Real Estate Bookkeeping: A Crash Course for Getting Your Financials in Check

Ashley:
Feeling overwhelmed about your unorganized financials. My name is Ashley Care, and welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to kickstart your investing journey. Our guest today is from southern Oklahoma and is a CPA and a bookkeeper with over 20 years of financial accounting experience. She’s going to give us a crash course on bookkeeping and how to hire the right CPA for rookie investors. So a couple of things we’re going to discuss are finding and accounting software that actually matches your goals, how to protect yourself from legal liability, then some CPA red flags, and actually when to fire your CPA. And lastly, should you do your own bookkeeping or hire it out? So let’s give a big welcome to Sarah Bratcher. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah:
Hi. Thank you for having me.

Ashley:
Let’s start off with rookies feeling overwhelmed when getting started and maybe this is just their first business ever that they’re having to track financials. Maybe they’re a little messy or unorganized. So what is the first piece of advice you would tell them when they’re feeling overwhelmed like that with bookkeeping?

Sarah:
So bookkeeping is really necessary for your business, but just because you have a business doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a pro at bookkeeping. It’s going to feel hard because it’s not familiar to you. You have this idea you’re wanting to buy houses and you want to rent ’em out and start this business and start some side hustle income or your full income, and it’s a byproduct of starting a business. You have to do your accounting to do your taxes, and especially in the real estate industry, you have to present your financials to your banker or your lender or your private investor. So it can get overwhelming and feel like a lot at the very beginning. And a lot of people, I have people come to me that just have maybe one or two houses and they’re just like, oh, let me get these cleaned up for you before I get to you.

Sarah:
And they don’t want to hire it out or they don’t want to talk to somebody or they feel when they go to their tax preparer, they feel like everything has to be beautiful and perfect and everything. And so it just adds that stress to it. And we’re here to help. We’re here to walk you through the process and get that all done. And I kind of equate it to when you’re buying a house, a property, and especially the off market ones that are kind of rotten and everything, you don’t want the owner to go in there and just sloppily slap on some paint and get it fixed up and everything. You want it raw as it is. And we’re the same way for bookkeeping. People think they need to get stuff in order before they come to us and it’s like, no, we want to help you organize it from the get go. Don’t spend that energy to do that. So

Ashley:
Before we get really get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, let’s understand the difference between a financial planner, a CPA and a bookkeeper. So what are the differences between those three positions?

Sarah:
Oh, that’s awesome. So a financial planner, they are kind of the 10,000 foot level. They look at all your assets and help you make decisions on what works best for your goals. Like if you want to retire, do you want index funds or real estate investing? And they’re really high up and they look at the reports provided by your CPA and your bookkeeper, A CPA and a bookkeeper. The biggest difference is the license. A CPA has a license and then the CPA can prepare taxes. They can go into financial management, they can go into governmental accounting, they can do whatever they want. And I think a lot of confusion comes from people think they need a CPA to prepare their taxes or they only need a bookkeeper that’s not a CPA for the price and everything, but it’s a CPA can prepare your taxes, but also an enrolled agent can prepare your taxes.

Sarah:
I’m a CPA and I decided long ago that I like to see the sunset in the springtime. So I decided to go full force into financial management and helping people get their books organized and run their business from their financials. Because as you scale your business, you’re not going to be able to be at every single job site if you’re flipping houses or you’re not going to be able to if you’re, some people are now buying a hundred houses a year, they are not at every single. They need a set of reports to help them run their business. And the accounting reports are just huge in helping you make decisions as you scale, as you get there. And it’s best to start out with some good groundwork when you’re at five houses or lefts to be able to get there quickly.

Ashley:
And that kind of leads into my next question. As a rookie investor who’s just getting started, who should they hire first?

Sarah:
So I think first just with a couple of houses, it’s easy to just hire a tax preparer and then a financial planner usually comes a lot later when you have a lot more assets to start managing. So

Ashley:
Along those lines of hiring and getting started, where can you actually find some of these professionals? Where is the best place to look? And maybe you’ve done your own taxes and you’ve never had to have a CPA before as a rookie getting started, where can you find them?

Sarah:
That’s a great question. Finding a tax preparer that is focused on real estate investing is hard. I think the best place would be to ask other real estate investors who they use, because a lot of us, we like community in the investors world, and if you have a local meetup, ask those type of people. But I think BiggerPockets has the featured pro section. I think that’s a good place to start as well. But when you get your tax preparer and you get a good one, hang on to them. You can ask them maybe for references for a bookkeeper, but you can find bookkeepers in the BiggerPockets Pro area as well.

