We track flips on the P&L in the following accounts:Flips - Sales Price, Flips - Purchase Price, Flips - Acquisition Costs, Flips - Rehab Costs, Flips - Holding Costs, and Flips - Selling CostsIf the project isn't sold by the end of the year, we book a journal entry to move it from the P&L to the Balance Sheet.

@Scott Mac you've got to know where to invest in Detroit to avoid getting taken advantage of or just plain making a big mistake.Detroit investing is block-by-block, which is difficult for OOS investors to do.Zip codes are statistically too big.That's why we've spent considerable resources ranking Detroit's 183 Neighborhoods. 

.$3K spent on inspections with no house to my name yet. 

This is the part of the tax law that controls whether the money we spent on fixing something on our property is treated as an expense or as a capital improvement.The Regulations I mentioned are extremely complex and confusing. 

We spent a year in upstate NY with my husbands family and were considering doing something similar up there since we had places to stay.

But obviously, we have spent the better part of 20 years on the buyer's side of the table, so we are looking for some general advice, tips/tricks, or even the pitfalls of setting up a hard money lending arm to augment our current business model. 

The deal fell apart, and not only did we lose the $5,000 assignment fee, but we also lost the $5,000 we had loaned to the sellers, who admitted they knew about the second loan but never disclosed it to us.When we asked the sellers to return the money, they told us it was already spent on Christmas presents and moving expenses, with no intention of repaying us.This experience was a painful wake-up call.

I know I've spent more than my share of time trying to configure software to work the way I needed it to and that distracted me from my business of flipping houses.  

It's really easy to create stressful and costly problems for yourself in this game, and as an investor, your time is much better spent learning and working on your next deal rather than trying to find a handyman on craigslist who will pump water out of your basement in another state at 3am. 

One was on the same street as another that I own and the other was in a city that I had spent a lot of time and seriously considered moving to.