Accounting segregation

[Justin England]

Hi everyone. I'm purchasing my first property, a fourplex, and close at the beginning of November. I'm curious about how everyone keeps their accounts for units and properties segregated.

My idea was to collect all rents for each property into a checking account for said property. Either via Cozy or money orders or checks. I do not currently have a business license or LLC set up, but should I? Will that give me access to better banking tools and credit cards that are worth it?

How do you segregate accounts? Do you have a huge checking account for ALL your properties? One for each property? Each unit? Separate savings accounts? I'd like to protect reserve funds and security deposits and keep them visible at a glance in Mint, but perhaps I'm over-complicating things. I am a huge proponent of investing time in front-end setup in order to automate and simplify daily operations.

Several institutions like Capital One 360 and one of my local CUs actually allow you to build checking/savings accounts on the fly, which is the way I'm leaning...

Any advice? Thanks!!

[Steven Hamilton II]

You should consider a single business account which can be opened I  your personal name or even a dba with a simple EIN. 

As you expand you may want to group properties together for record keeping purposes. Maybe 2 account for every 5-10 properties.