Ashley:
Yeah, you can go to biggerpockets.com/tax finder to be able to find a tax professional. But I also loved your advice of talking to other investors in your network too, reaching out to them to see who they are using. And you could also go into the BiggerPockets forums and ask too. It’s a great resource in the forums to network with other investors and to get opinions, advice, and referrals. I’m excited to dive into a crash course of bookkeeping for rookie investors. So after listening to today’s episode, they won’t feel embarrassed about their financials. But first, before we go into that, let’s hear a word from our show sponsors. Okay. Welcome back everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out our show sponsors. We really appreciate it. Just like you guys, they make the show happen. So Sarah, what are the five things that every rookie investor should know about bookkeeping? And maybe we could actually start with software.

Sarah:
Yeah, software is a big one. There’s a lot of analysis paralysis going into the software because, so-and-so’s using this one and it’s maybe it’s too expensive for you, but 10 years into their journey and you’re a rookie and you’re just starting out, so you want to look more to the free ones, but you also want to scale quickly. So there’s so many things to consider when doing that. And the first question I always ask, what is your current system? Because a lot of times it’s best to just keep doing what you’re doing until you get to where it doesn’t work. And if your current system isn’t providing the right financials for your lenders and you have to redo it in an Excel spreadsheet, then maybe it’s time to look for, start looking for a new one. But I always say just start with what you have and do as much as you can with that until it doesn’t work anymore.

Sarah:
And then start asking yourself, does it provide everything that I need for my business to function properly? A lot of people are doing flipping now, and it is a little more tracking and your classes and projects and stuff like that. And some people start out with a property management software that has accounting function on it, which is great for long-term rentals, but may not be as good for short-term rentals or for flipping. So you could just dive deep in the analyzing. They usually have what functions each software has and look at all them, but also how many properties you plan on having. There are some non-real estate related accounting software out there that a lot of people come to me and they’re using it, but it doesn’t have the ability to separate 1 2, 3 Main Street and 4 5 6 B Street. They’re all lumped into one, so that could cause some problems too. So you just have to think about a lot of things. And then also does your tax preparer have a preference? If you give them a set of books from one software and they have to enter it into another set of books that they like to use, then you’re paying more at the end of the year for that anyway. So start with your tax preparer and see what they prefer and if you can back into that somehow as well.

Ashley:
I think another big thing too is cost of the software. QuickBooks can get very expensive very quickly, just like how you mentioned, you can’t always break out each property If you want to have that tool in QuickBooks where you can assign a class to each expense, so which property it is for specifically, I’m like their platinum plan where you’re paying over a hundred dollars a month, and if you have multiple LLCs, that really adds up to a lot each month. So I really, really love the property management software that has the accounting software integrated. I’ve used buildium Rent Ready is a wonderful one for new investors with a smaller portfolio. And then I also use AppFolio. But another one that I really love too is esa and esa.com, and they have a great really specific, so it doesn’t have the property management stuff integrated. I think they’re kind of building that out.

Ashley:
But I love that because it’s so real estate specific for long-term rentals. And I think what you said was really important as to what is actually in your business. If you are going to be running flips and rentals through the one entity, which if you have a CPA, they’re probably not going to recommend that you do. But if you are having different income streams in one business, then yes, you may need to go outside of the property management software or software like ESSA where it is real estate specific for sure. So what is the next thing? Can you maybe talk about a little bit about actually separating your business and personal income?

Sarah:
Yeah, that’s a big one. So when you’re tracking all of this and when you’re getting down to entering all your transactions, having your personal transactions in there can just really weigh you down and cause a lot of extra time to be input into it. But also the biggest thing is your lawyer will have a fit. If you’re integrating one of those, your exposure to legal liabilities as an investor is higher. And always talk to your lawyer about this. If you’re doing, this isn’t legal advice, but when you pierce the corporate veil by having your accounting integrated, it really puts you at liability for your own house and it’s easy to swipe your card and accidents happen. It happens. If it does that, then there’s or less. But if you’re buying boats with your rental property account, then I mean they’re really frowned upon. And if you’re using your cash, it’s best to look at your structure for your LLC or whatever entity you decide, look at your structure, how to best distribute those funds to your personal accounts and use ’em that way.

Sarah:
But also a little piece of that for rookie investors is a lot of rookie investors get the advice to, you don’t need an LLC to buy your first rental property, which is great advice too. You don’t necessarily have to have that in place and that just gets started. And so if you don’t have that LLC or the entity, you can open a separate personal account. Just don’t do it on the same account you’re buying groceries out of. And so you can keep them separate that way. But a big one is for tax purposes too. If on the offhand you were ever to get audited, the IRS will just tear you apart and it’ll cost you more funds to have somebody go through and figure out what’s what. And it just gets all really messy.

