Using MyLowe's to track purchases and associate with different properties

[David Shapiro]

I've been playing around with MyLowe's which tracks your purchases at Lowe's. You can go back and see what items you've purchased. I make purchases at Lowe's for several different properties. As an investor I'm trying to accomplish two things 1) It makes it easier to assign costs to the appropriate property at the end of the month 2) Keep an inventory of what I've purchased. An example of how I see it being helpful: If after move out I see a tenant damaged a section of the floor, I can see exactly which flooring I bought last time and order more.

I'm curious if anybody has come up with a system to use this for multiple properties?

Two things I noticed. It looks like you can order multiple unique MyLowe's cards (not store credit cards). You could label one for each property.

You can set up a "Home Profile" and add different spaces. You could create a space and rename it for each property.

[David Epstein]

Here's my system for multiple properties:  In my area, HD usually beats Lowes on most things.  I have been rehabbing and holding for five years now, and the best thing in my wallet is my HD Commercial credit card.  It allows me to do the Pro Rewards, as noted by Andrew Cordle above.  But the big winner is I just put a house name on a given purchase.  Then, when I pay the bill, I just pay each house's amount out of their respective checking accounts.  At the end of the year, I plug all those numbers into Quickbooks, and I have an easy to read report on what I've spent on each building.  (and QB numbers go easily into Turbo-tax, which is another huge time-saver.  I used to "import" to TT, but lately I just put in the numbers off of the QB report so that they go into the correct place on the tax forms)

   With regard to Chuck Wilson's post, I don't doubt it, but I do wonder what he was buying.  Each store has their sweet spots.  With HD, if I have a big reno coming up, I make a shopping list, then count on spending an entire day in HD taking down SKU numbers (or doing it online), and then making a "Bid-Room" to order as much of the job's materials as I can in one shot.  In addition, the prices in Bid Room go on for two or three weeks, and yields moderate to excellent savings.  The minimum purchase is 2,500.00 for Bid-Room, which is easy to spend.  The challenge is anticipating everything.  For plumbing, I often buy the whole job from Supply House.com (Formerly Pex-Supply).  This might take working with a plumber on the shopping list if you're less experienced, but the savings are huge.  Don't be afraid to buy bulk: you'll use it on future projects.   And if the plumber is getting the job, they'll usually be happy to help with the list, gratis, because it increases their efficiency.  

Increasingly, I use Amazon Prime for many materials.  The stuff comes to my door in two days.  It's amazing what you can find: sinks, smoke detectors, tools.  That, too, gives you a simple "reorder" option.  

Good luck!  

Dave