All Forum Posts by: Andrew Taylor

I haven't. Need time and money. Property still available though.

Bugs get squashed by developers when they are pointed out. Bad design and bad user experience are left to fester until something better comes along to take its place.

I enjoy this community, and I appreciate its collective power. Most of the people in this thread have said the same thing. That doesn’t change the fact that the user experience needs to be modernized.

By all means, let’s settle for “okay.”

I've actually figured out how to resolve my desktop Chrome issue that was the genesis of this post. It turns out making the window wider causes the site to re-draw. I use Chrome on half of a 27" monitor, so you'd think the window would be plenty wide but apparently not.

Mobile app and other issues noted above by other users are still problems, though.

Quick question. I'm trying to clean up the transaction records from my first flip. I understand (mostly) double-entry accounting concepts, and I have most of my transactions recorded (just using Google Sheets for now) with a debit account and a credit account. I understand about 95% of what's going on, but I do have a problem I need help with.

How do I account for draw payments received? If my loan was such that each draw payment increased the loan amount, I'd know what to do with each payment (debit cash, credit loans payable). But my draw payments come from a construction holdback that was created at closing; i.e., I'm paying interest on the entire loan from day 1 (yeah, I know - first and last time I'll make that mistake). So I'm debiting cash, but I can't figure out what to credit to balance the transaction.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Chrome - Version 86.0.4240.198 (Official Build) (x86_64)

MacOS - Version 10.15.7 (19H15)

The bell used to be there for me, but no longer. Doesn't appear in Safari, either - the layout looks exactly the same on both browsers.

Hey folks - if you've made it this far, thank you, and I apologize for the inconvenience. As I mentioned, something in the original post violated site rules about "polling members" so they told me I had to relocate the thread here. Unfortunately, nobody would ever see it here without my linking it from the other forums.

Anyway, thanks again for clicking through.

(Note: This was originally posted in both the "Real Estate Technologies" and "House Flipping" forums, because, well, that's where it makes the most sense. However, the BP overlords have decided that asking for your input violates the rules, so I was forced to post it here instead, where it will get very little traffic. I'll link this post to new posts in the two original threads instead.)

Last year, my wife and I dipped our toes into the world of REI - specifically flipping. We bought a house on our own, and at the same time I partnered with another local investor for a second, concurrent flip. I kept the "books" for our flip, while my partner kept them for the deal we worked on together.

We started out keeping track of our expenses using Excel. That worked okay until it didn’t. I then embarked on a futile quest to find bookkeeping software appropriate for flipping houses. At various times I tried Quickbooks, Xero, Freshbooks, Wave, Kashoo, Zoho Books, HouseFlippingSpreadsheet and maybe one or two others.

Long story short - and probably no surprise if you’ve looked for a solution yourself - none of those products did the trick. I reached out to my partner and asked him if he was having trouble, and he agreed that the spreadsheets were no longer working for him and that he’d been unable to find a good solution either.

The issue seems to be that all of those products are accounting applications at heart; they are NOT job-costing applications, and job-costing is what we need. Sure, you can force QB to sorta do the job by monkeying around with classes, customers, or projects, but is that really a solution when the least expensive subscription to QBO is $12.50/mo? And if you want to manage bills - which I’m sure your trades would appreciate - you can ratchet that right on up to $35/mo.

Want to track projects in Xero? Try $60/mo. Ouch.

So I set out to design and build an app specifically for small volume flippers to track their project financials. I wanted to be able to add the various accounts I use regularly to purchase job materials and labor; add the various jobs I’m working on; add loan and budget info for each job so I could better better manage the draw process; easily add expenses and assign them to either a specific job or to company overhead; easily add incomes, either job related or not, from draws, vendor credits, material returns, etc.; easily add bills for future expenses due; and produce reports common to the flipping business.

I’m happy to report that I have what I think is a clean, tasteful-looking app design that meets all of those needs plus a few more. I’m not quite ready to show it off, but I AM at the point where I’d like to get some feedback from fellow flippers: are you having the same issues we had, or is there some reasonably priced solution already out there that we missed? Are there features in addition to the ones mentioned above that you’d like to see included? And, perhaps most importantly, if the app works as I’ve described, is it something you’d consider adding to your toolbox?

I’m also building a list of potential beta testers; if you’d like to be included, please reach out via DM and I’ll put you on the list.

Thanks in advance for your input, and as usual, I'm grateful to the BP community for the awesome resource it's become.

For as much traffic as BP surely gets, its website is pretty awful. I suppose it could be just me, but I doubt it. When I receive notification of a new message (which itself is an on-again off-again occurrence, not sure why I sometimes receive notifications and sometimes don't), clicking on the "View Message" link takes me to half a screen of text. The top half of the screen is completely blank, like the world's largest blank banner ad. (See the attached image.)

Scrolling does no good; the message itself scrolls in the small allotted space but the giant blank space remains at the top of the screen. There's no way to reach the "Reply" functionality below the message. (Admittedly, I'm running an obscure browser called "Chrome" but I also tried it on Safari with the same results.)

Next issue: I've spent the last twenty minutes looking for my inbox. Why isn't there an avatar with my profile information and links to the inbox etc. at the top of the page, like literally every other website on earth? Why do I have to go fish a message notification out of the trash and then click the "View Message" link to get to my inbox? How is that user-friendly?

There are two things you need to consider when using "rule-of-thumb" estimating for per-square-foot budget estimates. First, the finish level of the house: is it basic, standard, designer, or custom? Second, you need to consider the rehab level you're planning on: clean & list, light rehab, heavy rehab, remodeling? (These aren't the exact terms used in Villani's book, but they convey the exact same concept. I didn't invent this stuff, I'm just paraphrasing from memory.)

So what you do is say, "This house is a standard home that needs light rehab." Then you look in a little chart and cross-reference "standard" and "light rehab," and you get a per-square-foot number for estimated rehab costs. It won't be spot-on, and I wouldn't bid the job using the number or apply for a loan using the number - but I would and routinely do use it to determine whether or not a given wholesaler's deal is worth investigating further (spoiler alert: it's usually not).

As I said in my first post, you'll need to update the numbers since it's been a few years since the book was published, and labor & material prices haven't really rebounded since Harvey. But once you get them dialed in, you can get pretty close to what your final budget numbers will be.