Ashley:
And how easy nowadays is it to open a checking account in your personal name? You can go online and do that within minutes, and it’s easier on you too because you’re not having to go through sort your expenses. Wait, was this a business one? Was this a personal one? What about personal credit cards using your personal credit card to pay for business expenses and then you use your business checking account to pay off your personal card for that business expense. Would that be something that would be frowned upon?

Sarah:
Yeah, no, that’s frowned upon too. Yeah, it’s not advised to do that.

Ashley:
Plus you can get a lot of reward points too with it. There’s always good bonus reward points that you can use for your business too. So kind of along those lines is when you’re getting that credit card, it’s not that hard to actually get a business card either. It may take some time before you can really build up that limit on it that they give you where you’re most likely, this is your first ever business and you’re probably not going to get a $30,000 credit limit right away, maybe more like a thousand or something like that. But you can always call and request if you are making payments, paying the card off, you are not having a high balance on it, letting it run, you’re missing payments, things like that. When I opened my property management company, I opened a business card for it and they gave me a limit of $5,000 to start off with, which was not going to be enough because I needed to put all of the expenses for all the materials for every maintenance person.

Ashley:
So there was two maintenance people at the time. They each had one of these cards, they’re run to Lowe’s, things like that. I was paying off the credit card every other week or every week sometimes just because they were maybe doing a large turnover where they had to rehab the property and those expenses and it was like the card is going to max out if I don’t go and make a payment. And slowly over time, I just kept getting it raised and raised and raised, and now it’s, I think it is like 30,000 or something. So we never have to worry about maxing it out and the card getting declined because I didn’t pay it off. So that definitely getting a business card just to keep everything separate is super easy to do and it’s going to be easy on you, easier on your tax professional, your bookkeeper, you’re probably going to have to pay them less because it’s not going to take them time to sort through and be like, okay, what was this six expense for?

Ashley:
What was this one for? Was this business, was this personal? And then also just having that visual view of being able to look into your business bank account or even the personal one you set up for your property and just looking and just getting a visual of like, okay, here’s where my money at is at right now for this property to kind of keep track of it that way too. Okay. So now the third thing, what kind of systems should be created? Because as we talked about, you may get a credit card, so you have your credit card statements, you have your bank statements, you have all your receipts for your expenses. What’s the best way to organize all these documents?

Sarah:
We live in the digital world and it’s literally at our fingertips. And the best this, especially for Ricky, start with what’s free. I think most of us all have Gmail and access to that and just a Google drive. Just take a picture and put it in your Google Drive and on the file name, just put as much information Home Depot Plumbing for this address and just put as much information in there because 30 days from now or one year from now when you’re trying to cram it all in to get your taxes done, you’ll have that information in the file name and you can easily do that. But also when you get to a point where you have a va, you don’t have VA or a bookkeeper, they can organize it for you and give it to your tax preparer and give it to your bookkeeper.

Sarah:
And I mean, it just trickles down to where that one little 15 second, taking a picture type in a quick thing will save you a lot of money and a lot of headaches from a year from now when you’re trying to get your taxes done and you already have all that information on hand that you’re not bugged, you’re not like, what was this for? What was this for? And everybody’s not. You’re not sitting at the computer if you’re trying to do it yourself, you’re not sitting the computer trying to figure out, you already know. And it’s best to get into that habit from the very beginning, I had to train my husband. He does so well at it, honestly, he does better than me. The IRS wants you to keep your records for about three years. If there’s a substantial mistake or error, they want to look back like six years. And then if it’s actual fraud, they want to look at everything. So keep all that.

Ashley:
What is your opinion on if you are using software? So say for example, I’m using QuickBooks and then I have my Google Drive and I’m the one doing my bookkeeping. I’m the one doing my organizing for my receipts. I’m the one making the purchases, so I have the receipts. So I’m the whole process. Do you recommend that I store, when I upload a receipt, I’m uploading it to QuickBooks or whatever the accounting software is? Or am I uploading it to the Google Drive? What do you think is the best place to actually store it? Or should I be putting it in both places?

