Accounting for house flippers

[William Harvey]

Hello BP community,

For house flippers doing consistent deals, what tool(s) do you use for accounting? I've tried QB (admittedly, didn't try for long) and it didn't seem to be a good fit. Seemed like QB would be good for a rental, but since with flips you have to capitalize every cost and everything is essentially on the balance sheet (versus the P&L) it didn't seem to work properly. Now, I manually export CC and bank statements into CSV files and then separate each transaction where it needs to go. I do at the end of each year and really dread it. It is super tedious and hurts my brain. 

For instance, we bought/sold 5 flips last year so we have 5 "buckets" each transaction could fall in PLUS our general office expenses (Google ads, Propstream, DealSimple, etc.) 

I manually go through every transaction to drop in the right "bucket" to figure out our profit for each deal and then I give to my CPA. Is there an easier way to do this? I've done this for years now and feel there has got to be a better way.

[Marty Boardman]

I use QuickBooks. For my fix and flips I use the class designation (each property is it's own class). On my balance sheet I have to assets: 1. The property and 2. Capital improvements (I call this my WIP, which stands for work in progress). I went into my accountant's office about 10 years ago and set it all up with her. It works great and we've never had any IRS issues. At the end of the tax year I just send her my P&L, balance sheet and settlement statements.