Rental income bookkeeping

[crich]

Those of you that own properties what are you using to track expenses and income? Excel is getting annoying and I like the idea of an app or program that I can throw in all the numbers and it will calculate not only monthly information but overall property value (ltv, % returns etc). Ive seen a few programs that link with a bank account that seem slick. Quickbooks seems to be a little bit overkill. Curious what you guys are using. Thanks.

 

[MattB]

Excel is not great, but is what I use. I have a dedicated rental property account so all the inflows and outflows are rental-specific. A guy could also use an account per property to further segregate cash flows. I use my bank's bill pay service for most out flows and they are titled making them easy to sort by property. Add to that the property tax and insurance payments from lender escrow accounts, it is pretty fast to do the annual tax accounting.

I should add I also use property managers who provide me with an annual itemized cash flow statement, so that helps too.

 

[crich]

Excel is not great, but is what I use. I have a dedicated rental property account so all the inflows and outflows are rental-specific. A guy could also use an account per property to further segregate cash flows. I use my bank's bill pay service for most out flows and they are titled makes them easy to sort by property. Add to that the property tax and insurance payments from lender escrow accounts, it is pretty fast to do the annual tax accounting.

I should add I also use property managers who provide me with an annual itemized cash flow statement, so that helps too.

Ive never looked into any bill pay services with my bank I'll see what thats all about. I have everything flowing in and out of one account and have considered individual accounts for ease of tracking incase I get lazy. The property management companies do provide statements at the end of the year but its nice to see it month to month.

 

[MattB]

With the bill pay service, I can download the account outflows within a date range (e.g. 1/1/xx - 12/31/xx) and then sort alphabetically by payee. We only have a few properties, so that makes it really easy to allocate the payments to the associated property. My estimate is it takes me maybe an hour each year to pull the details together for our properties and put in a spreadsheet to provide to our accountant. Not bad at all.

I have an excel spreadsheet with the same expense categories as the software my PM's use (luckily they both use appfolio) so it is pretty fast to put the amounts in the right columns by property. I usually just confirm the annual statement revenue ties to the 1099's. Sometimes they are a bit off just due to timing.

We also get monthly statements from our property managers, so the annual is just a consolidation of those.

I track value, mortgage balance, LTV, etc. in a separate spreadsheet which I update each 6 months, also in excel.

 

[SDHNTR]

A property manager.

 

[Laramie]

I have 2 rental houses and keep it extremely simple. Deposit slips and receipts go into an envelope for each property. At the end of each month, I tally everything and enter into Excel. It takes roughly 5 minutes per property monthly. At tax time, I literally just hit print and give it to my accountant.

 

[Rokwiia]

QuickBooks. It will allow you to record your bank deposits and disbursements then view your Balance Sheet, Profit and Loss, and more. You can reconcile your bank account balance to QuickBooks to be sure you've included everything and done so correctly. It is not designed specifically for rental income properties but will work just fine.

Once you enter a payment, then next time you enter a payment it will autofill the check and assign it to the same category of expense you incurred last time.

In the alternative, Excel works well too.

 

[GSPHUNTER]

One word, WIFE

 

[Mturney]

I use the WIFE method also.

 

[Svivian]

I am in the same camp as MattB. I have separate bank accounts for each rental property labeled with the address on my online banking. Bill pay takes care of the rest and my tenants drop off a check at the bank each month so its really hassle free. From there I have access to each bank statement for my end of year accounting that I can also provide to my CPA. I also take into account mileage on my truck and fuel expenses for any times I have to visit the property to avoid as much tax liability as possible. Its not much but it adds up and my time is worth something.

 

[def90]

Thing to think about with Quickbooks is that you can just send your accountant your quickbooks file and it makes their life simpler and usually your accounting bill smaller.

 

[WDE91]

Right now I'm just at one property, though I will eventually be adding more.
I use a separate account for the rental to avoid comingling.