Mint v. Quickbooks for LLC Bookkeeping

[Hunter Payne]

I've used Mint very successfully for 10+ years to track income, spending, and net worth for my family's fairly complex personal finances. Every single asset and liability on our net worth statement is linked or included, and I can look at data and reports and export them to Excel. I can isolate data by account/asset or by income, expenses, or subsets. We've now set up a single-member disregarded entity real estate LLC in TN that will hold around 10 rental properties. I'm wondering if I can use Mint for bookkeeping instead of Quickbooks (or one of the other online or software programs that are not free) when Mint is free and I'm very, very facile (and fast) with it. If I were to use it, I would set up a unique username for the accounts and assets that are in the name of the LLC so that I would not commingle that data with data from other accounts and assets in my family's personal names. I can separate income and expense items with identifiers by property. I could then run the Excel reports at the end of the year to hand to my accountant. Anyone have any thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea?

[Timothy VanWingerden]

I wouldn't do it if it were me. I use mint personally and my personal finance is fairly complex as well. Even though Quickbooks isn't the most intuitive, as you continue to grow your rental investing you are going to keep trying to retrofit Mint into something that it has not been designed for. I also like the idea that every rental payment is backed by an invoice on QB.