Tag: rental income expense tracking

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Landlord Tips

Superior Tool to Zillow Rental Spreadsheet

There are better tools than the Zillow rental spreadsheet for landlords.

If you’re searching for rental properties, you may have heard of Zillow. Zillow is a popular online real estate platform that allows you to search for homes, apartments, and other properties for rent or sale. It also provides some real estate tools including a Zillow rental spreadsheet, which is a tool that helps landlords track income and expenses. It is free to download and use, however, it lacks some features that are important to have when managing rental property.

Limitations of Zillow Rental Spreadsheet

  1. The spreadsheet is designed for up to five properties. If you start using the Zillow worksheet, you’ll quickly run out of room if you have more units. Or, if you have a roommate situation and want to track which individuals have paid rent, then you’re limited again. You need to add more lines to the spreadsheet to accommodate more properties.
  2. The Zillow rental spreadsheet does not generate reports. Do you want to know the profit and loss for an individual property? The Zillow worksheet only totals the income and expenses for all properties and shows that number as a cell. You cannot view profit and loss by month. Additionally, the worksheet cannot easily generate a report to help complete Schedule E, which needs to be filed at tax time with Form 1040.
  3. You need to know how to use a spreadsheet. When you download the Zillow rental spreadsheet, you will need to open it in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to use it. And if you add additional lines to the spreadsheet, then you will need to update the formulas to capture totals. So you will need some knowledge of spreadsheets to comfortably and accurately navigate your data.

RentalIncomeExpense.com is a Superior and Free Tool

A better, completely free alternative is RentalIncomeExpense.com is designed for landlords. It is free. Landlords simply enter income and expense information based on Schedule E categories. You do not need to adjust formulas based on information you record. You can generate reports including profit and loss and Schedule E Helper with just one mouse click. And, there is no limit to the number of properties you can track.

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Landlord Tips

Rental Income Expense Tracking for The New Year

Rental Income and Expense Tracking for the New Year
Start the new year right with a better rental income and expense tracking tool

January is a new year with new promise. Unfortunately, landlords are still looking at the prior year as tax season nears. Wouldn’t it be great to have an easy to use and simple tool to expedite your rental income and expense tracking? Fortunately, www.RentalIncomeExpense.com is just such a tool. Best of all, it is a FREE service!

Do Not Do Income and Expense Tracking With a Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets make sense for calculations that you need to quickly do that are beyond a calculator. However, if you are using a spreadsheet constantly, you are probably not using the most efficient tool. This is certainly the case when tracking rental income and expenses.

Do you need to quickly create a profit and loss statement from your rental income and expenses? How about an IRS report for Schedule E? Or need to save keystrokes by reentering a common recurring expense? RentalIncomeExpense.com lets you do these things effortlessly.

RentalIncomeExpense.com is a Breeze

Get started by visiting www.RentalIncomeExpense.com. Change the way you do rental income and expense tracking! Signing up only takes a minute and the service is free, so there is nothing to lose.

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General

Automatic Landlord Income Expense Tracking

Landlord Income Expense Tracking
Automatic and free landlord income expense tracking software makes life easier.

As we’ve already discussed, landlord income expense tracking is an important yet time consuming task for landlords. With all of the options available from a worksheet to landlord accounting software, each one has its pros and cons. We are going to highlight two major pros for landlords using RentalIncomeExpense.com – automatic recording of information and price.

Automatic Landlord Bookkeeping

If landlords want to save some time on tracking rental income and expenses when using RentalIncomeExpense.com, then they should use ClearNow for online rent payment. Rent collected via ClearNow is automatically recorded as income in RentalIncomeExpense.com. Furthermore, fees paid to ClearNow to collect rent online are also automatically recorded in RentalIncomeExpense.com. So just by using ClearNow, landlords eliminate the need to manually record rental income and the associated expense and thus save time.

Free Income Expense Tracking

RentalIncomeExpense.com is free rental property software. It’s hard to beat free. Many will ask, “What’s the catch”, when something so valuable is free. Believe it or not, there is no catch. Designed for landlords, RentalIncomeExpense.com is simple yet powerful landlord accounting software. Because it is free, landlords lose little when trying it out before taking out their wallets and purchasing software for their rental property needs. Beyond free, it also provides reports, like profit and loss, that tell landlords how well business is doing.

Information is powerful. A free tool like RentalIncomeExpense.com makes the mundane task of landlord bookkeeping all the more valuable.

