QuickBooks Online seems to be the go-to choice for real estate professionals.
Brokers, agents, transaction coordinators, all find uses for it, and QuickBooks is universally accepted as easy to use and reliable accounting software for small business. This presents both, great news and some challenges for the real estate business.
The great news: It is true, QuickBooks dominates the world of small business and real estate in particular. When new people working with finance join your office, chances are, they are already familiar with QuickBooks, saving you lot’s of time on training them. Most accountants and bookkeepers will be familiar with it. Therefore lots of help is available.
The challenge: QuickBooks is not designed explicitly for real estate accounting. Instead, it is a general small business accounting software. Therefore it becomes critical that you set up your QuickBooks, your income and expense accounts and your company financial processes to adequately reflect your actual business activities.
This challenge is where most real estate brokers stumble. They forget that they are not buying a dedicated real estate accounting solution. Brokers sign up for QuickBooks, either because someone told them to, or because that’s what everyone else uses, and expect their transactions, listings, rental deals, agent commissions, splits, title and escrow deposits and disbursements, their real estate office accounting to magically organize itself.
Often surprised and frustrated, when it fails. Few, outdo themselves, finding the poor soul in their office who is familiar with QuickBooks, and make figuring everything out her responsibility. That, along with the 20 other jobs she is probably already doing. QuickBooks can certainly do the job, it is affordable, and if you already decided to use QuickBooks at your brokerage, there is no reason to disrupt the office with unnecessary software implementations.
The trick to successfully using QuickBooks: analyze your operations, spend some time or few dollars with a professional to set up your QuickBooks in a way that matches the way your office run. Create simple accounting processes, automate everything possible, review your monthly and quarterly reports and adjust as needed.
- Analyze your operations.
- Spend some time or few dollars with a professional to set up your QuickBooks in a way that matches the way your office run.
- Create simple accounting processes. automate everything possible, review your monthly and quarterly reports and adjust as needed.
- Automate everything possible. review your monthly and quarterly reports and adjust as needed.
- Review your monthly and quarterly reports and adjust as needed.
When you need help, our real estate QuickBooks experts can evaluate your business process, help you design and set up your financial process, automate or integrate applications.
We will help you make sense of using QuickBooks for Real Estate. From tracking complicated splits, multi-level commission plans, title and escrow deposit tracking, to reports that clearly show your profits.