I am sorry I gave you that impression. I am doing manual data entry into TurboTax. When I just had a few properties, manual data entry was not that tedious. Now I have quite a few properties and am looking at record keeping software applications that will either export to TurboTax or allow import from TurboTax.
Quickbooks takes some time to learn and John Hyre’s KISS materials shorten the learning curve. Unfortunately, I still have to enter the Quickbooks chart of accounts manually. Finding the time to do this at the same time I am motivated to do this is my current problem.
Hi,I am trying to determine which quickbooks software is the best or has performed the best for small realestate investors that are growing. I currently have 5 properties with the intent to aquire more but I don’t want to go any further with out a great tool like I hear this is. I would appreciate your opinion on this software or any other that has proven succesful for your portfolio.
I have used Excel spreadsheets for years to track my rental income and expenses. I tried to do this with Quicken as an extended checkbook register, but I found that I had no way to import the Quicken data to TurboTax such that each property’s income and expenses would transfer to a separate Schedule E worksheet.
The data transfer worked, but I ended up with a single property on Schedule E with the aggregate total of all rents and expenses reported.
I decided to purchase Quickbooks and John Hyre’s KISS Guide to Real Estate Bookkeeping. John told me that he has successfully imported Quickbooks rental data into TurboTax for eight different properties, but no more.
The Intuit folks told me last year that the Home and Business version of TurboTax will import the Schedule E data for an unlimited number of rental properties from Quickbooks.
Quicken probably has a way to export your rental property data to more than one Schedule E worksheet when you are tracking multiple properties in your Quicken account, but I have not found it.
When Intuit first introduced Rental Property Manager, it was not compatible with TurboTax. Hopefully, recent versions of this product have overcome this deficiency.
I have used Quicken for 15 years. fairly easy to understand. once you have your categories and classifications set up, the est is easy. I suspect QB is similar. you hav to take the time to learn how to use it.
once you gt it down, cranking out financial statements (or every variety) takes just a few seconds.
Posted by Frank Chin on June 26, 2007 at 03:37:30:
T. Hill:
I used Quickbooks for a number of years for Real Estate and other businesses. I took over the bookkeeping from my wife who had it on Quicken for a number of years.
If you are fimiliar with accounting concepts, Quickbooks is very easy to set up, maintain, and automate. My wife found debit credit bookkeeping a little confusing, and prefers Quicken.
I was on another accounting system called SBT years back, and bought their “property” package. I also looked into packages like Rentright etc.
What I found was those packages are more trouble than it’s worth just for tracking lease expirations, tenant info, deposit, and tenant complaints etc., particularly just for the 10 to 20 tenants that I keep track of.
I use the automatic transaction feature in Quickbooks, and maintain receivables. So rents are automatically billed every month, I apply payments against it, and know right away who didn’t pay, and on rare occasions, how behind they are.
I use Quickbooks Pro 2006 and recently declined to upgrade the software because it doesn’t add anything I need and the 2005 to 2006 “upgrade” actually took away a feature I used extensively.
I do not like the product, but use it because the QB file loads directly into my CPA’s tax software. It is not easy to set up and their “standard” chart of accounts for Real Estate is OK but finding out how to set up property and asset accounts is not easy.
If you are not attached to the QB product for other reasons, I would suggest something more investor specific such as Rent Manager or even the Quicken Rental Property product.
I also use Excel for my rental properties. I have been manually entering the data into Turbotax. Your comment seems to indicate that you are importing the spreadsheet data from Excel to Turbotax.
If you have found a way to import from Excel to Turbotax, I would appreciate any guidance you could provide on how this is done.
Quicken can’t be really used for rental properties (other than for tracking income and expenses) because Quicken cannot generate “real” balance sheets, which are critical to asset/liability management. QB requires basic account knowledge (and more advanced knowledge for some functions).