Bookkeeping Recommendations and Strategies

[Youssef Fahmane]

Hi everyone,

Me and my team are still learning and we would appreciate if you can give any recommendations on how you go about your book keeping. We have QuickBooks but it takes us a lot of time putting in the details instead of us focusing on more buying, selling, fixing houses. Would you highly recommend hiring a freelancer to do part time? Or do you have any recommendations/strategies on how to go about doing this things. Thank you in advance!

[Ben Day]

@Youssef Fahmane welcome to the club :) 

Obviously, the highest and best use of your time is not bookkeeping. Unless you have a rockstar team and it's your one true calling, you can absolutely outsource it. 

Seven steps to making real estate investment bookkeeping as easy as possible: 

1) Get some real cash flow

2) make sure you have separate cash & credit accounts. Per property checking accounts is a little overkill, but having dedicated accounts for each rehab is a really easy way to not have to save 100+ receipts. Nothing is worse than having to dig through a bunch of personal accounts to find the stuff you need to books financial statements together. 

3) Use a real accounting system (Quickbooks counts, you're good here)

4) Get trained on your accounting system (bonus points if you can get training from someone that you can outsource to later)

5) Get even more cash flow - outsourcing usually starts around $200/mo and that's the really, really, really cheap stuff. Good rule of thumb is to think you'll spend more than $300/mo, or 1-3% of revenues. Once you get to this step the cash flow you're generating should be dedicated to buying your time back. 

6) Outsource - bonus points if you can find someone that understands real estate not just from an accounting standpoint, but the operations and lending as well. 

7) Leverage your team to do ridiculous things and never do the stuff you hate ever again