Hello good folks of BP,

My wife and I will be closing on our first owner-occupied rental property (duplex) in May 2019 and I'm trying to do as much up front leg work as possible to prepare for us being new landlords.  We have some questions around the best way to accept rental payments and how investors are separating/storing funds for future repairs, vacancy, capex, cash flow, etc.

After doing some research on accepting rental payments, it looks like there are a few popular options:  cozy.co, buildium, google payments, paypal, certified funds (money order & cashiers check), cash, personal check, etc.  

As an IT Pro, I'm much more inclined to automate/digitize rental payments.  Cozy.co looks to be quite attractive and I've gone through their initial account setup, linked my bank account and all seems smooth so far - but I'm curious as to how the service functions in practice and if there are any "hidden" fees that the tenant or the landlord would potentially run into and be cause of shock/disappointment.  Least favorable would be cash, due to the hassles of accounting & writing receipts.  We're open to accepting personal checks or certified funds, but would having those sent to a PO Box be the best bet, as opposed to having that stuff sent directly to our primary residence?  Initially our tenant will be living above us, so this won't necessarily be an issue at first, but we'd like to setup a system now that scales as we purchase future properties.

After doing some research on where to keep funds, it looks like the common response is to either keep them in either an interest-bearing savings account, checking account, CD, etc. and largely to keep the funds liquid, so you can access them on demand. That makes sense for the most part and we have a Business/LLC-based Checking & Savings account that we plan on housing the funds & transferring any deposits into (e.g. cozy.co), but I suppose our question goes a bit beyond this and into the accounting side of things. How do you separate out & account for the monthly funds going into the future repairs, capex, vacancy, etc. categories? Do you use separate accounts for each category? Do you separate the funds going into these categories from your "monthly cash flow", or do you keep them all in the same account? I suppose I'm a bit confused with seeing the different categories listed on our numbers listed on the Rental Property calculator for the property, and trying to visualize those numbers being separated & accounted for over the long term.

Admittedly, my wife and I don't plan on touching any of the rent money and letting it build up in the business account being deposited into.  I feel like this is the safest and probably the laziest approach to it, but I feel like there's probably a more realistic/practical approach to organizing funds into various different categories.  While I'm sure the likes of quickbooks or other accounting software apps would be helpful, I'm curious as to whether the cost would justify the benefit for our first investment property and only renting out 1 unit @ ~$600 per month.

Apologies in advance for the newbie questions - any insight, advice or reading materials covering this would be much appreciated folks.

Thanks for reading and have an awesome day!