All Forum Posts by: Sean O'Keefe

My customers use Stessa, Digb, or Quickbooks.

Ashish Acharya Agree, provide you are married filing joint with your spouse.

As a CPA, I'd suggest not using Excel unless you are very organized and have a rental property dedicated bank account/credit card. If you're not super organized most CPAs will charge some kind of clean-up fee either explicitly or implicitly (and it would have been cheaper/easier just to get tracking software). If you go with software instead of Excel you still need to stay on top of it or hire someone to help with bookkeeping.

Also, @Michele Fischer you aren't required to keep receipts for purchases from your business credit card or bank account. The IRS says to keep records for your business tax deductions indicating:

• What you bought
• When you bought it
• How much you spent

It doesn't mention requiring paper receipts at all. There is an exception. A receipt is required if you make an out-of-pocket cash purchase for > $75. As a result, photo-tracking functionality in apps like Stessa and Apartments.com become kinda redundant. 

Aside from Excel, here are the most common REI accounting software programs out there:

• Quickbooks Online ($85 per month). 
• Stessa (Free, but eventually $19 a month, let’s be honest)
• Digb ($1 a month, but $19 a month if you have > 1 property). 

Please stop talking about taking pictures of all of your receipts and uploading them to apps. This is so 2019 :) 

Great thread here with a few suggestions good (Quickbooks, Stessa, Digb) and one surprise I've never heard of before - Notion. I think you'd need to be a guru.

REI Software to help to track income and expenses

I love these two on this thread -> 5 stars for creativity: Notion, never mind software until > 5 :)

But seriously, if you want to keep it simple and organized and you don't know how to use Notion that well (me) and spreadsheets will get super messy if you're not organized I suggest 3 software applications for tracking income and expenses:

• Quickbooks Online ($85 per month). You’ll needs help setting it up to track multiple rentals. Looks like a lot of CPAs like this one, but they aren’t paying for it - you are.
• Stessa (Free, but eventually $20 a month, let’s be honest). Specifically, built for real estate investors to manage their portfolio. Not mentioned on this thread but a good option.
• Digb ($1 a month, but $19 a month if you have > 1 property). Built for real estate investors to track income and expenses and also has a lot of tax functionality to simplify planning/filing for you or CPA at the end of the year.

Hope this helps :) Happy tracking!

@Guillermo Perez Vargas here are two great threads that cover the accounting/tax software options for REI and have thorough feedback.

BP -> Quickbooks or something else

BP -> Fav bookkeeping/accounting software

They don't mention Quickbooks Desktop. As Basit mentioned there are other cheaper options focused on Real Estate Investors like Stessa or Digb that are setup out of the box for real estate investors (e.g. they have the chart of accounts with real estate descriptions for income and expenses). Stessa is Free to start and Digb is $1 a month. Worth checking out before you continue with Quickbooks Desktop (not accessible online from anywhere - old) or get Quickbooks Online ($100 a month and needs to be setup). 

You aren't required to keep receipts for purchases from your business credit card or bank account. The IRS says to keep records for your business tax deductions indicating:

• What you bought
• When you bought it
• How much you spent

It doesn't mention requiring paper receipts at all. There is an exception. A receipt is required if you make an out-of-pocket cash purchase for > $75.

@Tammy Muller here are two great threads that cover the accounting software options and feedback thoroughly: 

BP -> Quickbooks or something else

BP -> Fav bookkeeping/accounting software

They don't mention either of these options, but that might be because RentalHero & REI Hub are full-blown property management software, and Quickbooks Online, Digb, and Stessa are accounting/tax software focused on real estate investors.

@Jonah Downs good question and looks like you got some great answers. Here's another recent thread on bookkeeping/accounting software you might want to check out https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

In a nutshell: 

Quickbooks Online (QBO) is the favorite for real estate accounting, bookkeeping & taxes, but expensive to track multiple properties because you need the version with classes ($85 per month). Also, QBO isn't set up out of the box for real estate which means you need to pay someone to set it up for you or figure it out yourself. 

There are a lot of full-blown property management software systems out there with accounting modals (Builduim, Doorloop, Rentred, to name a few) but they do a lot of other things besides accounting, bookkeeping, and taxes so not the same thing as QBO.

QBO has a few cheaper competitors Stessa & Digb.com that are specifically set up out of the box for real estate investors (e.g. income/expenses categories are things you'd recognize like repairs, appraisal, etc.) and there is no need to set up a separate class for each of your properties since the portfolio already includes these. They're also a lot cheaper: Stessa (free to start) and Digb.com ($1 per month to start).

In the other thread, someone also suggested Quicken as an option at $50 a year but I think there's some setup involved to tailor it to your real estate needs (the person on this thread could clarify: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...) 

@Marissa Contreras Quickbooks Online focuses on helping real estate investors manage accounting and bookkeeping. There are a lot of options for full-blown property management software that have an accounting modal (some mentioned above, like Buildium, Doorloop, RentRedi, etc to name a few). Great options if you are looking for full-blown property management options.

If you have multiple rentals you'll need the version of Quickbooks Online with "classes" ($85 per month to @Simon W. point) to allocate the income and expenses between different properties and their chart of accounts (list of income and expense types) doesn't come setup out of the box for real estate.

For real estate-focused "accounting & tax software" I'd recommend Stessa (Free to start) and Digb.com ($1 a month to start) and Quicken is also a cheap option like @Bill Brandt mention. Both compete with Quickbooks Online but are focused on solving the accounting and taxes problem for real estate investors unlike some of the other options mentioned here.