Tracking income/ expenses as a landlord / renovator

[Jacob Stephen]

What software do you guys use to track rental income and renovation costs. The options I can think of are Quicken or Quickbooks. Any know the pros/cons of these or other software packages? Thx

[Patrick M.]

I spent an awful amount of time and money on QuickBooks. I was sold on it by a number of successful business people who use it and I also purchased Nancy Neville's book as well.

But man I just kept making a mess of things- I could not coordinate my two multi-families in a coherent way and I found it to be extraordinarily inflexible! I am computer savvy, I use MS Word, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Lightroom, Powerpoint and Excel etc. So I would like to think I am no dummy- but I was not at all comfortable with quickbooks and it was very unforgiving of mistakes.

So enter excel- I found this and I used it as a template- a little editing here and there. Then I grabbed some for keeping track of my mortgages etc.

I even created one which I am really proud of- To determine property tax increase- It lists each property and each apartment. Every year when I get the Property Tax figure I simply plug it in and it automatically generates the increase per month-per apartment based on square footage. Love it!

But if you are going to go with QuickBooks I highly recommend you go with the book by Nancy Neville to get you started!