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General

Increase Rental Income & Value of Rental Property with Simple Steps

Simple steps to increase rental income and value of rental property
There are simple steps landlords can take to increase rental income and the value of rental property.

Successful landlords want to increase rental income and the value of their rental property. There are some simple ways to achieve both goals. With any business, investing in your property so that you can offer more value can justify commanding a higher rent from tenants.

Boost Curb Appeal & Rental Income

One of the driving factors tenants consider when searching for a rental is location. If your property is located near parks, popular businesses like grocery stores, or main travel routes, stressing the benefits of the physical location of your rental property can boost interest and value. Following close behind geographic location is the curb appeal of your property. Is the exterior clean and in good shape? Is the landscaping neat and attractive? If the answers to these questions are “YES”, then you’re already one step ahead in providing value.

Take a Look Inside

You don’t have to do a major renovation to make the interior of your rental property feel fresh and clean. Instead, simple upgrades like a fresh coat of paint, new hardware, and brighter lightbulbs can create an attractive vibe. And something as simple as a good scrub – in the bathrooms and kitchen for example – make a clean unit go a long way. If the interior of your rental property looks and feels great, then it’s easier for you to find a tenant willing to pay your asking rent.

Sell Amenities

Who doesn’t like great amenities especially if they are included in the rent? You may be able to earn more if you charge a la carte for extras, but no one likes to be nickeled and dimed. If you offer great amenities just include them as part of your rent and thus get the asking rent that you want. Here are some amenities that can increase the value of your property and your rental income:

Online rent payment: Tenants want an easy way to pay rent. If rent payment is on auto pilot for tenants, it will make your life easier to get paid. Consider services like ClearNow or RentPayment for online rent payment.

Short term leases: Typically, rents tend to be higher for shorter term leases. So if you have a prospective tenant willing to pay more for a shorter than standard lease term, you can enhance your rental income.

Boosting curb appeal, improving the look and feel of the inside, and offering great amenities will help you increase your rental income and value of your rental property. These steps are easy to take and can make a lasting difference. Whatever you decide to do to increase rental income and the value of your rental property, be sure to keep track of what you spend. Tracking your rental property expenses with a free tool like RentalIncomeExpense or other form of rental property accounting software will make your life so much easier!

Categories
General

Why Landlords Should Not Use the Zillow Worksheet

The Zillow Worksheet is a popular spreadsheet to download that Zillow provides for landlords to track rental income and expense. It is free to download and, at first, sounds like a great way for small landlords to track income and expenses.

Zillow Worksheet Has Many Issues

Unfortunately, by the time most landlords sink hours entering in their income and expenses with Zillow Worksheet, they’ll realize its significant limitations. Paraphrasing the old movie ‘The Untouchables’, Zillow worksheet is the technological equivalent of bringing a ‘knife to a gun fight‘.

  1. There is no individual income or expense item detail tracking. With the Zillow worksheet, you can only enter in the amount for a category and month. Do you want to know what the breakdown was for your ‘Advertising’ expense between different advertising options for a given month? There’s no way to provide that detail, just a dollar amount. Do you want to search for when you made a repair to the floor? Again, no item detail means you can never track this down. This will be a HUGE headache if you’re trying to make sure that you’re properly accounting for all the expenses (as you should, to reduce your taxes as much as you should be able to).
  2. The spreadsheet is only designed for up to five properties. If you start using the Zillow worksheet, you’ll quickly run out of room if you have more units. Or, if you rent to a roommate situation and want to track which individuals have made rent payment, you’re limited again.
  3. The Zillow worksheet has no way to generate reports. Want to know the profit and loss for an individual property? You can’t do that. The Zillow worksheet only totals the income and expenses for all properties and shows that number as a cell. There is no way to see profit and loss by month. And, the categories selected in this worksheet do not match up to the IRS 1040 Schedule E categories, which means this worksheet cannot easily generate a report for Schedule E.

When one really looks at the Zillow Worksheet, it is almost malpractice for a beginning landlord to use it – it doesn’t track income and expense item details, doesn’t show basic reports like profit and loss, and doesn’t grow with a landlord’s needs. It is surprising that for years, Zillow promotes this worksheet as a viable tool.

RentalIncomeExpense.com is a Better, Free Alternative to Zillow Worksheet

A better, completely free alternative is RentalIncomeExpense.com. It is free. It allows landlords to enter income and expense detail and Schedule E categories. Profit and Loss reports can be generated with just one mouse click. And, it allows an unlimited number of properties to be tracked.