converting to rental; separating expenses

[Trey Perrone]

New to real estate and BP community. Finding so much great info here!

Currently have a town-home that was a personal residence and converting to rental. At this time cash flow wont be much ~$200/mo but will look into refi later if we choose to keep down this path. VA NOVA HCOL area.

I have read a lot of good threads on separating income/costs for an easier paper trail and plan to create a couple new bank accounts; one to receive the monthly rent and a second account to hold the security deposit. Current plan is not to LLC the single property at this time.

My thought was to seed some cash into the account initially perhaps 1-2 months of mortgage payments so that we can setup the account to pay the mortgage/HOA directly but still cover the costs if our tenant were to late pay or we end up with a vacancy down the road (have a 24/mo contract so time to build up reserves), etc. I figured this would be a much cleaner path/separation of funds vs continuing to pay the mortgage from a personal acct and sending money over monthly or quarterly (or longer) from the new rental account to repay that costs.

Working on talking with a tax pro on all this looking more for personal experiences on seed some $$$ in acct vs scheduling a $$$ transfer each month to a personal acct that still pays the mortgage. it just seems easier to put 2-4K in the account to start now and reduce the paper trail?

thanks!