Streamlining Quickbooks Online for Bookkeeping & Lowering Accounting Fees

[Shane Swart]

I know book keeping topics repeat frequently on here so I apologize in advance!

We have been using the same accountant to do our taxes for the last six years or so and recently started having them do our bookkeeping for our properties in Quickbooks last year. We had reached a point in our portfolio size where spreadsheet tracking and then filing taxes became too heavy of a lift for everyone and the cost of doing our tax return was getting hefty as well.

That said, has anyone had any success figuring out how to link property loans from bank online portal successfully into your Quickbooks? We have 9 different loans at 4 different banks and they all have great online portals that could easily be linked Quickbooks doesn't want to do it... anyone know something we don't?

Also, one of our property managers uses Appfolio  for a portion of our properties and Quickbooks claims they can link but we have not had any luck there. Has anyone had success linking Appfolio to Quickbooks?

Right now, we still have to download & send all of our loan statements and property management statements and send to our account and it is honestly almost the same amount of work I was doing maintaining spreadsheets. Having the reports and organization of Quickbooks is great, but we are spending A LOT of money on accounting and we need to streamline the process.

Thanks in advance!

Shane

[Basit Siddiqi]

The issue is that a mortgage payment has several components to it(Principal paydown, mortgage interest, payments into escrow). 

Furthermore, you have to account for when payments are made out of the escrow balance such as when real estate taxes or insurance are paid.

The best solution that I found is finding the details as the end of the year such as interest paid, end of year principal balance, escrow balance, taxes paid, insurance paid.

If you have all that, you can do a year end journal entry to reconcile everything.

Best of luck!