effective methods to track income and repair expenses by units?

[Carl Fordyce]

i just bought my first rental its a 4-plex building I've been racking my brain on finding the best method for tracking my monthly income to expenses on a per unit basis. I've looked at things on BP but everything is broken down on a per property basis.  i figured its good to track it on a per unit basis that way i can see  how each unit performs from a income to expense basis as well as the whole building.

1: Is this an effective way of tracking the income to expenses for a 4-plex building?  and if so does anyone know of any good Apps of spreadsheets that they wouldn't mind sharing?

thanks

[Cody L.]

Originally posted by @Ray Lai:

@Cody L.

You make some very good points about accounting for common bills as a problem for the property when splitting it by unit. 

What about for people that own only a few properties that could gain some real benefit to tracking by unit to figure out how to squeeze out the profitability per unit and they have the time to put in more work to do so. Couldn't they simply just divide common bills by the number of units (e.g. $300 tax bill divided by 4 units at the property to get a tax per unit)?

It makes perfect sense for a guy that owns 100+ units to track at a higher level, than someone who owns one 4-plex for example. 

 I can only give you my advice.  You can do what you want with it.  I would STRONGLY suggest not trying to account for a multi unit property on a per unit basis.  A future buyer won't care.  The IRS won't care.  And it'll cause you nightmares at scale. 

Sure you only have a few units now (or will), but that's not your plan right?  Every process you put in place should be with the idea of "will this work with 1000s of units?"  THat's how I started with online payments, online leases, digital signing, tenant portals for work requests, etc.   I didn't have to do that with a handful of units but it allowed me to scale without changing how I operate.