Investor · San Francisco, CA · Member since 2019 · 58 posts · 35 votes
Hi all,
Have gone through prior posts on the topic and seems like as you scale your number of vacation rentals, having a bookkeeper + quickbooks online pro is the most common recommended accounting solution. Sometimes people use an integration like OwnerRez to get the revenue data from the platforms into quickbooks as well.
Seeing if anyone has a recommendation for a shop that can get us started with the right setup for accounting and bookkeeping and then ideally manage the bookkeeping for us on an ongoing basis? Ideally one that understands STRs and has some familiarity with extracting the revenue data from Airbnb & Vrbo.
We're currently up to 6 rentals and now our Google Sheets spreadsheet solution is getting a bit time consuming.
Ha, @Luke Carl i saw an old post of yours on the topic that said "hire a bookkeeper" so was hoping that was the easy solution!
Relatedly, we will probably need to move on from our current accountant this year to one that's more real estate focused.
We grew fast and ended up with a different CPA every year for a few years there. I feel your paint. Growing pains! It's a good problem to have! Beats working at dunder mifflin!
Man I've been through a ton of book keepers and I'm still not happy. At this point my best advice is just hire your CPAs book keeper. Unless of course you don't like your CPA.
Ha, @Luke Carl i saw an old post of yours on the topic that said "hire a bookkeeper" so was hoping that was the easy solution!
Relatedly, we will probably need to move on from our current accountant this year to one that's more real estate focused.
We grew fast and ended up with a different CPA every year for a few years there. I feel your paint. Growing pains! It's a good problem to have! Beats working at dunder mifflin!
I have 4 STRs and 2 LTR. I got a quote from RealEstateCPA.com (I definitely think they know what they're doing) and it was going to be $1,750 to get me setup on quickbooks and $305/mo to handle my bookkeeping.
That was just enough to give me pause and I haven't pulled the trigger yet, but I'm outside of St Louis and haven't found a great option yet.
Oh yeah, I also met one CPA for lunch. We only had 45min. He spent 38 of those minutes quizzing me on the "wokeness" of the US military and if I thought we'd lose the next war. I kept trying to change the subject to real estate, but no luck.
He left abruptly muttering about getting back to me about quickbooks and I never heard from him again. He did pay for my BBQ sandwich though, so not a total loss!
@Alex S. and @Rohin Dhar if either of you are still looking for someone to handle the bookkeeping side of your real estate business, I'd be happy to chat with you and see if it is something I can assist with. I own both short (2) and long term rentals (10). I am wanting to add a couple more bookkeeping clients (real estate specific) going into the new year.