How to hire office personnel

Question

How do you all handle your books and monthly bills?

I’d love to hire someone to do this but I’m not sure how to go about it.

I have a handful of rentals and am flipping houses. Right now I’ve got two on the market, three in the remodel stage, one under contract and making offers on more. I came from the hammer-swinging background, so office type work doesn’t come easy and I haven’t had any experience with it in the past. Right now I have quickbooks set up/ learning it and I have OneDrive for storage, but I am still struggling to take the time to reconcile every month. Is there an easier way? Do you set up separate checking accounts for each flip and rental?

Aaron McGinnis · Answer

Dominic -

I run a design build business; I've been where you are... having books that are weeks to months out of date is horrible and can spell disaster as you make decisions based on bad and untimely data.

What we've done, after years of trial and error and tons of money lost on bad solutions, is the following -

* Off set accountant who does monthly reconciliations and statements, year-end taxes (We run on basis of completion, which I recommend you switch to immediately)

* Off site book keeper who does day to day data entry

* Quickbooks on a server on the internet so everyone can log in remotely

* Paychex handling weekly payroll

Don't pay an accountant to do your data entry, it's usually way too expensive and not necessary... don't pay your data entry person to do your monthly reconciliations and statements (They don't know enough, typically). I think it's also good to have data entry and reconciliations handled by separate firms, as it will provide a degree of cross-checking.

We use CRI Accounting for our accounting, and they do a fantastic job. The important thing to get when looking for an accountant is a firm that already knows your industry and has the capacity to really solve your problems. We went through about 3 different 'accountants' prior to just buckling down and hiring a real firm. If I had just done it the right way from the beginning I would probably have saved myself about $50,000 in fixing bad accounting errors over the past 10 years. Not to mention the agony of having made some terrible decisions based on inaccurate/bad information due to bad accountants giving me bad information or no information.

For office help, we use Mytasker.com. We have a virtual assistant there who does the following jobs -

* Quickbooks Data entry* Run payroll* Handle all aspects of insurance certificate upkeep* Run monthly insurance reporting (WC/GL)* Update payables/receivables into a weekly list for me* Pay vendors/subs at my direction* Order office supplies* Order materials for jobs* Order dumpsters and portapotties* Post images to social media* All the oddball jobs that take time but don't take a lot of thinking

We previously had a full time employee doing this, and actually had a hard time keeping her busy. Our VA does this in about 40-50 hours a week, and reduced my cost for this work by 90% (Not "to 90%"... "by 90%")

Greg Dickerson · Answer

Sounds like it’s time to put some sytems in place and scale. First step is to hire an office manager/bookkeeper/administrative assistant/transaction coordinator/assistant project manger/marketing manager ////

You need a dynamic individual to wear a lot of hats and help you take it to tu en next level.