Accounting/Bookkeeping for your STRs - what do you do?

[Julia Bykhovskaia]

Since I am very new and green, I'll continue to crowdsource insights/ideas. How do you keep track of your expenses for each property? I want to be able to have separate P&L statements for each property. I am thinking whether I should use Quickbooks for it or just maintain an Excel file. Below are my questions to the community:

1. Do you have a property management LLC you formed for your rentals? If yes, do you use the same bank account or separate bank accounts for each property?

2. How do you track Revenue/expenses for each property? Do you do it yourself in Excel or use any kind of software (QB?) and if you are using the same bank account for all properties how do you remember which expense was for which property (same goes for rental income)? 

As always, thank you very much in advance!

Julia

[Michael Greenberg]

Hi Julia,

I'm all about setting and forgetting (partially). I use mint.com to track my personal and STR finances. Since my LLC is single member, it all flows to me anyway so I figure "why not make it simple and nearly free". I did setup a separate bank account but in hindsight I may not have because of the above. I then use Mint to create categories, tags, and notes to track and manage. The reason I say nearly free, is that mint.com is free, but I did buy an add on product for mint called minttoreport. It allows me to export my data from mint.com and import it into minttoreport to create P&L reports and track income and expenses. Works really great once you "tweak it" and get used to how to use mint.com

Mike