A Clean Start: Bookkeeping for Real Estate

Our team at ShoreAgents will help you support your financial needs by providing thebookkeeping servicesyou deserve. Maintain Financial Statements, including income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, management reports, etc., both on a cash and accrual basis. QuickBooks Online provides all the necessary functions for real estate accounting and is currently our accounting software of choice.

Having a comprehensive list of categories is important to accurately report your transactions. Coding all expenses to something vanilla such as “business expenses” relays no useful information. If you use an official accounting system, that system will automate much of the behind-the-scenes work.

Bookkeeping Services for Real Estate Investors

Hence, it is advisable that family members maintain bookkeeping of real estate transactions regularly. Even small items, such as phone bills for official calls are best paid by a business account and a company debit card to avoid any mix-up between the two. Nothing creates a financial mess at the end of the year quite like personal or business expenses charged to the wrong account. By keeping your realtor business and personal accounts separate, your bookkeeping will go much more smoothly and you’ll be able to keep your business’ professional image in tact. For end-of-year accounting, you will need to review your personal account for possible business deductions such as portions of your phone bill or even your mortgage payment. Meanwhile, keep small business purchases on a personal account to an absolute minimum.

Our in-depth knowledge of industry-specific regulations and best practices ensures that your financial records are accurate and compliant, reducing the risk of errors and potential penalties. Having an accurate calculation of owner’s equity can help an investor to decide when the time is right to refinance a rental property mortgage. Real estate bookkeeping usually isn’t the first thing investors think of when investing in property, but it’s an important part of owning and managing rental property. With good bookkeeping, an investor can better identify opportunities to increase rental income, reduce expenses without affecting property value, and better track owner’s equity.

A snapshot of what we offer

Our proven outsourced process provides you with the accounting system and resources you need to get insightful reports, monitor cash flow, and save hours of bookkeeping time. We offer quick and efficient financial reporting services to real estate companies, which help these companies in determining their financial performance. Manage your assets, evaluate their values, and plan your moves with data-driven insights with our property management accounting solutions. If you are a sales agent, you may not need all the complex tools available in products like Xero. Quickbooks Self Employed is a great bookkeeping package that helps you keep personal and business expenses separate, and generate reports and tax forms at the end of the year. Real Estate accounting and bookkeeping services will help you identify margins by each location.

A great time to separate these accounts is when you officially file for an LLC, S Corp, or other business entity. By doing so, you will be required to file your business taxes separately from your personal ones. It may seem like a hassle or extra step when you are first starting your business, but this process can provide an invaluable layer of legal protections down the line. You should commit just 30 minutes a day to reading or watching something about finance. This doesn’t mean you have to wake up every morning and watch CNBC, but even a generic finance article will help. You will find that once you start to dig in, finance is really quite basic.

Tax View all Bookkeeping View all AR View all Why Should You Choose Our Real Estate Bookkeeping Services? While the major benefit of outsourcing your real estate bookkeeping is enormous savings on time and expenses, there are numerous benefits of partnering with us. Advanced Bookkeeping Tools We make use of some of the latest bookkeeping tools and software to ensure accurate, reliable, and top-quality services quickly. High Quality We follow stringent quality standards and our processes are certified to ensure that all the results delivered by us are of high quality.

Why Should You Choose Our Real Estate Bookkeeping Services?

And as with any industry, real estate will have its own bookkeeping nuances to consider. The right real estate accounting system always considers everything that makes your small business unique. It’s entirely possible to find an adaptable solution that accommodates your business practices, whether that includes property management, working with tenants, or tracking commissions. If you’re looking for an affordable solution to your accounting needs, you may want to consider looking at our accounting templates. These templates greatly simplify the accounting process for small business owners and real estate investors by offering easy-to-understand layouts and a streamlined design. Reconcile bank accounts monthly to double check that transactions recorded by the bank match those shown in the real estate bookkeeping system.

