All Forum Posts by: Ben Day

SAY IT AGAIN FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

Lionshare Bookkeeping specializes in working with real estate investors.

We serve businesses in all of the major areas:

Flips and Construction: Tracking by project, bank draw statements, profit margin monitoring. You focus on the project, we'll do the bean counting for you.

Wholesales and Assignments: Cashflow analysis including advertising, earnest money, and all the fun expenses involved in helping your buyers and sellers get to "yes"

Passive Income & Rentals: Track income and expenses by property, measure your business overhead, and close your loans faster with specialized reports built for lender analysis

Our Focus

Make tax time a breeze: Stop stuffing your shoeboxes full of receipts and stressing out when the new year rolls around. We'll help you stay organized and help you talk with your tax preparer.

Always bank-ready: Walk into lender meetings with a firm idea of your options. Eliminate the guesswork at refinance or "bank-ability" and generate leverage without sacrificing profit.

Maximize your business cashflow: Never feel in the dark about your own business again. We help investors find and understand their cashflow, reach income goals, and grow their business.

Tools

Dedicated Accounting Software: We'll provide you with third party software, and we can train you to use it.

Document and Receipt Management: Throw away your receipts (after you send them to us!). We'll provide a system to capture every receipt, invoice, settlement statement, deposit, and cash expense.

Mobile-friendly: Make executive-level financial decisions from your networking event, coffee meetup, or halfway through your 18 holes. All of our services are made for people who spend as little time in a "real office" as possible.

Custom Solutions: Our system is built to be flexible. Does your business need something to succeed? If there's an app for it, you can bet that it will integrate with our system.

Lionshare Bookkeeping takes the stress off of investors, allowing them to go on offense and grow their business or go on vacation and enjoy their financial independence.

If this is something you're interested in hearing more about, you can email me at [email protected], or visit my website at www.lionsharebookkeeping.com to set up a 15 minute phone call and let's talk!

Hey Daulton! QBO is something you are definitely going to need if you keep growing. One of the biggest things I see from investors is that they like to spread out their investing between multiple LLCs. I’m not sure of your situation (no advice given), but what commonly holds investors back in growing their business is the admin costs. If you need official documents for three llcs, you’re looking at potentially triple the cost. This applies to QB as well. Can you run multiple llcs in one QB account? You can try. Just remember that every level of complexity you add in the beginning will make it harder for you to get help in the future. As far as cash flow vs. # of doors, I’ve found that usually the 3-5 door range of good cash flow is when upgrading your accounting system makes the most sense. Granted, if you’re splitting up these doors between 3 different entities, that means that you’re actually looking at 9-15 doors before upgrading. Not exactly a great option if you’re looking to scale.

Hi James! 

Quickbooks is great for tracking your business. There's a lot of great material here on Bigger Pockets that can help you put together a DIY Bookkeeping plan. You'll want to focus on two things: 1) What does the IRS want? and 2) What makes the most sense for you. There's plenty of professionals here that can help you set up your books, learn how to do bookkeeping the "right" way, and help you understand financial statements as well. 

If I were you, I would start by making a scratch list of all the things you want to track and then comparing to the IRS Schedule C or Schedule E and seeing what things you missed. That list is what your bookkeeping should be based on. The BEST set of books is the one you can understand and helps you make decisions. 

Good luck! 

Hey Rylan! 

My vote is for Quickbooks Online. Wave is definitely an attractive place to start, but if you're going to scale your business QBO is definitely in your future. Part of their service for mobile is downloading the data to your phone so that you can still access it without internet. It may not be the most up to date, but unless you're updating your books every day this won't hurt you too bad :)

What is great about Quickbooks is that it's such a big player in the mobile accounting/business field that it will sync with other apps in the event that your business needs to scale without adding headaches. If your systems can't "talk to each other," you're in for more admin work and less REI work. Obviously not what you're signing up for.

To get specific: QBO is a dedicated Accounting software built to track contractors, issue 1099s, pay employees, track multiple projects/properties, and track and organize expenses and income, all from the cloud with multiple users. It's incredibly popular with accountants, has a robust support system in place, and is well known in REI circles as far as different ways to customize it to fit your business.

Honestly I would recommend reaching out to an accountant or bookkeeper on BP that is actually engaged in the day-to-day operations of REI businesses and see what they think. Professionals that deal in the day-to-day level stuff will be able to address your concerns directly, as well as help you think about scaling easily as you grow.

Good luck on your new venture! 

Hi @PJ Binn! 

Karl is right on about using Quickbooks. One of the things you can do differently is upgrade to Quickbooks Online Plus, which will let you organize your expenses by "class" AKA by property. This way, your chart of accounts can stay simple and you'll still get all the reporting you need. This will also get you one step closer to being ready for tax season. 

Another thing I would do is run your income through a second software. I'm a big fan of controlling what happens to your cashflow system, and there are horror stories of bad tenants bouncing online payments so many times that QB eventually shuts down your payment feature permanently. 

If you haven't already, look into Cozy.co. It's a free software built for landlords that helps with the whole rent collection process. They make your rent information very easy to track, and you can make the data entry very simple from there. I wouldn't track your expenses in Cozy, but that's an option as well. 

Hey Allen! For super small operations, I think QBO is overkill. Is the functionality awesome? Absolutely. But if you’re going into a DIY bookkeeping system and not using a professional, you might as well get as much as you can for free to start. I recommend using free software like Wave if you’re looking at DIY solutions. There’s no class tracking, but for super small businesses you just don’t need all that reporting. Memo in the property on your entries and save yourself $30-60/month. Eventually it will make sense for you to move to QBO. When that happens you should (hopefully!) use a professional for set up, training, and outsourcing. I wouldn’t hop into a paid software until I knew I was using it the right way, or had a professional giving me that support. I can tell you from experience that converting 4-5 properties between accounting softwares is not impossible. Don’t let that fear of the future keep you from growing your business today!

ey Ed! I would definitely reach out to a professional. Bookkeeping seems pretty harmless at low volume, but it’s always best to start out strong. Most PM softwares are built for management businesses, not investors. I would suggest not going the PM software route, and stick to something that other professionals will know. Quickbooks Online Plus does a great job, and it’s super easy to find support for their software. This will also help you scale your business depending on the functionality you’re looking for long term.

100% agree. Bookkeeping for Real Estate Investors is exactly this. There are some nuances and some things you can do to up your game and get financial reporting per property as well, but this is barebones bookkeeping. Sounds like the seller was more or less a hobbyist and not running his portfolio like a business.

No problem! Always happy to offer up some expertise