Tag: landlord accounting

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Landlord Tips

Rental Property Maintenance Expenses

Rental Property Maintenance Expenses
Landlords face a variety of expenses when managing rental property.

Landlords like to collect rent on time and in full. That’s the revenue side of the landlording business. The expense side can vary widely because of unforseeable surprises. Landlords can organize rental property maintenance expenses into two buckets – known and unknown. Understanding these expenses and preparing for them as best as possible are beneficial for landlording success.

Known Expenses

Known rental property maintenance expenses as those that landlords expect every year. Examples of these types of expenses include mortgage payments, insurance premiums, and property taxes. For the most part, these types of expenses remain the same year over year, and they are rarely a surprise to pay when due. Known expenses are the easier to budget.

Unknown Expenses

Unknown rental property maintenance expenses are more difficult to budget because they are . . . well . . . unknown. Many of these expenses are related to some form of repair. For example, the air conditioning unit could suddenly stop working in the middle of a heat wave, and you need to figure out how to remedy the situation as quickly as possible. Or, a pipe bursts and you need to quickly repair it to prevent damage to the tenant’s property or the rental property. To make life easier, it is wise to do your best to plan for the unexpected. Planning can include setting aside a budget for emergencies or a short list of professionals to help in a time of need.

As landlords incur rental property maintenance expenses, they can track them in landlord software. By tracking expenses, landlords can run reports that may help make budgeting easier for future years. RentalIncomeExpense.com follows the Form 1040 Schedule E expense categories.

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General

Should Landlords Use Quickbooks?

Should Landlords Use Quickbooks
Quickbooks is great software for small business. But landlords can do better with other services.

Quickbooks by Intuit is a leading small business accounting software. Landlords often consider Quickbooks to do rental property accounting. However, there are much easier tools for landlords to use.

Quickbooks is too complicated

Quickbooks, by reputation, is not easy to learn. People buy books and videos to answer questions about how to set-up things in Quickbooks.

Moreover, even for Quickbooks experts, using Quickbooks for property management is difficult. In fact, it is challenging enough to warrant a video course on how landlords can use Quickbooks.

Landlord-specific accounting software is easier to use

Fortunately, there is a lot of landlord accounting software available as alternatives to Quickbooks. Just as a handyman has many tools in their toolbox (hammer, screwdrivers, wrenches) to fix problems, the right sized landlord software can make your life so much easier.

For landlords who just need a few reports and simple income and expense tracking, RentalIncomeExpense.com is an easy-to-use and free alternative to Quickbooks. For large property managers with complex needs, there are property management accounting services such as Appfolio and Buildium.

As one example of the benefits of using a dedicated tool like RentalIncomeExpense.com, a landlord can quickly create an IRS Schedule E helper report with just a click of a button. This report contains all categories on the IRS form that their accountant will need at tax time. Try doing that with Quickbooks!

Categories
General

Landlord Accounting with RentalIncomeExpense

Landlord Accounting
Landlord accounting with RentalIncomeExpense.com makes tracking rental property income and expenses free and easy.

Landlords can manage their recordkeeping task in a variety of ways which can range from using a simple paper ledger to expensive sophisticated software. We’re going to take a look at RentalIncomeExpense.com as an ideal landlord accounting solution because it’s free, and it generates powerful reports when tracking rental property income and expenses.

FREE & EASY

Yes, you read correctly . . . RentalIncomeExpense.com is free. Landlords do not need to pay anything to use this tool. Most accounting software, like QuickBooks, Buildium, and RentecDirect, are fairly expensive, especially for the small landlord. Tracking rental property income and expenses is not the most exciting task, but it is a very important task. Making landlord accounting easy where you simply just record dates, vendors/customers, and amounts according to simple drop down menus makes the entire process painless.

POWERFUL REPORTING

Every business wants to know how well it is doing, and landlording is no exception. Generating reports from income and expenses that are tracked is powerful. RentalIncomeandExpense.com provides instant reports that matter, like Profit & Loss and a 1040 Schedule E helper. Because RentalIncomeExpense.com follows the income and expense categories used by the IRS’ Form 1040 Schedule E, the helper report makes tax time easier. You wouldn’t be able to generate such powerful reports if you were using a paper ledger or a simple spreadsheet for landlord accounting.

There is a lot of different accounting software to choose from. Because landlord accounting is such an important task, we encourage you to consider RentalIncomeExpense.com. It’s free and provides powerful reports that tell you how your landlording business is doing all the while making tax time a whole lot easier.