Quickbooks
I invest in commercial real estate and want to use Quickbooks to track my income, expenses, assets and liabilities. I am looking for resources for commercial real estate investors to enhance their use of Quickbooks. Are there any recommendations?
I already purchased and read Nancy Neville's book at mylandlordsbookkeeper.com I found it to be useful but geared toward residential real estate investors. For example, her proffered chart of accounts and items lists are not aligned toward a commercial real estate investor; also her templates do not fit well with a commercial investor. Still it was a useful resource.
I am interested in learning more about using Quickbooks for commercial real estate transactions such as how to expense CAM expenses to multiple tenants. I also am interested in how others track depreciation of properties that have segregated rates of depreciation. How do you use Quickbooks to create 10 year proformas (the Quickbooks 1 year budget is not my thing)? Should I set up and use the fixed asset manager and loan manager? What useful reports do people create and how often?
I watched the Quickbooks Training on-line seminars available via quickbookstraining.com. I listened to the Mastering Quickbooks 1 and 2 lecture series and the Accounting lecture series (about six days of lectures). They were all excellent background material on Quickbooks but obviously not geared toward Commercial real estate.
I have not yet purchased the landlordaccounting.com e-book. I am considering that as a next step. I am also considering Faust's book on fasttracconsulting.com but it is out of print and expensive.
Any advice on what to read next? I want to really master this as I value excellent records to help guide my investing decisions.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Wells,
Whats great about QB is the ability to customize. Once a file is set up properly, the rest is data input.
With that being said, you need to create seperate jobs that would represent tenants. From there, if you have a cam expense, you would first break down how much each tenant needs to pay for a particular invoice and then code to the correct job. Example: total invoice is 1000. 500 of amount would be coded to tenant 1 and 500 would be coded to tenant 2.
What i love about QB is thr ability to produce reports. Of course, the most useful reports are your balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow. Besides those three, its all up to what info you need.
Rather than finding a course specific to a certain industry, i would recommend a general course. It will allow you to know QB enoigh to customoze for YOUR business.