What software do you use to stay organized

Question

I’m having trouble keeping my network organized, creating my monthly budget, P&L’s to analyze deals, and I was wonder what softwares do you guys use that are simple and user friendly.

Microsoft office?

IWork?

Paper & pencil?

What CRM’s

Anton Ivanov · Answer

@Aleks Dahlberg

Thanks for recommending DealCheck and happy to hear you've liked it so far!

Jeff Minser · Answer

@Scott Luetgenau hey there, I use the calculators for every offer I make. I started my investing career about 3 months ago. Listened to about half the podcasts available on the BP site. The calculators gave me a since of confidence in my analysis and they are very fast and easy to use. I currently have my son, 18 years newly graduated running numbers through the calculators for me through out the day while I’m at work. So when I get home we review them together and decide to offer or not. I closed on one fix and flip 2 weeks ago, got another fix and flip offer accepted today. Both these properties are in the state of Utah and I live in Southern California. Purchasing pro was one of the best things I’ve subscribed to for my investing career. But the calculators are only as good as the information it’s given. You still have to do a little research for some of the information. Attend a webinar That’s offered weekly and you will see the calculators in action and where to gather the required info you’ll need. 100% go pro!!!!

Matt Faix · Answer

@Andrew Ager We use excel for analyzing deals, tracking contacts, mailing lists, etc. Otherwise we use QuickBooks online for all of our bookkeeping.

Trevor Ewen · Answer

@Andrew Ager

There's the personal and the business. Business tools tend to be agreed upon by your organization. Since I am in tech, it's always been JIRA, Trello, Asana... any of these used well does the job.

Personal is maybe where it's more interesting, to me. You'll need:

- A good task list program (accessible on desktop and mobile)- A good calendar (accessible on desktop and mobile)- An email scheduler (RightInbox is one I like for Gmail)- An expense management tool (Expensify is the best I have used)- File storage for EVERYTHING (GDrive is my choice)

Definitely recommend getting on top of those, first and foremost. Your experience with those personal tools will inform what you do next in your business, especially if you are on your own.

Scott Luetgenau · Answer

@Rick Hanrahan That makes good sense.  I'm sure being able to analyze the financials on several properties would be highly advantageous.  Sounds like a great spreadsheet!

Gita Faust · Answer

Make the switch Dave. Make sure you get Enterprise, Premier or Accountant version as you will be able to view accurate Balance Sheet by Class.

Dave Payerchin · Answer

We pretty much use google for everything.  I just took a class about quickbooks and the guy that presented was a real estate guy.  He swore up and down that Quickbooks desktop version was way better, faster, and cheaper.  We currently use Quickbooks Online but I'm considering making the switch

Rick Hanrahan · Answer

@Scott Luetgenau. Analyzing deals is definitely an essential skill set for the investor. I’ve been at it since 2010 and built a fairly robust Excel spreadsheet for underwriting deals. It has numerous tabs that are all interconnected and self populate based on the variable cells. I’ve built and tweaked it over the years. I’ve also tried numerous other software and solutions to include BPs. I believe BPs software is fairly good. It definitely has a nice finished report. However, I believe one of the most important features for underwriting is comparing and contrasting different scenarios with a quick glance (to save time). This allows the investor to truly understand the numbers and deal as a whole. It allows the investor to cut the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I usually utilize at least 3-4 scenarios, in separate columns, that can be easily viewed side to side. BPs, while pretty, does not offer this feature. You would have to run the numbers multiple times with different scenarios to “see” this. The spreadsheet I created is somewhat similar to Micheal Blank’s apartment syndicator deal analyzer - which is likely one of the best on the market for analyzing apartments. Either way, creating your own underwriting spreadsheet or getting software will dramatically increase your efficiency and allow you to underwrite many more deals thus improving your skill set.

Good luck!

Scott Luetgenau · Answer

@Jeff Minser  I really appreciate the thorough review.  I'm definitely feeling like the next step is to consistently evaluate deals with the calculator to get better at spotting real finds and seeing what will work best for my situation.  Thanks again!

Scott Luetgenau · Answer

Has anyone used the BP deal evaluation calculators to good effect?  I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for the pro membership and if there's value in unlimited evaluations.

What software do you use to stay organized

Most Popular Reply