All Forum Posts by: Saad D.

When you say "worth it", what do you mean exactly? How do you track late fees? What if the tenants get behind on rent, how do you track all of that? What if it's now two tenants, and three and four?

With respect, I totally disagree with this advice. We all need to learn to be investors, not landlords. And software like Baselane is not "fancy", it's actually built to drive time savings and insights so the landlord can become an investor, and not get stuck doing landlord tasks. 

My hypothesis is the following: one of the main reasons why most small investors stay small is because they aren't using the proper tools and systems and are just stuck doing the grunt work. If you want to scale, then don't follow this type of advice. 

Hi @Brandon Garcia, I think most first time landlords make this mistake. They do not set up the right systems and then pay for it later. I can guarantee you this will happened because I made the same mistake with my first rental. Whatever you do, I strongly recommend avoiding Zelle. I understand you want to get your cash instantly but you're leaving yourself open to many risks with using a Zelle, Venmo, cash app, etc. 

Use a system that allows you to do the following 3 things: automatically charge a late fee, track all paid and unpaid invoices in a clear ledger, prevent tenants from paying partial payments.

At this moment, you're also just asking about how to collect rent. Let me ask you a question - How are you planning to mange all of your rental property finances (vendor payments, taxes, insurance, mortgage, reconciling rent payments, understand how much money you're actually making, have clean financials for tax time, etc.)?

The reason I ask is because the second biggest mistake I see new landlords making is not organizing their rental finances. This may seem trivial now, and not something you need because you only have one property. However, let me reframe it for you. If you want to scale, and be a pro investors, It's about building the right habits, and establishing the right systems and processes, now, not later. That's actually why I joined Baselane 3.5 years ago to build a platform I know I needed to run my rental business and to help 15M landlords in the U.S. do the same. Hope that helps.

Great feedback. Your input has been very valuable.

We're (Baselane) building a balance sheet. You'll have something by the summer most likely.

Ahead of the balance sheet were launching AI bookkeeping in a month or so. I hope you get to test that out.

Thanks @Jamie Banks. You can upload historical data via CSV on Baselane to start. This really helps with the migration from Excel or other software into Baselane. You made a very good suggestion to have backup file saved. 

Hey everyone, I’m a landlord myself with 18 units, across 10 properties —and for years, tax season was a source of dread. I remember spending entire weekends crunching numbers, gathering receipts from random shoeboxes and backtracking through countless transactions in my bank account. By the time I had everything together, I always felt like I was rushing, and I’d inevitably forget something. 

Eventually, I realized that if I kept waiting until tax time to organize my books, I would never escape the stress (and extra CPA fees). So I committed to tracking everything throughout the year. Here’s what helped me most:

1. Quarterly Check-Ins: I spend an hour each quarter reviewing my rental income and categorizing any expenses right away. This habit alone changed the game for me—I no longer have a mountain of data entry in March. We have a VA so she does all the tagging and I ask her to export it from Baselane, into excel, then I review it and give comments.
2. Going Digital: Scanning and storing my receipts in real time saves me from searching for that one $17 plumbing supply receipt. It’s crazy how quickly those small things add up. Most of our receipts are digital (email) so we just put it in drive and attach it to Baselane transactions as we go (weekly). It's part of the VAs job to do this every day.
3. Smart Banking/Tools: Full disclosure, I work at Baselane, a banking and finance platform designed for landlords. One reason I joined is because I genuinely needed the exact solution Baselane offers: a banking account that automatically categorizes rental transactions, streamlined reporting, and easy exports. But even if you’re not using Baselane, any tool that integrates with your bank and helps automate categorization can drastically reduce year-end headaches. You can integrate Baselane with Quickbooks for example.
4. CPA Handoff: Once I started keeping my records tidy in real time, handing things off to my CPA became pretty painless. Instead of 30+ emails back and forth, now I just send them a consolidated report or grant them access to review transactions. This year, 96% of my transactions are already tagged for 2024, so I expect to do about 1 hour of cleanup before I send to my CPA.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m still learning new ways to simplify tax prep every year. But for me, the biggest shift was developing a routine and using tools that let me see my rental finances at a glance.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. If anyone else has a favorite strategy or tool they use to keep tax prep under control, I’d love to hear it! Always happy to swap ideas and keep refining this process.

Just as a followup, rent reporting has been one of the fastest adopted tenant products at Baselane. It's still early but we're expecting tenants to use the service for 9-18 months, and about 45% to also order the extra reporting of their previous rent payments which costs ~$20-25.

Checkout this post from Rob Whiting, CEO of Boom (Baselane partner for rent reporting), explaining his predictions for the adoption of rent reporting.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robwhiting_big-headline-out-f...

Yes. I think we all agree about the Balance sheet. And as accountants you use it to build a complete picture and ensure completeness. 

Hi @Simon W.Thanks for replying. At Baselane, we're going to build the custom chart of accounts and Balance sheet.

Just for my own understanding, I'd like some clarification on your statements.

1. I don't really understand what you said about edit charts of accounts. If most investors, and by most I mean 95% are not accountants, then why do they need to edit chart of accounts? I'm genuinely asking to understand the use case for my self for an individual investor.

Re. balance, as someone who is a former CPA and has prepared financial statements for multi-billion $ funds, I understand the important of a balance sheet. Based on the user research we've seen most use cash flow as a proxy for performance. Many, if not most, want to have this data, but a very high % don't calculate monthly performance. They usually tally it up at the end of the year. Has that been your experience with RE investors?

My question back to you about Balance sheet is what % of RE investors that are not accountants understand what a balance sheet is and how do they actually use it? (Do they know how to use it)? Would love some actual reference to data if you have it (not anecdotal). 

Thanks

@Simon W.Great questions. 

Baselane offers cash flow at the unit, proper or portfolio level. Yes, you can consolidate it into 1 report.

Balance sheet- this will be built next year. It's not as highly requested as one may think for multiple reasons (we're building based on feature demand). 

Edit chart of accounts - not at the moment. We offer over 120 categories that are real estate related and periodically add more based on customer requests. 

How do you use edit chart of accounts feature and for what use case?