Quickbooks: Real Estate and Personal Bookkeeping Must Have

Bookkeeping used to be my nightmare

I recently started using Quickbooks (referral link with 50% discount) for all personal finance and real estate bookkeeping. Now, I wish I did this a long-long-long-long time ago!

Prior to Quickbooks, I used an Excel-based manual process. I logged into online banking once a month and downloaded transactions. Then, I copied them into an Excel template. Assigned a category to each transaction. Refreshed my pivot tables and reviewed the results. Seems easy?

This process actually took an incredible amount of time! With every new rental property I purchased, the work-load increased. The volume steadily grew to an average of 300 transactions a month coming from 27 bank accounts. I was spending roughly three work days a month on data entry and review. And by the time I was done, the next month was already midway! Ughh...

Quickbooks gave me my time back!

I signed up for Quickbooks and linked it to all my bank accounts. So that all income and expense transactions automatically flowed into QuickBooks from CIBC, RBC, NBC, Scotiabank, BMO, Equitable, Questrade, CapitalOne, etc. No more download or copy-paste was needed.

Quickbooks keeps me organized!

In addition, I created auto-rules to categorize the incoming transactions from the feeds into the appropriate categories and classes. Most of the data fell into the buckets I needed all by itself. As for the remaining transactions, Quickbooks app lets me classify them on the go. For example, while I wait to pick up my son from Karate, I open the app and swipe things into places. Bookkeeping happens naturally in real time.

Quickbooks helps me collect rent!

Another feature I love is reporting! The Customer Detail report shows me the rent roll. I can easily see all completed and missing rent payments when I run current and past months data, side by side. It takes me just a couple of seconds to follow up on outstanding rent payments. I issue invoices for past-due rent and keep track of all the catch-up payments as they come in - all tenant activity is in one central place.

Quickbooks keeps me accountable!

The moment I log in, I know my income, expenses, and net profit or loss exactly, to the penny. I can drill into data by property, tenant, partner, company, time period, etc. I use insights from QuickBooks to plan on how to become financially independent sooner.

Quickbooks knows if I spend more or less than I make; 

if my assets are cash positive or negative; 

if my net worth is rising or falling. 

Quickbooks helps me make the decisions that are right, not the ones that are easy.

If you'd like to give Quickbooks a try, use this link to get a 50% discount.

Hope you love this tool as much as I do! Let me know how it goes :)