Alternatives to Quickbooks for financial records?

[Noam Birnbaum]

Hey y'all,

I've been running a small (non-R.E.) business for many years, so I'm no stranger to what it takes to manage a small business's finances. I'm also no stranger to Quickbooks, because that's what I've used for decades.

But, there are some unique details about R.E. that make me wonder if there's a better option besides Quickbooks.

If a landlord holds multiple properties and each one is in its own LLC, you probably should use a separate Chart of Accounts for each LLC in order to avoid piercing the corporate veil. (In Quickbooks Windows, this would mean a separate data file for each.)

And yet, there are portfolio-wide considerations that you want to take into account: Some expenses will be spread across multiple properties (for example, your BP and Rentometer membership fees, right?). 

Also, while you should regularly run reports for each property to determine your profitability and cash positions, I also want to run portfolio-wide reports to view aggregate trends for the entire portfolio. And so, keeping each property in a separate Chart of Accounts might not be convenient.

Got any thoughts on this? What do you use to manage a portfolio of multiple LLCs? How do you keep your cash and your books separate, but make it easy to view aggregate portfolio data? How do you arrange things to keep the corporate veil whole?

Thanks!