However, as soon as you begin working on your first investment you need to take business finances more seriously. This means keeping your business and personal accounts separately, and not mingling charges between the two accounts. You can ask us at ShoreAgents for help with your real estate bookkeeping work.

Considering a Virtual Bookkeeper for Your Organization

There’s nothing better than being able to save a little extra time and money as a real estate agent. Finding an efficient and cost-effective way to take care of your real estate bookkeeping and accounting is imperative to doing just that. Having a clean set of books allows for real time internal financial analysis and up-to-date information for your advisors. It also ensures your CPA has accurate numbers at tax time and you can provide financials to a bank when requested. So we’ve put together the basics to help you set up your accounting books with a real estate emphasis. Let our dedicated team of experienced real estate accountants and bookkeepers manage your financial records with precision and professionalism.

Communicating your needs to your virtual bookkeeping service is essential to setting up the right team. Once you outgrow your current service and require more help, you can easily add members or hours to your plan rather than placing another ad and interviewing dozens more accounting professionals. No one likes an audit, but if your books are in order, you’ll have a much easier time arguing your case and reconciling any discrepancies.

In short, managing your real estate accounting procedures is about more than personal preference. You must comply with how your county, city, or state regulates real estate income, such as state tax obligations or business license requirements. Managing real estate is a local and regional game, meaning that rules and requirements vary based on where you live and work. One of the best pieces of advice for better real estate accounting is to familiarize yourself with local regulations specific to your jurisdiction when you get started. Within the real estate industry, these five elements can separate fiscally responsible agents from those who rely on disorganized or outdated records in their accounts.

Bookkeeping Services for Real Estate Brokers

Whatever the need, Botkeeper saves time with redundant real estate bookkeeping responsibilities. Real estate agents and brokers, will certainly have key expense categories such as income from commissions, fees and dues, education credits, marketing and advertising, and vehicle mileage costs. While this accounting system may be considered more simplistic, being disciplined with bookkeeping is crucial if you want to prevent frantic late nights full of data entry. As with any accounting practice, real estate accounting requires tracking income and expenses to create a clear overview of each property’s cash flow.

Once the project is complete, the asset is in use and your CPA will begin depreciating it. When we hire a new full time employee, we are generally limited to the local talent pool and out of town candidates who are willing to relocate. If your local talent pool is limited, you’ll have to pay top dollar to attract and retain quality candidates from out of town. By going with a virtual team, you have access to talent pools from around the world without the burden of trying to relocate them. Aside from providing you personal peace of mind in understanding exactly where your business stands financially, there are some very practical and legal reasons why bookkeeping is so important.

Additionally, sub-classes can be used to add another layer of organization to your bookkeeping. For example, if we wanted to categorize commercial vs. residential or by region or county, properties and reports could be further segmented along logical lines. These could be cash held in the business, receivables due from tenants or buildings generating business revenue. These details could change how you choose to manage or outsource your bookkeeping needs, so it’s essential to understand the expectations and policies. The list below highlights some of the basic things you should track, regardless of whether your operations are just getting started or have built considerable traction. Simplifying your processes gives you more time to spend on vital business activities.

If you’re setting up a brokerage, it can be an LLC or even a legal corporation. SLC Bookkeeping has helped real estate gurus like you gain solid financial footing through accurate reconciliation, reporting, forecasting and strategic planning. As a real estate investor himself, he understands the process and the language of the industry. He enjoys working with other investors and passing on his wealth of bookkeeping knowledge.

It’s wise to create a separate business account so you can keep track of every transaction. You can then connect to your personal account or transfer funds between accounts on a pre-scheduled basis. Investing in accounting best practices will set you up to excel during tax season. When you’re ready to go live, make sure you have some time set aside to get your virtual staff set up on the right foot. Ironing out the kinks early on will make it much easier to deal with any potential hiccups in the future. There’s a very real learning curve if you’re going to take care of the bookkeeping duties yourself.

