RENTAL CASH FLOW BOOK KEEPING

[JIMMY T.]

Hello colleagues,

I just found this site not to long ago and I am addicted!

A little bit about myself (this is my first post on here) I have two rental properties that have been rented for almost a year now, generating good cash flow. My problem is I am a bit unorganized because I work a full time job and do 90% of the rehab work myself on the rentals as well as upgrades to my home. Almost seems as if I have no time to be in the office looking for more deals and straightening out my paper work.

Basically, my question is what is the best/easiest way for me to track expenses, rents, utilities etc. etc. so that I can know exactly what money I have to play with. Plus tax time is right around the corner and dont want any trouble :D

Thanks in advance !

[Kevin C.]

Originally posted by Steve Babiak:

I suggest you ask this question of the people who you would consider candidates to be your CPA or accountant. When I asked the CPA-to-be, he indicated Quickbooks due to being able to track asset classes better, and to be able to easily create reports that are specific to a certain property. Plus, my CPA can be "correcting" an accountant's copy of my books while I still make new entries into the books; the accountant's copy then gets merged back into my copy.

There are certainly other alternatives out there, and a search on BP should turn up some websites that sell software for property management (but being smaller, those might seem to be overkill). And some swear by their spreadsheets :D

I'm able to create income/expense reports for each specific property with Quicken quite easily.

I print reports in Quicken and provide them to my CPA along with associated receipts, he has never indicated he needed anything else.

QuickBooks is more powerful than Quicken for sure, but all I needed was something to track income and expenses for each property and Quicken is quite capable of doing that.

Since I already use Quicken for personal accounting I incurred no additional costs to track the income/expense for my properties.

Quicken can be a viable solution, and a low cost one at that (or no cost if you already use it for personal record keeping).