How to set up accounting and banking for reserve funds.

[Andrew Z.]

Hello, everyone. 

I have a newbie question about reserve funds. Let's say I have a number of rental properties, each with income, actual expenses, and reserve funds for capex or vacancy.

1) Do you have separate bank accounts for each property?

2) Do you funnel all of the cash flow through that one bank account, even reserve funds...letting the balance increase over the years, or are you moving reserve funds to another account? If so, do you have a reserve account for each property, or one reserve account for all your properties?

3) I plan to use quickbooks, should I create sub-accounts for each bank account to indicate that some of the money is operating and some of the money is for reserve? 

Maybe I should have a single bank account for everything and just handle "reserving" funds through quickbooks sub accounts...

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

-Andrew