If its small stuff and my core parnters IE I have been doing deals with them for more than a decade I just fund the rehab up front.. makes for much easier book keeping for me. 

Investors that are not incorporated publicly have no accounting requirement, except as required for taxes which doesn't require a certain method.Real business owners follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), your bookkeeper or account will even if you aren't a public traded company.

I get excellent bookkeeping from my management company. 

On the bookkeeping end of things, these properties will be handled individually, but I would like to have one email address, one business card, one google voice number, etc. for tenants.

Hope the cash payments will be verifiable, (checking account records and quality of bookkeeping).  

That said, there is a laundry list of things she kind of helped herself to when she was doing the final bookkeeping after the firing.  

My goal is to get an virtual assistant / bookkeeper / office manager to handle everything and I'm just trying to figure out if its a must if they need to know quickbooks.  

There are several other expenses that you have not listed:- Vacancy %- Lawn care- Snow removal- Utilities for common area (if applicable), Utilities during vacancies- Pest control- HVAC maintenance- Plumbing- Administrative (evictions, bookkeeping, advertising, etc.)- Property management - You should budget for this even though right now you plan on self managing.  

Aside from the extra liability protection I also like to keep my books in my finances extremely organized.For each LLC that I form I also have a new EIN and a separate bank account.That means all of my income and expenses for each property sits within its own bank account and therefore is very easy to see which property is more profitable that the others, pay bills, and manage finances.If on the other hand, I had one LLC that owned all three of the properties I would have to rely on my bookkeeper and/or my property manager to differentiate which property brought in income and which expenses were attached to each property.

I can already tell you one area, bookkeeping, if someone could simply type in "paint at 2333 S.