QuickBooks Online - worth the price? Need accounting advice!

[Jay Belcher]

I need accounting advice. I apologize in advance for the wordy post, but would appreciate if anyone has good ideas.

I recently started using Rentec Direct (property management software). It tracks income and expenses, but not assets, so it wouldn't completely eliminate my use of QuickBooks. To populate Rentec I was looking to add a remote user (a VA) to my QuickBooks. With the desktop version not supporting remote users, I looked into QuickBooks Online (QBO). I discovered that QBO has to be the full (Plus) version to support classes. Not only that, since I run multiple property owners, I would need multiple licenses. It works out to $120/mo or $240/mo after the discounts run out. That price sort of struck me as madness. Does anyone know of any better options - any better way of doing this? Alternately, how ugly would things become if I only tracked income and expenses (Rentec), and stopped tracking assets. I know that has implications - e.g. not knowing mortgage balances, not tracking depreciation, etc. Just looking for ideas. P.S. I could give the VA remote access to my machine, but that sort of scares me.

[Dan V.]

It is recommended to have separate QBO subscription by entity since you are only allowed to enter one company name. However, if you like QBO but really wanted to save money, there is a workaround, that is Location. Location is a feature in QBO similar to class, with one limitation, it is available at header level only, which means you are allowed to assign one location only in each transaction. You can set up each entity as a location and each property as classes, the downside will be more work (since you will need to fill out additional field for every transaction) and if you don't have a good system in place, it could end up in a mess. You can run a report by Location, or use it as report filter. 

Another alternative, if you want to keep QB desktop but do not want to provide remote access is to use a file sharing/hosting service like Qbox which is QB file compatible.