Digital Filing and Organization For Properties/ Rent by the room

[Taylor Burns]

Hey BP! 

I am looking for some advice on how to organize things digitally. I have been doing a house hack with a 5 bedroom house. This house has been quite the adventure with fixing things and unexpected expenses. Between a boat load of home depot receipts, financing paper work for foundation work and leases for each tenant, my paper files are starting to look like a mess. 

I am also looking for house number 2 which will increase the amount of things I need to keep track of. 

I am wanting to scan and organize everything to keep things neat and under control on a computer or in the cloud. I am looking for any apps or filing systems/ scanners people have had success with.

Thank you BP! 

[Matt R.]

One thing that may help, for Home Depot, specifically: see if you can get into their "Pro Xtra" program.  Sometimes it's included in your membership with a local real estate investor's association.  It doesn't immediately give you any cheaper prices, but it does provide some online tools for organizing your purchases.  Basically, you enroll whichever credit or debit cards you buy landlord stuff with in the program, and then anything you buy on those cards shows up when you log in to HD's web site. You can assign a label to each receipt (like "123 Main St" or "northeast bedroom"); it will break down things for you by their categories (electrical, plumbing, paint, etc); and I think you can get it to spit out a CSV or Excel file of your purchases, to save you some typing if you need to pull the data into some other program.

With Pro Xtra, iIf you spend a lot of money at HD (I think it's over $5k/year), then you get some rebates.  Also, if you have a big single order (I think over $2K, but ask them), they can send it to their "bid room" and sometimes get you a little bit better price.

The only recommendation I have as far as a scanner is to try to get a flatbed one.  In my experience, these are better at scanning things that are not 8.5"x11" pieces of paper, like most store receipts.  I don't have much luck with the scanners that are built into the top of a sub-$100 inkjet printer, where you feed the paper through a slot and it emerges an inch later; these tend to give distorted images, for me.  If you get one of those all-in-one printers that has a flatbed scanner on top, possibly with a document feeder for when you do want to scan some 8.5"x11" stuff - like the signed version of a lease - that may work better for you.

I have a really ancient HP flatbed scanner with a document feeder, and a separate ancient HP LaserJet printer, and those have worked for me so far, but I only have one SFR. I don't use an app or anything online to store documents; I just have directories on my PC, which are backed up regularly to an external hard drive.