What do you use to keep track of expenses?

Question

With tax season now being here, I am thinking about ditching the excel spreadsheets and using a program like Quickbooks moving forward.  Any thoughts, advice, or recommendations on other software to use for this?

Daniel Hyman · Answer

@Dan Shelhamer

Quickbooks Online is a great program.

If you are actively building your portfolio, might as well take the dive now and learn the system. The class-tracking feature allows you to associate a given transaction with its correct property.

Once you have the data reconciled, you can run financial statements that are useful to lenders, investors, and will help you manage overall business performance.

John Underwood · Answer

I have mutiple properties and I use Excel. It does eveything I need. I can use a new tab for each property and have a summary tab that grabs all the info from each property and show it in one place. It makes it easy to do my taxes at the end of they year becuase it keeps a running summary of expense and income.

John Thedford · Answer

Quickbooks

Ned Carey · Answer

@Dan Shelhamer I use QuickBooks. When I  moved to my new accountant he said I had to use QuickBooks. I does have a  steep learning curve but it is a powerful program.  A big advantage in my eye is, it is a universal software that any accountant or bookkeeper will be familiar with.

There is lots of support online when you have questions. I am not just talking about support from the  maker Intuit, but lots of blogs and videos from 3rd parties.

You can keep track of your bank accounts, Balance sheets, P&L statements and all kinds of useful reports. If you are going to grow your rental business to any significant size I think it is worth learning and using it.

That said excel is also a powerful program. There is a LOT you can do with it and it is easier to learn and understand. Especially when you have already been using it. I wouldn't use it for a lot of properties but if you just have a few and you are used to it, there is no need to fix a problem you don't have.

Dahrian Barrett · Answer

I'm assuming your talking about your personal expenses, If so, I use Clarity Money app. Its free and has everything in one place from checking, Savings, Loans, And more in one place. Its been working wonders for me.

What do you use to keep track of expenses?

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