How to track transactions and digitize records?

Question

My partners and I are having a hard time managing the bookkeeping part of the rental process.

For context, we have multiple HOAs and lender's we have statements from. Our day to day property management is handled via a separate team we helped train. However, we're struggling with maintaining a "source of truth" because the property management company uses Buildium for rent collection. However, we have Stessa set up for paying HOA's and need to manually check statements from the HOA to check account statuses and any issues with balances.

Ideally, we're able to tag different transactions to different statements and reconcile differences based on discrepancies. Is there a good software product (Quickbooks doesn't do digitization I believe) that can be used?

Or is the only good solution to hire a book keeper to manually digitize and clean up our transactions?

Shelli Behrens · Answer

It seems that your current setup may be more complicated than necessary. I use QuickBooks Online for all my clients, which allows us to connect your bank accounts directly via bank feeds. This enables us to categorize and reconcile transactions efficiently, and then generate detailed reports for each property, giving you clear, organized financial insights.

Josh L. · Answer

@Warren Y. Unfortunately, even with all the hype around AI and tech advancements, there’s still a bit of a manual process in accounting. But once you have a process in place and you’re continuously ironing it out, your financial picture should be a lot more clear.

Waruna Y. · Answer

Thanks for all the answers! The PM does have full access to buildium. Unfortunately, the owners bank account is sync'd with Stessa.It sounds like we're going to have to spend manual time tagging transactions though and there's no way around that?

Simon W. · Answer

I do not think Buildium sync with QB.

As for the OP—you run the PM so you have full access to Buildium? If so, why not just sync the statements there so it can track all the expenses that you use Stessa to track?

Michael Smythe · Answer

Thought Buildium synched with Quickbooks?

Max Emory · Answer

@Waruna Yapa, like @Shelli Behrens said, I'd recommend QuickBooks Online as your "master" accounting platform that compiles all data from all different sources. That's what we do for our clients and what I recommend others do as long as someone who is savvy with QBO and REI is in the picture.

We link our clients' financial accounts to the QBO bank feed. Then, for transactions such as a distribution from a property manager or cash to close from a HUD statement where there are many transactions behind the 1 transaction your bank account sees, we translate those transactions into QBO via a journal entry and match the journal entry to the bank feed transaction.

If I understand correctly, it seems like this is what you're going for.

QBO is great for REI as long as it's setup for it. 100% of our clients are REIs and 100% of them are managed in QBO in addition to their PM software, etc.

Hope this helps in some way!

Happy to talk more.

- Time Capital Bookkeeping (REI since 2019)

Ryan Lowe · Answer

Like all internet advice this really depends on specifics of your situation. As a general statements I would say there is always someone in an organization who the burden of organizing financial information falls to. The owner, PM, accountant, and bookkeeper are probably all capable of this work.My HOA dues only typically change once a year, so they are on auto pay. I have yet to find an easy button for organizing transactions and subsequent reporting, so I use a bookkeeper.

Matt Schafer · Answer

I use Shuk for my rental properties and it's been great. It's a platform focused on landlords who self-manage and is low cost (only $5/month per unit). Some cool benefits include expense tracking (per property), the Lease Indiciation Tool (helps predict the likelihood of a tenant renewing the lease giving you the chance to renew early and/or increase monthly rent if you know someone wants to renew), Tenant Communication (via their app), Maintenance Requests, Tenant Payments, and more. It's been awesome and the founder of the company based has helped me when I've had questions on things regarding the platform. Go check it out! It's been great. You can just google "Shuk Rentals" and it's one of the first things to pop up.

Markus Shobe · Answer

Your best bet would be to download your bank statements to excel and download bank ledgers from both Stessa and Buildium and match it up on excel. It would take some work but once its setup it should be smooth.

Waruna Y. · Answer

For sure! The current setup is this:

The property management company adds expenses on their end to buildium. This includes things that deal with the unit like renovations, legal expenses, rent collection.

The lender payments, taxes, and HOAs are paid via bank account and tracked on Stessa.

The challenge we're running into is consolidating between the two sources without going through hundreds of transactions manually. Some of the HOA is also paid by the property management company so there also may be some bookkeeping errors on their side. This is why we need to make sure that every transactions that's in either Buildium or Stessa is tracked back to a statement.

Ideally, what I would want is to be able to get the statements (hoa or bank statement), digitize it and compare against the data in Stessa and Buildium.

However, I don't know if there's a better way to approach this problem or if there's a reputable digitization service that's already used by investors

How to track transactions and digitize records?

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