Real Estate Accounting

Street Smart® Real Estate Accounting™

This system is an educational tool designed for people involved in the purchase, management, and tracking of rental homes and/or apartments.  This system will aid you in your understanding and application of QuickBooks for a real estate investment company.

This narrows the vast possible uses of Quickbooks into the specifics needed for real estate owners. Others such as property managers, commercial landlords, or developers also use this system.

It is essential for you to have a strong understanding of the financials of your company, even if you hire a bookkeeper. This system helps you learn the terminology and processes, how to use QuickBooks to enter data properly and be able to analyze your business, make decisions using accurate financials, and save an enormous amount of time and money.

Start at the beginning to understand the underlying accounting principles. This applies if you plan to enter the bookkeeping data yourself, hire a third party, or train an employee to do it.

You will learn the common bookkeeping activities a landlord will encounter while dealing with properties, tenants, and sorting out financing.

Throughout this system, we use a sample data file of an LLC. Your entity, state laws, and individual needs may differ. Get a competent bookkeeper and attorney and go over what you need to do in QuickBooks.

Large public corporations keep two sets of accounting books: one for tax purposes, and the other for management decision-making and analysis purposes. This manual assumes you keep one set of books and use one QuickBooks file.

This system is not a replacement for a competent accountant. There are over 80,000 pages of tax law that change (increase) yearly. Find them via your other investor friends, Yelp, and your professional contacts. Interview many accountants/bookkeepers and choose a competent one with extensive experience using QuickBooks with real estate business owners like yourself.

Implement QuickBooks for your property management using an accountant that supports you and is familiar with Quickbooks. Most who deal with small businesses are and may even offer you a discount for using QuickBooks.