Bookkeeping with Buildium

[Matt Kowske]

Looking for what others are doing here. I'm having a really tough time doing my accounting a way that isn't totally confusing and sucks up half a day at the end of the month. I use Buildium and LOVE it for the property management features, but am having trouble with the accounting.

1) When doing renovations/upgrades, like a kitchen remodel, I understand this is a  Capital Improvement and should be balanced against an an Asset account. Things like repairing a broken light fixture is a Repair, under the Expenses tree. Now the problem with this is when you run a P&L statement (or when Buildium calculates the amount of cash a property has to distribute to owners), it does not consider these Capital Improvements because they are assets, not expenses. This is a problem because the money WAS spent. It went out of the checking account so this calculation then on what is left is incorrect. How do folks work around this? Are you to run a P&L, then general ledger all the Capital Improvements for the same time period and manually add those to the expenses? 

2) Buildium is clearly designed to be used by a PM company, assuming the mortgages and financial assets of the owner is completely separate. If I were to do this, and a kitchen remodel was done like I mentioned and categorized as a Capital/Building Improvement I don't see how that transaction would be entered because the financials for the property are totally separate from the PM. Does that mean the owner would take care of the expenses for the capital improvements so it can go on their books instead? If a PM company did a kitchen remodel for an owner I don't see how the accounting could work.

I'm starting to ramble, sorry. Bottom line is I like to do my own accounting and I like to use Buildium, but I'm finding it hard to use it for both and even more difficult to have separate systems for both. How do you all do it?

[Micky Deming]

This is a great topic. I think it's often helpful to use Buildium for property management and tracking tenants, but to use either Quickbooks or Xero for tracking the flow of financials and financial reporting.

This article is really well done and helpful and recommends using an actual accounting system: https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2016/02/1...