to report the rental income, or do I just manually determine the proper expense allocation?

[Just-Lisa-Now-]

You may have to make the adjustments manually in this kind of situation...do the math and put the correct amounts on Sch A and E

[gary1861]

Thank you.  I was hoping there was some box or form I wasn't seeing that would allow ProSeries to do it.  I can override the Schedule E (manually enter) amounts, and it calculates fine, but I am guessing that the override will NOT allow the return to be e-filed.  Thus I may have to just manipulate the program and only enter the Schedule E amounts on Schedule E and the enter the Schedule A amounts as well.

[rbynaker]

---

@gary1861 wrote:

Taxpayer decided to rent out their home for 4 months - tourist reason.  They lived in the home the other 4 months.  I was thinking that I would enter the information on Schedule E worksheet and the program would allocate the expenses between the rental v. the personal.  The program doesn't like personal use days of 214 and maybe due to that, it won't calculate the "rental expenses".  Should I be using a different form to report the rental income, or do I just manually determine the proper expense allocation?

---

Can you elaborate on "doesn't like personal use days of 214"?  Is there an error?  What kind of expenses are you entering?  How many rental days?  Did they move back in after the rental period?

[gary1861]

I entered the 151 as days rented, I entered 214 as personal use days.  The program turned that box reddish (like when there is an error) and the explanation was that I had marked it as a vacation rental, but there was no such box checked, etc. and none of the expenses were being allocated to Schedule E.  The expenses were mortgage interest, taxes, utilities, etc.  Normal rental expenses.  Yes, the taxpayer moved out of the house for 4 months to rent it out and then moved back into the house.  

[gary1861]

Sorry I just noticed my original post stated they moved back for the other 4 months - it should have been 8 months.  They rented for 4 months and lived in the home for 8 months.  Sorry for the confusion.

[rbynaker]

Are you choosing property type 3-Vacation/Short-Term Rental?

[gary1861]

I tried both with code 3 as you mentioned as well as code 1 - single family residence.  Same result either way.

[gary1861 · Accepted solution]

When I removed the personal days (had to enter a 0), the program worked just fine, allocating the expenses between Schedule A and Schedule E based on the business percentage I had entered after doing the math 151/365=41.37%.  That eliminated the error issue and I didn't have to override (which would have been a problem for e-filing and I didn't have to just enter the calculated numbers.  The only issue is that Schedule E doesn't show the personal days, so the total days doesn't add up to 365.  Probably a programming issue.