I am a newer investor. I have now started to purchase property in my LLC. I received a recommendation form another investor to use Quicken. So I went ahead and purchased that. Did I make a mistake? Everywhere I look I see people using Quickbooks? What are the big advantages I am missing out on by not using Quickbooks?

My business is focused on buying and selling single family fix and flip homes. I am also looking to purchase and hold 4 to 10 unit buildings in this LLC as well. I met with a enrolled agent yesterday that was also a book keeper. In that meeting I was given some general ideas, but I didn't feel I had a concrete direction I could go in. She stated Quickbooks is her recommendation.

In other areas of small business I have seen a lot of of people use Quickbooks.  But I didn't feel I had the complexity yet to need Quickbooks.  No employees, not processing payroll, no inventory act. That plus the recommendation; are the reasons why I chose to Quicken.  

Does anyone else use Quicken?  if so, is it working for you the way you want?  For those using Quickbooks, please share how you keep your books with a bookkeeper.  

Thanks everyone.  

Hi Demetrius! I'm an accountant and a certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor. I use Quickbooks in my firm every day. I have also used Quicken for personal finances. Although both programs are developed by Intuit, they function very differently. In my opinion, Quicken is good for tracking personal expenses and budgeting, but for business operations you should be using Quickbooks.

Quickbooks can run many reports that Quicken simply cannot, such as balance sheets and profit and loss reports. Quickbooks is also accountant-friendly, as most accountants are using it. With Quickbooks desktop, you can create an accountants' copy to give to your accountant so he/she can prepare your taxes. If using Quickbooks online, you simply allow your accountant access to your books and you both can work in Quickbooks at the same time.

Your business doesn't have to be complicated to benefit from Quickbooks and there are many different subscription levels based on your needs. For example, if your business doesn't have payroll or inventory, you would purchase the lower tier Quickbooks that doesn't track inventory or run payroll.

I use rentalhero.io and love it. Has everything I need and not the stuff I dont need. Easy to learn. And its cheap, $119/ annualy

Our first year, we ran everything in excel, learned a lot by doing the book keeping and calculations that way. In our second year, since we are a rental company, we switched over to rent manager. Since you are planning on flipping and doing rentals, you may need two solutions because those business models are very different. You may need to consider 1 LLC for the rental business and one for the fix and flip, talk to your accountant and attorney to see if that makes sense.

I've been using Quicken for years, but I don't have any properties yet. So we'll see how that ends up going. 

What @Brandon Guzman Siars said is partially true. Quicken and Quickbooks were originally owned by Intuit, but Quicken was sold or split off a few years ago. Quickbooks probably has a lot more reports, but Quicken Home, Business and Rental has quite a bit of stuff. I know for sure that you can do both balance sheets and profit and loss reports with it.

Originally posted by @Mark Smith :

Our first year, we ran everything in excel, learned a lot by doing the book keeping and calculations that way. In our second year, since we are a rental company, we switched over to rent manager. Since you are planning on flipping and doing rentals, you may need two solutions because those business models are very different. You may need to consider 1 LLC for the rental business and one for the fix and flip, talk to your accountant and attorney to see if that makes sense.

I'm in a similar situation right now. I'm currently using Excel to track everything manually, but I plan to upgrade to Quickbooks (or something else) when this becomes no longer feasible.

I've also tried Stessa which is free and very intuitive, but I found that it was a little too rigid for me in some areas.

I had previously used excel spreadsheets to monitor everything, and in reality, probably still could. 

A few years ago I started using quickbooks, mainly because I could break down reports by property or by expense type. The other reason to go with quickbooks for me, had to do with non real estate work I also do. I use it to manage income from my consulting business as well.

I had used quickbooks online, though on the suggestion of my CPA had gone to the desktop edition where my costs are lower as I don't need to upgrade every year or pay a monthly subscription. 

I have looked at other accounting packages, and used wave for a non profit I've became treasurer at, but Wave in what I've used it for, works great in the non-profit use, but I don't see it as the greatest for real estate, though you probably could use it for that if you did the work to set everything up right at the start. 

@Demetrius Charles I've been using quicken for about 3 years now. Business home and rental. It does absolutely everything I need and shoots out any report I could possibly use

I do my own book keeping but my cpa has never had any issue with any reports I send to them.

This is great insight everyone.  Thank you for sharing your experiences and recommendations.  I will continue to do my due diligence.  In the meantime, if you know of resources that I could use for self study, please do share.  I am youtube trying to find the videos to use Quicken to see how to create the P&L for each property and estimate actuals vs budget for these flips.  

Wave is a nice hybrid system. It functions as a double-entry accounting system, a la Quickbooks, but also has the auto bank feeds that Quicken possesses. I was a fan of Quickbooks desktop but find the online product lacking. End of the day, everything will get the job done, key is to stay diligent with bookkeeping. Which reminds me...