All Forum Posts by: Ben K.

@Soh Tanaka exactly. $840/year is too big of a price tag for me when I'm just a 1 man operation with very few rental units. Where I live cost of living is low, so rent is also low. Its not LA or NYC where an efficiency apartment can be rented out for $1500/month. An $850/year payment on Plus would be coughing up the combined months rent I got for both my efficiency and my larger 1 bedroom apt. It's too big of a price tag, and I just cant justify it.

@Michael Perry I considered the desktop version, but my computer at home is around 10 years old and on its last leg. I'll probably have to get a new one within the next few years. Just don't see the justification yet when all I do on it is bill pay and bookkeeping at night for 30 minutes tops. I was worried I'd lose all my data when I finally get a new computer. I had Quicken Rental Property (desktop), but that software was a joke. I basically went to the online version just to preserve the data.

@Ben Day QBO has the option to upgrade from SE, and the accountant said we can no problem, just involves more setup depending on how in depth I want it to be, and they'd be willing to help with all of that too. Sounds like it'll also automatically convert everything I already have setup in SE and all the transactions so I don't have to go back and redo anything.

Thanks for the heads up on using Zelle for business stuff; I'll I've ever used it for is personal transactions in the past.

I live in a fairly small town of approx. 20,000 people, so making that stop at the PO Box only adds about 5 mins onto my commute from work to home during my lunch break, and another 5 mins if I have to stop at the bank to make deposits. 5 mins for no stops if I'm just going from work to home, and 15 mins if I'm making both stops. The time aspect is pretty much zilch. From the rates I saw on some of those sites & comparing it to the little amount of time it takes me to make those stops, it would be costing me ~$1/minute.

As far as the maintenance records go, it's literally 4 units so it's not much to manage. Plus, the text messages are all backed up to the cloud. Text message received = work order; if item repaired or replaced and I did the work, then I'll have a text message sent back to the tenant showing work completed; if it's something I had to purchases (new stove for example), then I'll have both the receipt for the appliance store & a text back to the tenant showing the work was complete.

One of the nice things about my properties is I fall into that tiny sliver of properties that are exempt from having to allow emotional support animals. 1 property being a single family house not brokered by a real estate agent. The other being a complex with 4 units or less and the owner occupies one of the units; the complex has 3 apartments and a garage, and I occupy the garage as a storage unit; my state's laws classify storage units as rental units.

I'm not sure how it's fudging any numbers. The account told me today that for deposits I can just tag them as deposits & they'll classify them as a liability instead of income. If I classified them as income I'd be paying more than I needed in taxes. So, I'm not sure what you mean by fudging numbers.

Other than to ones I touched on here, I don't know what you mean about the legalities of strategies, like doing listings on Facebook?

@Ben Day it's my first year using these accountants. The guy I used to use sold his business to another company, and he'd never actually sit down and go through anything with me. This new firm seems much more welcoming to sitting down and going over everything with you. I wish I would've made the switch years ago.

@Ben Day I've looked at the websites for things like Cozy, Stessa, and TenantCloud; they all seem to offer services at a fee that I have been able do either for free or pretty cheap - Listings, I've gotten by pretty good with listing available units on Facebook Marketplace & local Facebook pages geared towards rentals, classifieds, etc. Background checks, that's the beauty of listing on FB is you can check out their FB profile & if they have a picture of themselves smoking a bong you can easily skip past that person; if all else fails I know a guy who's wife is a PI and she can run a background check on someone for me for like $20 (it doesn't hurt that she used to work for the state's Department of Criminal Investigation). I don't need a website for them to send me work order notifications, as I don't have a maintenance staff, just me, so it's just easy enough for them to shoot me a text if they're having a problem with something. Since it's only 4 units, it's not that big of a deal. Also rent collection isn't a difficult process for me; I just have them mail rent checks every month to my box # at the UPS Store, and I swing by the bank and do an ATM deposit on my way home for lunch. I did notice that QBO also allows for direct deposits, of course just like the websites, there's a percentage fee for each transaction. If I really wanted to do e-deposits, I'd probably just set it up with Zelle through Wells Fargo, that way would be free.