Sarah:
So QuickBooks has the option to store your receipts and everything, but I would say Google Drive, because it’s just one place. If you ever get enough to where you change to AppFolio instead of QuickBooks, because AppFolio is a lot more expensive than QuickBooks, then you’ll lose access to the QuickBooks. And if you have ’em on Google Drive, you can easily transfer ’em to an external hard drive or something that you have in your hands. Yeah,

Ashley:
I ask that because I agree with you as far as I am terrified that one day I’m not going to use the software. And I did this with Bill DM before I used Bill dm and then I switched to using a property management company. So I was closing down my buildium account. I had to go in and download every file that was saved in there. And customer service was not helpful at all. There was no bulk download at one time where I could download every receipt that was saved in there. So I am also terrified. So right now we actually do both. I have a VA that actually attaches it into AppFolio and gets it ready to be paid through there. And then we also save another copy, which seems like double work. But if for some reason I’m not using AppFolio anymore or I manage for somebody else, if they decide not to work with me anymore, I have all the information just already saved in Google Drive to just send to them instead of having to download every single receipt that has been paid for their company over the last two years, whatever it may be.

Sarah:
And worst case scenario, the IRS wants to see everything for an audit or something like that. You have it easily

Ashley:
Accessible. Yeah,

Sarah:
Yeah. To hand over to them. Yeah.

Ashley:
Okay. So let’s go onto the fourth thing. What is a COA and what should rookies be looking for in one?

Sarah:
I think the chart of accounts are what gets most real estate investors hung up the most. The chart of accounts helps you decide, I call ’em buckets, what bucket to put it in. So when you look at the report, you look at income, you look at cost of goods sold, you look at expenses, utilities, taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance. And I think for real estate investors, I think the biggest thing is the difference between a repair and a maintenance. And I know people that are just so hung up and will spend 30 minutes on the phone with me trying to decide if one receipt is a repair or a maintenance. And it’s like if that is what is holding you back from your bookkeeping being a smooth process, simplify it. Just lump repairs and maintenance into one because when you look at the report, you’re still going to be confused. You’re going to be like, oh, what I’d put in repairs and what I put in maintenance. And then maybe as you get more familiar within everything and it becomes less hard, then you can break those down and see where you want to track and everything.

Ashley:
Because if you look at a tax return even, and you look at the income and expenses for reporting your rental property, it is very generic and it is repairs and maintenance, and it is utilities. It’s not broke. They don’t want to know what exactly you paid for water, what exactly you paid for electric. So that’s okay that that’s not broken down. And they have the other where you fill in like, oh, this was for continuing education, whatever expenses, they may not have put in there as generic, but I like to break it down for my own personal use. If you don’t care how much you’re paying in water compared to electric, just it into utilities. But I like to go and see, okay, this is exactly what each amount is going for every month just because I like to get freaky, my switchings like that. But if you’re looking at a tax return and you really aren’t going to be someone who’s reviewing your financials, which you should be, and you just want to know what your total utility cost is, what you paid out in repairs and maintenance, and you don’t want to break it down into plumbing, repairs, electric repairs, things like that, you really don’t have to for tax purposes and tax reporting, you can lump it into that bulk category too.

Sarah:
Absolutely. And lenders, they don’t need a three page profit and loss of every single item on there. And it causes so much decision fatigue when you’re trying to just quickly get these things entered, especially when you’re doing it on your own. Okay.

Ashley:
So I want to hear your last tip for hiring A CPA and when to actually fire your CPA. But first, let’s take a short break and hear a word from our show sponsors. Okay, Sarah, what is the last thing that rookies need to know about CPAs?

Sarah:
All CPAs are not created equal. We have some rock stars out there, and then we have some other people that, and I wouldn’t say they weren’t rock stars, but they’re just not rock stars in the real estate realm and they have a different focus. And just like every relationship in life, you have to find somebody that agrees with the same values and the same goal that you’re after. You can find a very cheap CPA out there that’s just trying to get tax returns done really quickly. That’s not going to spend the time to figure out how many tax breaks you might be eligible for. Don’t set on the first person you see, interview several of ’em, interview ’em and figure out if you connect with them. If you get on with someone and you don’t understand the terminology, the words they’re using, it might not be a good fit.

Sarah:
Or if you try to schedule a call with someone and it takes two or three weeks of back and forth to figure it out, then they may not be on the same timeline as you and just ask them how much communication is involved. And I hear all the time too about I went to a tax preparer and I didn’t even talk to them. They just gave me the stuff and I didn’t get to tell them that I needed to do this and that. And you may need someone that’s more focused on tax strategies and you have regular meetings with them instead of just sending your stuff in and they turn out a tax form. But ask a lot of questions. Sit down and write out what’s most important for you to know about and see if they can answer your questions. And if you get a good feeling after the interview, then I would say it’s a good fit. But your CPA is a part of your team and they have the saying of hire slow, fire fast, and you need to vet your CPA. You can’t just say, oh, this is a CPA, I’m going to go to them and they’ll know everything that I need them to know. The CPA license covers so much broad spectrums and finding someone that has the same focus of you is important.