We Work With All Major Real Estate Bookkeeping Software

Furthermore, outsourcing your bookkeeping tasks frees up valuable time and resources allowing you to concentrate on what truly matters – growing your real estate business. With our team handling the complexities of your financial records, you can dedicate your efforts to property acquisition, development, and building strong client relationships. Gain a competitive edge in the market and enhance customer satisfaction by letting REA manage your finances. With user-friendly accounting solutions made available to businesses of all shapes and sizes, there is really no excuse not to get started today.

Open a business bank account to keep personal and business income and expenses separate. Reports created from a real estate bookkeeping system can also be generated based on a specific date range, such as monthly, year-end, or trailing 12 months. Most investors use the cash system of accounting by reporting income when it is received and recording expenses when they are paid.

You have to keep track of your income and other financial points to ensure you can handle your taxes. You must provide accurate details on your expenses, income flows, and anything else that goes in or out of your business. This saves you valuable time and keeps you free to scale and grow your real estate business. Track your general expenses, travel expenses, and your commissions and transactions accurately with our customized bookkeeping tools for real estate agents. Mazuma is a licensed accounting firm based in Orem, Utah, and members of the AICPA.

If invoices are being sent by email, be sure to add that information as well. Mortgage payments or debt service payments can also be tricky to record correctly. Mortgage payments consist of debt, interest and potentially an escrow amount. Make sure to add these additional categories to the mortgage payment when posting from the bank feed. If the overall project runs over $2,500, we will need to capitalize all of those expenditures. Under our assets listing, set up a category for each unit called improvements to record these transactions.

• With good bookkeeping, an investor can better identify opportunities to increase rental income, reduce expenses without affecting property value, and better track owner’s equity.
• You can use your real estate bookkeeping program to help you keep track of all your expenses and how well you’re managing your funds.
• And as with any industry, real estate will have its own bookkeeping nuances to consider.
• Doing this on one card will not move the needle, but making several moves can change the direction of your financials.

Did you know that FreshBooks offers time-saving bookkeeping software tailored to the needs of small business owners? If you want to simplify your business, peek at our bookkeeping solutions and learn how to generate net cash flow reports on the fly and prepare for tax season in a snap. The benefits of bookkeeping for real estate company operations are hard to overstate. Well kept books help you see exactly where your business sits and show you where you can take it. Not everyone needs full time accountants for real estate companies. No matter what level of help you need,hiring a virtual assistantor team could be exactly what you’re looking for at a price and scalability that makes it feasible both now and in the long term.

Proper truckers bookkeeping service practices can give you an edge over the competition by allowing you to make informed decisions about future projects and purchases. Is to take inventory of your specific needs, including both goals and pain points. You’ll get a whole lot more out of it if you know what you’re looking for. Keep copies of all receipts by using a safe and secure online storage system to organize all real estate documents. You can ask us at ShoreAgents to help you with whatever bookkeeping software program you wish to utilize.

Review financial reports, such as income statements, net cash flow, and capital expense reports to monitor property performance and make better real estate investment decisions. A good exercise to track your spending is to use a dedicated debit or credit card on all expenses for 30 days. If you use this for everything, from coffee to rehab materials, you will get a true idea of where your money is going every month. At the end of the 30 days, you should sit down and review what expenses were used to grow your business and which were essentially a waste of money. There are many expenses in business and personal life that we allow solely because we have been doing it this way for a while. Little things like looking at a cable bill or consolidating credit card debts can greatly reduce your monthly payment.

ShoreAgents is a BPO company that specializes in providing virtual staff to the real estate industry. They work remotely from our office but are fully dedicated to serving your business needs. Hiring an offshore real estate bookkeeper is ideal for your business, as it gives you access to someone who understands what your business requires. Accounting System Implementation starts at $500 for new investors and business owners who are just starting out. To as much as $10,000 or more for businesses or portfolios that need a lot of clean-up to be brought up-to-date.