Portfolio has 30 single family homes for rentals.

What book keeping and tax software would you recommend?

Thanks

Everyone has their favorites as far as Property Management software, I use PM Cloud with good success. Buildium is probably the most robust. Most have the basics, manage leases, tenants, payments, maintenance requests. Some incorporate more advanced capabilities such as credit checks, tenant portals, managing maintenance tickets, and publishing rental advertising. There are at least a dozen different products out there that are descent, it depends on how far you want to take the automation and how much you are willing to pay each month for that capability.

Mike Butler has a QB set already set up with a tenant tracking kit next to it. I suppose you could just use QB but I would think that is a bit more challenging.

Good question, NE.

V.M.,

Rental bookkeeping to SIMPLE and basic.

For bookkeeping I still use Quicken 98 because it's SIMPLE!! Started in 1996, upgraded to '98 and kept it. The later versions are more complicated. You need an older operating system to run it.

Quickbooks was too complicated.

Print checks from memory, just add the house number. With some very simple set up the reports are laid out for tax prep.

Download the data to a USB drive and hand it to the tax preparer. Done.

DO NOT rely on tax software such as TurboTax or HRBlock. Those 2 programs, done by a trained pro, cost me $35,000 x 3 years = $105,000 in overpaid taxes last year because certain deductions did not "appear" on the software. Now I'm paying thousands to submit amended returns. Just hire a CPA for accuracy.

I spent $1500 setting up Buildium (why is it so hard to set up!!) and have been frustrated by it every single day. We spend an hour a day FIXING things Buildium did wrong. It will be hitting the trash can soon.

Brad, I was ready to toss Buildium too but my son found it very easy to use and he would guide his old mum through it. I still think it is not intuitive to me but I've learned the parts I need to know. And it does the most important things we wanted it to do: apps, background check, collect fees, deposits, rents, utility payments. I use it to send emails I want to keep 'on the record' and such.

I *just* started putting my vendors in there so DS#3 can find them if need be.

I'm using excel. (Pivot tables are awesome forgenerating the Schedule E numbers)