Ashley:
And as much as it is a pain to have to switch all of your information to onboard with a new bookkeeper or accountant, A CPA, it’s worth it to do it now than to wait. And just more of a mess piles up. And I know this from experience, so it’s better, like you said, to just take action and to hire someone new if the work is not getting done. The biggest thing for me when working with an accountant, whether a bookkeeper a CP, A tax professional, is that they are telling me what I can do and what I should be doing. And it’s not me having to ask questions of should I get real estate professional status or should I be doing a 10 31 with this? I want them to tell me to look at all of my information and to say, okay, here’s what you can do.

Ashley:
Here’s what you should be doing instead of me having to figure out how to navigate the tax system. And so that’s another thing of how to vet, if you’re looking for a tax professional or even just a bookkeeper is saying, I would love your recommendations of what could be doing different. There was one bookkeeper who I had hired, and I only kept her for a year. She didn’t end up working out, but one of the reasons I had hired her initially was because of the great idea she gave me of how I actually should be doing all my bookkeeping. And it ended up saving me so much money switching to this other software from when I had previously been using because of this one little trick she had on the software. And that was worth how much I was going to pay her and making that switch of having to onboard just because of that one piece of advice.

Ashley:
Before, years before that, it always had been either me doing the bookkeeping or me having the help of my accountants I use, but my accountant had no specialty in real estate. There was me just sending the reports to have my taxes done, and then they were entered in as in not, oh, you should be doing this differently or do this or this would be a benefit. And so that to me is asking or telling your situation, just like I always say about even a lender to see what kind of loans, tell them your situation and see what they can give to you, what benefit they have to provide to you, what suggestions they have to you, I think can be a huge, huge resource instead of asking, do you know how to do this or should I be able to do this? Have them tell you what you can and cannot do.

Sarah:
Absolutely.

Ashley:
Yeah. So if anyone needs help finding a tax professional, you can go to biggerpockets.com/tax and you’ll also be able to find Sarah on there too. So Sarah, kind of a last question for you. As we’re talking about finding a bookkeeper, A CPA, what are some of the red flags that you’re thinking of when you maybe first start working with A CPA or maybe you’ve actually worked with them a while. What are some of the things that are red flags that should really make you make that decision to move on to someone else

Sarah:
Spicy? This could get interesting, but I think the number one thing is the communication. The communication isn’t there. If your questions aren’t getting answered, if your gut feeling’s a good one, if you just don’t feel good about it, I would quickly find something else. I know finding someone to do your bookkeeping or your taxes is painful. It is a lot of work and it’s a lot of information. You have to get to them in a short amount of time for them to do their proper work. But communication’s the key and not delivering what they promised. If you were expecting more from them and you don’t feel like you’re getting that, I think it would be time to find someone else. I would talk to them about it. Maybe something’s happened, maybe they are providing it in a different platform. There’s so much miscommunication that can happen too. But I would ask them to make sure and then quickly try to find somebody else. And then I think there’s a lot of people in that tax finder now and a lot of good people in there.

Ashley:
And then lastly, how often should you actually be communicating with your bookkeeper? Should you have scheduled calls? Should they be reaching out to you? Should you reach out to them? Give us a hypothetical situation of here’s what’s ideal for the communication between you and your bookkeeper.

Sarah:
So with my firm, different tiers of, we have clients that we talk to weekly, some almost daily that are bigger and more involved doing flips and stuff like that. And then we have some that we only talk to quarterly because they don’t have time to sit down for an hour meeting every month. And we have some that we just provide a video recap of their month for ’em, and we send that off and we don’t hear from ’em for months. We just keep sending the videos off. So whatever your needs are, if you’re starting out and you have five properties or so, your needs might be a little less. But if you’re needing reports all the time and everything and you’re not getting answers back from them quickly, that that’s another thing. But I would say at least monthly, if they do your reconciliation on a month, you should hear from them preferably. And if you have questions, just enter the time.

Ashley:
Yeah. Well, that’s great. I think that that’s just the things you went over today are just a great stepping stone and starting place for somebody to actually take action on hiring a bookkeeper if they haven’t already. So Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. We’re going to link your information into the show notes, so if people can reach out to you and find out more information, you can also find Sarah at biggerpockets.com/tax. Thank you guys so much for listening. I am Ashley Care, and we will be back with another episode of Real Estate Rookie.

Tony:
This BiggerPockets podcast is produced by Daniel ti, edited by Exodus Media Copywriting by Calico Content.

Ashley:
I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and you have been listening to Real Estate Rookie.

Tony:
And if you want to be a guest on a BiggerPockets show, apply biggerpockets.com/guest.