Investor · Charlotte, NC · Member since 2008 · 217 posts · 12 votes
As my business grows larger, so does my pile of paper. I've decided to start using software to manage my life. Quicken was recommended to me, but after installing it and trying it out I really don't like it. I'm having trouble with interest only loan payments coming back into me. Maybe I just no nothing about accounting and that's the problem.
Does anyone use Quicken or Quick books? Is there an alternative? What's the best way to track your real estate income/expenses?
For me I keep it simple and use Excel.
I build my database how I want it and track what I want. I build calculated fields and I know how they compute for my sanity.
At the end of the year I run a pivot table to see my expense categories for the tax form. Takes less than a second.
Quicken is more of a personal finance software where Quickbooks is geared toward small business accounting. A competing accounting software is Sage Peachtree. Many accountants prefer Peachtree but Quickbooks is used more widely, partly because is it a more intuitive software to learn.
I would use an excel spreadsheet for the formulas to calculate my incoming interest only payments since they differ depending upon # of days in the month. Then I would set them up in quickbooks as one time charges. You can do them all at one time if the rate doesn't change. Then on that particular day the charge will post automatically just like a recurring rent charge posts for a tenant. The rest I operate in QB so that I can pull reports for income and expenses in an instant and for whatever period of time I would like to review.
I appreciate the different opinions. I think I will stick with excel and just expand it to be more thorough. The goal with quicken was to be able to track everyone in one place (for peace of mind) and to measure my monthly net income. Sounds like I shouldn't reinvent the wheel here!
Just in case anyone else following this thread is considering using Quicken for your rental property bookkeeping, there is a limit to the number of properties that Quicken can export to TurboTax.
It would appear that the number is 15. I have no idea of there is a limit to the number of properties that Quicken will track, but it seems to only have the ability to export the property data to TurboTax for up to 15 properties.
I was told by the Intuit folks that Quickbooks can export an unlimited number of rental properties to TurboTax Home and Business. This implies that the other personal versions of TurboTax have a limit on the number of properties that can be imported from personal financial software packages.