QBO worth the monthly fee?
I suppose it depends on your situation and how many units/properties you have. If you have a lot of income/expense, 1099s, etc., then absolutely consider what your accountant recommends.
I have a half dozen properties and prefer to use TenantCloud. I've tried other accounting platforms before and prefer the simplicity over QBO. And honestly, I've never liked QB (or accounting for that matter), so I may be biased.
TenantCloud is free, but I pay $90/yr to enable the online ACH rent payment feature. I suggest you check them out and see if you like them. They have a feature where you can export all of your data (including accounting), so your data is never stuck with them.
Hi Shodhan,
It appears here that QB is running a 50% off special. See link https://search2.quickbooksonline.com/qb-online/. This pricing is much more favorable, but the tool is a real property management essential! Once you've locked in your QB account, you'll want to have an all-in-one property management/tenant management software that is QB integrated. The only one I know that does this (and I could be wrong) is NowRenting.com.
Real estate is an incredible sector to be in, best of luck. Happy to help in anyway.
Grant Cohen
Couple notes here.
1. QBO is the way to go, however combining it with the knowledge and know how of a good accounting team / partner who knows how to really set it up and pull value out of it is critical when first getting started with it. I do alot of the "work" in QBO right now, but did partner with our accountant in the beginning to setup it up right from the start.
2. Ask your accountant if they can get your wholesale pricing on the QBO, while I can't officially quote you... i can tell you we pay 35$ a month and not the full 60$ a month for our service.... the all in cost to 420 a year if that helps you. We were able to get this pricing because our Accounting team set up the service and then bill us monthly instead of setting it up on our own... it is the only way to get wholesale pricing. Ask your accountant or go see @Brandon Hall and his team... we are current clients of theirs and are loving them as our accounting team and business partners as our Portfolio grows.
3. We currently manage our portfolio of 10 Properties, 15 Doors with QBO and will never look back, happy to answer any other questions.
-Dan
Take your accountant's advice.
QBO is a wonderful platform for consolidating all of your real estate accounting. Bank statements, CC statements, Mortgage statements, PM statements - you need all of that data on one central set of books. QBO is the industry standard when it comes to accounting software for buy and holders. Learn how to input data and reconcile or simply offload it to your accountant. Either way, if you are planning to grow your portfolio, get in the habit now of having clean financial records. It will end up saving you money down the line.
I am also trying to set up QB desktop. I would like to know any helpful tutorials available. I have QB premier 2018 but never set up. Should I use that or update to 2019 version?
@Mohammad (Asad) Asaduddin Your 2018 copy should be fine. I think they stopped supporting 2014 and older, it's still going to work but some features like online banking will not.
Thank you all! I appreciate the feedback. Grant appreciate the link, good looking out and Daniel thanks for the inside tip of wholesale price. Can’t wait to get it set up properly so future time can be spent on hunting deals then worrying about back office items.
Shodhan