What we find is that owners in your position can do well in a set of ideal circumstances:  the home is in great condition, they find excellent tenants who treat the property with care, and nothing crazy happens. 

Some markets are excellent for short term, and others not so great.It depends upon your goals, your temperament, and the time you have to invest.

BiggerPockets is indeed an excellent platform for expanding your knowledge and networking.

Does anyone have any recommendations, or even better any spreadsheets, excel or web-based, they use to keep track of all construction expenses for Flip/BRRRR properties? 

It runs the fourth Tuesday of every month and is an excellent chance to network with other investors.

If you have the ability to house hack 3-5 properties in the span of 5 years, that's an excellent way of building wealth!

Tenants should be paying for anything they did that required repairs during the tenancy (eg they caused the toilet to back up, they pay for the plumber).I don't know what software to recommend, but you can do a lot of it in excel in a single file, just use different worksheets for each property within that one file.

The wife has excellent credit (high 700s) and the adult son (also a contributing income earner) has excellent credit as well (mid 700s). 

Is there an online platform on which we can do this or do you track this in a excel sheet ? 

It also has credibility and trust issues.