Investor and Real Estate Agent · Maize, KS · Member since 2014 · 270 posts · 53 votes
I own 8 properties with a partner and were looking for guidance:
We want to find an easy way to track our spending so when tax time comes around we will know exactly what we spent rehabbing each buy and hold rental property that year. Is there a product we could easily use that each time we charged money on our business credit card it would be tracked to a certain property. Each month we use our card for several things (landscaping at one property; fixing a leak at another; new water heater at a third etc etc. All the costs add up quick and it gets complicated without a system.
I'm not sure. I use credit cards for fuel and travel only. We have charge accounts at Lowes, Locke a Supply, etc. and every purchase at suppliers we require a PO # which is the house address for the items purchased. Then when we get the monthly statements we enter and post all purchases to the specific house. We also post the utilities to each house.
Quickbooks - we post income by house and all expenses by house. Year end is a dream. The numbers from the QB p & l goes right to the schedule E. A 5 minute job.
We can't do all the work for you:) You're going to have to call BOA customer service and find out.
Also. Download genius scan for iOS. Snap a photo of a receipt and it converts to PDF and sends it to your favorite software. you can add unlimited receipts to the same PDF at anytime. very convenient and helps convert to paperless...
@Westin Hudnall we are trying out a program called LandlordMax. It allows you to post each expense, it allows you input type and date of repair on each property so you know how old the water heater is from its own page, etc. Our charge accounts are all set up with a PO number tied to each property so the book keeper can allocate the purchase accordingly. It also has a place for tenant name, car Li number, date lease started etc. Even pictures can be entered if you figure out how to do it. I am eager to see how it works.
If you are doing cash based accounting, I really don't think you need anything more complicated than Excel. I have been using it for 8 years and with the Pivot Tables and Filtering capabilities, its pretty easy to track by account. Its just a matter of allocating transactions among Assets, Liabilities, Income and Expenses. The only thing a little tricky is the depreciation...
Quicken rental property manager has been awesome. It pulled all my Bank of America business account transactions over no big deal. All I had to do is label each transaction; such a relief not having to go through bank statements at the end of the year or hand track receipts as they come in which end up all over the house. The quicken app is easy to use to do everything I awaits above from your smart phone if you choose and I was able to download it on my business partners phone (she is of the "non computer generation") and she is able to see how much is in our business account as well as how much income has been brought in for the month vs how much we've spent in one easy snapshot. I handle the finances so this should really help our relationship since she's often felt in the dark before in regards to our finances.
The program reminds me when rents are due; tracks them; tracks when leases will end ; maturity dates for my loans; interest rates etc. that with 1 click I can email to her as well.
I forgot to mention for anyone interested it can be downloaded from quicksoft for only $68.95 (almost 1/2 the price any where else it's downloaded from) and has had no issues.
I use an IPhone app called One Receipt. You take a quick photo of receipts and you can tag them for each property and make notes as necessary. The data can then be exported to an Excel spreadsheet as well.
I love that app. I used it as well before I got quicken rental property manager. Quickens 2014 addition has that same feature which my partner uses then hits a "sync" button to sync it up to my other transactions.
@Westin Hudnall I was looking at the Quicken Software after reading your post. I may go that route. It looks pretty comprehensive. Thanks for sharing your experience with the software and the discount download price!
I've been using Quicken for years. Great with most of the different checking and credit accounts over the years. Usable with Lowes LAR but I've had to manually download the Quicken File from the Lowes Credit website each time I want to update my transactions. Does Direct Connect still not work for Lowes LAR? Has anyone found a way to make it work?