Real Estate Consultant · Bloomfield, NJ · Member since 2010 · 2k+ posts · 1k+ votes
Hi All. Looking for something simple to manage the expenses of multiple rehabs (which will be sold retails within 6 mos.). Nothing too complicated. Checking BP but nothing sticks out.
I will put something together myself if nothing else materializes. Just wondered if anyone knew of anything off the top of their heads.
I use a custom excel sheet. Very simple. I like the simplicity and flexibility of an excel sheet. If you want to get abit more elaborate you can create multiple sheets and summarize the results with a pivot chart.
In my excel sheets i like to put a column with the description of the work, Labor, Material. Then i try to put the price per unit of measure ( example square feet, linear feet etc) and the quantity . After that i multiply the price / unit of measure by the quantity.
Once you have the total for each line item ( result of price/ unit of measure by quantity), just run an addition, and you get a total.
I add contingencies to the bottom line depending on the project i am dealing with.
I have a question for everyone who reads this post.
When you purchase a property to flip - do you estimate what the purchase, rehab, holding, finance cost would be? Do you estimate what price would be selling it for?
I know the answer is yes - right PROFIT first.
Second after you purchase the property you either track expenses on excel, QuickBooks or any software to that matter. If you do use a software, why use excel? Why cannot you get all the reports from your estimate to money spend to property sold resulting 99% in profit you had forecast-ed.
Second after you purchase the property you either track expenses on excel, QuickBooks or any software to that matter. If you do use a software, why use excel? Why cannot you get all the reports from your estimate to money spend to property sold resulting 99% in profit you had forecast-ed.
QuickBooks is great for managing the financial part of the project (well, much of it, not all of it). But, it doesn't allow you to visualize the other parts of the project at the same time -- scheduling, cost forecasting, cash flow analysis, etc. Excel provides the ability to track this data in a manner that is customizable to the user.
I could probably set up several QB reports for each of these needs, but there's no way to overlay the various sets of data using colors, simple sorting, pivot tables, etc. -- you can do that in Excel.
I agree with @J Scott, we use QB for pure accounting and we duplicate the QB entries into Google spreadsheets so that our non-accounting team members can understand the data.
Furthermore, that method allows us to keep all of the information pertaining to one property in one spreadsheet with the data spread out among 5-6 sheets.
@Ibrahim Hughes - you are probably best off creating your own spreadsheet and just entering custom formulas. That way it will be tailored to your needs. Just use one cell to put the days you expect to hold the property, and then have all of the other formulas pull from that cell to calculate holding costs, for example, asssume X refers to the cell with the holding days set to 120:
Total interest expense = ([yearly interest] / 365) * X
Total utilities expense = ([monthly avg] / 30) * X
Total Property Tax = [[yearly tax] / 365) * X
By using that method, if X changes and you hold the property for 150 days intead of 120, you only have to change one cell and all of the costs will update.
@J Scott True you have to do a detail estimate in excel or other software. After you purchase the property you can track all the details and summary starting from your budget, actual spending and sale of property. You can also go in as much detail you want, get reports by difference by % or $. It all depends on how you use QuickBooks, view your reports by each property.
@J Scott True you have to do a detail estimate in excel or other software. After you purchase the property you can track all the details and summary starting from your budget, actual spending and sale of property. You can also go in as much detail you want, get reports by difference by % or $. It all depends on how you use QuickBooks, view your reports by each property.
Yup, I'm pretty well versed in QB. The issue is that it's impossible to get a holistic view of the entire project on a single page (report).
Though I still use QB for all financial reporting and management...
For those using QuickBooks, I would suggest using the "Class Tracking" feature to keep track of all of your income/expenses by REI project. Then you can simply run a quick report on individual projects to see profitability.
@J Scott You can for individual property and company as a whole.
Gita
In Excel, for each project, I have a list of trades contracted for that project along with scheduled tasks for that trade, milestones and payments for each milestone. These milestones and payments are annotated by color indicating whether the work has been completed and the payment has been made, the work is currently in progress and the payment is pending or the work hasn't been completed.
I also use pivot tables to change the views of that data to provide various summaries by trade, contractor project and date, as well as to provide a cash-flow analysis for the remainder of the project.
Unless it's possible to create pivot tables in QB, I'm fairly certain there is no single report I can create that gets me anywhere close to what I do in Excel. Even if there was a way to replicate this data in QB, I'm guessing it would take 10x as long to enter the data and modify it as the project progresses.
Again, QB has its place...but (for me, at least), that place is accounting, not project management...