Excellent tips!

If you did want to keep it simple, you could just create or download some expense/income tracker excel sheets.  

My spreadsheet is probably 130 lines or so in Excel and I'd say a good 40 to 50 of those things are Home Depot items.

Excellent info above- I'm a newbie and looking at a small park with a mix of storage units, pads and a small single family house.Seller is showing total noi of 6,000 for the year.

@Kim Meredith Hampton made excellent points for consideration also.Once you've collected rent the availablily to give notice of change isn't until the end of when they are paid up.. or within 60 or 30 days of that.. so by collecting early your in for the duration of payments received, even if they are on month to month. you've closed the door on changes until the pre payments are done. 

Years ago in the mid-2000s I managed to get (after about 6 months of repeated efforts) a CD of data from Providence but it was only some assessor data, and a few years ago I tried again and they gave me even less information and this time it was in PDF, not Excel as it had been in the 2000s.

I dont deal in war zones ever  never never  and we find excellent long term tenants for our properties and the taxes are more then reasonable... trick is an easy one ... visits as  often as possible and have a great on the ground team...yes many of the properties are older but they dont build them now like they did then... these properties are solid.. having a building inspector check to make sure before closing is just common sense... then a great re hab team and you have a property with a great return... 

They have done an excellent job with my rental properties. 

The money order tenant gets an immediate excel sheet mailed back to her whenever I receive any rent.

I'm not denying that irrevocable trusts can be an excellent tool.