Expense accounting for flip property

[Kevin Greene]

Hello everyone,

Working on my first flip and honestly the hardest part has been keeping track of expenses. I get receipts from my contractors and enter the line items into Excel. I then categorize each line item, and Excel sums each budget category. This way I can see my budget utilization for each category, such as "Kitchen", "Bathroom", "Flooring", etc. If there is an overrun I can instantly see how that will effect my end profit. Dealing with receipts is my biggest time-sink! It's easier if the receipt is for one and only one budget area, because I can just do one line in my spreadsheet for the total. A bulk purchase may have many different items on that need to be parsed out and categorized line-by-line. I enjoy the granularity this provides but the process has its flaws. It is tedious, time-consuming, and not particularly scale-able (although I'm working on that - see below). 

I'm working on a system to collect digital and paper receipts, scan and e-mail them to Podio, and then have a VA parse the receipts for me. I'm still working on how I would import that into my financial software of choice (Currently an amalgamation of Excel and YNAB, but experimenting with Quickbooks). Once I figure out my optimal solution I plan to do a write-up to share with other investors struggling with accounting (Especially keeping track of paper receipts).

With all that said, I want to know how YOU account for expenses during a flip. Do you just add it all up at the end and whatever is leftover is profit? Or are you a maniac like me and watching every nickle and dime that's spent? What software and processes are you using? I'd love to hear the nuts and bolts of how others deal with this issue.

EDIT: I don't spell gud.