The accountant set me up with the QBO self-employed the other day, and I spent some time going through transactions last night, so far so good; it seems pretty stupid-simple like what I'm looking for, the only downside I can see as of now is I'm not sure what category to put deposits under so they come through as a liability instead of income. Aside from it being easy so far, it's also pretty cheap ($60/year since they can sell it at a discounted rate). She said QBO kind of has you in a catch 20-2 with Simple Start & Essentials. QBO lets them sell Essentials at a discounted rate, but not Simple Start, so they basically come out to the same price ($300/year). I'm not exactly wild about paying $200 more per year than I was with Quicken Desktop software ($100/year), especially if I'm just paying for a bunch of features I wont even use, but it wouldn't be the end of the world to upgrade to Essentials and pay a little more, especially since they can import all the stuff from self-employed into it, and the accountant was very helpful and said she would help with all the setup for properties, tenants, etc if I wanted to upgrade to Essentials. I probably wouldn't go to Plus just because of the cost ($500-$850/year, I'm not sure where they're discounted rate would land). If I end up upgrading to Essentials I probably wouldn't even use all the features it has, so Plus would probably be way more than anything I'd need. She did say that Essentials has a lot more features, but I don't remember all of them were. I wouldn't need to send out estimates because I'm not doing any bid jobs, but it would be nice to associate the rent payments with the rental unit, and maybe the tenant's name too. She did say I can add tags Notes & tags to transactions, so I can search by tags if I wanted to see what the P/L was by each unit or building; I just don't remember how to add the tags. She did tell me that as far as the accounting side, all it matters for them is that it's income, doesn't matter what kind or where it's for; that's just for my own information. I'm not sure what the 1099 stuff is for; when I hire someone to do repairs I just write them a check (online bill pay) once they finish the work and I count it as an expense. Not sure if that's just because I'm a sole proprietorship and not an LLC, I'm not sure.

Do you know of some of the other advantages that the Essentials would have?

@Christian Szpilfogel do you recommend one or the other, QuickBooks Self-Employed or QuickBooks Simple Start? After talking to the CPA last week, it sounds like QBO is trying to do away with Simple Start & making people go either Self-Employed or Essentials. But Simple Start is still available at this time.

Hello everyone. I only have a few rental units. The first one is a 3-plex (building with only 3 apts), and the other is house (not split up into units or anything, just a single unit property). Currently I first started off just using a basic spread sheet, that sucked and only did that for 1 year. After that I started using Quicken Rental Property Manager; that software sucks too. Even with it linked to my business bank account, and I would go through all the bank transactions line-by-line and specified what each transaction of for (utilities, rents received, repairs, etc) it would never associate the rent received for the apt/unit & the tenant in that unit to the tenant I had listed for that apt; I kept getting notifications that this person is past due on their rent when they weren't. If I used the "Tenant Dashboard" to say they paid rent then it would add a rent received transaction into the bank transactions making it look like I double collected on rent. Deposits were also a joke too with duplicate entries and stuff that just made it easier to do a work around by entering it in as the tenant lost all their deposit and then paid the tenant like I was paying a bill and just note that it was a deposit refund. Its the kind of software that makes doing bookkeeping dreadful. Plus you cant even send a year end to an accountant, so I'd have to print off a bunch of sheets & reports to hand to the CPA because I don't know what they all need.

Since I only have a few units, I'm looking for basic and very simple to use accounting software that I can send to the accountant at the end of the year. I don't need to be able to pay bills thought the software, I use my bank's online bill pay for that, so it should be able to see that from the bank account when it pulls it in. Besides I don't want to have to start buying paper checks to print off and mail out. I'm not checking and/or making reports throughout the year, I can see how I'm doing by looking at my bank account balance. Basically itemize income (rent), expenses (repairs, utilities, cleaning, etc), and show that deposits are set to the side, just these most basic of basic features.

I don't use turbo tax so I'm not concerned about that feature. I have my W2 and all my stuff from my regular job, the stuff for my home mortgage, health insurance, all that jazz that I already take to an accountant. Also, I wont be using it to track my personal finances or anything like that, just the rentals. These few rentals are just a very small secondary income that hopefully pays off more down the road.

I'm not looking to expand anytime in the foreseeable future so I don't have to worry about growing to 50 or 100 units anytime soon. If that day comes in 10 or so years then I guess that'll be something to consider then, but for now I need simple and easy without many bells and whistles. I was looking at either QuickBooks Self-Employed or QuickBooks Simple Start. Does anyone have any experience with either of these? If so, what are the pros/cons of each, and which would you recommend?

Thank you everyone in advance for your recommendations.

I currently have my tenants mail their rent check to my PO Box. Some times it's a hassle and I get all kinds of excuses for why it doesn't get put in the mail (as if they couldn't clothespin the envelope with their rent check to their mailbox for the mailman to pick up when they're making deliveries). I even had one tenant that kept putting their own address in as the mailing address, and putting my PO Box in as the return address, and couldn't figure out why their rent check kept coming back to them, she thought I kept returning it to her. Apparently they don't teach people how to address an envelope anymore.

I have kind of been interested in using PayPal to receive rent payments. I've used PayPal a handful of times to make purchases, but I've never used it to receive funds. @James Brueggeman you said you give your tenants a very detailed list of setup instructions oh how to set up their payment side of the account so you don't get charged the fee; would you mind sharing those instructions that you give to your tenants?

I see QuickBooks allows you to add a PayPal app (I just noticed it because I'm thinking about switching to using QuickBooks). I wasn't sure if having the PayPal app with QuickBooks would help make things even easier.

Is there any downside to using PayPal to collect rent? I saw one person say that a tenant could send $1, even if their rent is $500, and PayPal will register it as paid. Another person said a tenant could pay their rent in full, and then dispute the charges and PayPal usually sides with them most of the time. Do they then take the money out of your account and give it back to the tenant, and if you don't catch it then you're out a months rent? Are these real issues?