Best way to track 11 rentals managed by 3 different PMs

Best way to track 11 rentals managed by 3 different PMs

Ian S.Pro Member
Investor · Geographically Confused · Member since 2016 · 31 posts · 7 votes

Hi. We own 11 SFH rentals, spread among 3 property managers (different states). All 3 PMs use Appfolio and pay us monthly. Any expenses go against reserves of $500 per property and if any expenses are higher than that, we make an owner payment through the portal. While most of our expenses for each property go through the various Appfolios, some are done directly from our credit card.

All this has become a bit of an accounting nightmare. Until now we've been using a pretty unwieldy home-baked Google Sheet to track our expenses, but are looking for a more elegant solution.

Our wish list:

  1. Must be cloud based - we don't always have the same laptop with us so we need a 100% web based solution.
  2. Must be mobile friendly - We want to be able to upload receipts on-the-go and categorize them. We want to be able to pull out our phone and see how a particular property is doing.
  3. Must be affordable. We’re really struggling with sticker shock at QB Online $35 a month, Xero $30 a month and Rentec Direct $45 a month (!)
  4. Must be easy-to-use. QB Online doesn't seem to support rentals "out of the box". Some people set up buildings as Customers, and units as Jobs (or maybe Tenants?), while some set it up with buildings being Categories - (!) and if we choose the wrong model, we’re stuck forever? We can’t even change the term “Customers” to “Buildings” so we’re concerned about how any produced reports would look.
  5. We don't need it to be able to send out and pay bills, or track rents (apart from rental income) - we have PMs/Appfolios for that.
  6. We don’t want to rely on downloading transactions from an online bank - since most of our online activity is tracked through the 3 appfolio's we’ll have to manually enter it all. (That's ok!)

Any suggestions?

By the way, are there are BP Webinars on Accounting? We couldn't see any, but that’d be helpful :)  

Thanks!

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  • Chad HalePro Member
    Property Manager / Investor · San Jose, CA · Member since 2013 · 779 posts · 301 votes
    8y

    Are the PMs providing monthly and year end reporting of expenses/income etc?

    Are there different/separate expenses that  you are trying to track?

    QB is good but does have a learning curve and is not "automatically" set up for property rentals.

  • Ian S.Pro Member
    OP
    Investor · Geographically Confused · Member since 2016 · 31 posts · 7 votes
    8y

    Hi Chad,

    Thanks for the reply.

    Yes, PMs are providing monthly and year end reporting of expenses/income tracking. 

    We want to track expenses on a per property basis as well as overall. (how much did we spent on maintenance this year, how much on cap ex, etc - to help us identify strong performing and weak properties)

    Any advice appreciated.

  • Chad HalePro Member
    Property Manager / Investor · San Jose, CA · Member since 2013 · 779 posts · 301 votes
    8y

    Hi Ian,

    Are the PM's lumping all the properties into one report?  I would expect a per property and total report.

    Yes, you would then have to combine the reports from the three PM's into your own report.  

    Perhaps you can ask the PM's to export an XLS of each property and total.  You could then use those to build your total portfolio analysis?

    Sorry if I'm missing something?

    chad

  • Ian S.Pro Member
    OP
    Investor · Geographically Confused · Member since 2016 · 31 posts · 7 votes
    8y

    Hi Chad,

    Yes we get an "owner packet" which is a pdf with multiple owner statements, 1 page per property.  

    That is an excellent idea to ask for an XLS/CSV export.  However, once we get the XLS/CSV we still need to put it somewhere - do we DIY it via Excel/Google spreadsheets or do we try to import it to QB Online as "banking transactions"? Wouldn't we then have another step to associate these transactions to the right property?  

    Thanks

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