Investment Property Bookkeeping

Many of our clients at PPS have investment properties. The typical client has a 2-3 properties that they rent. For many years, most of these clients simply managed these properties as a part of their personal finances. This can get to be confusing when it comes to managing your finances. Here are some things that PPS has found successful in managing your investment property portfolio:

- Seperate the finances. Whether the property(s) is its own LLC or just part of your finances is up to you and your CPA but in either case, create a seperate checking account to deposit funds into and pay expenses from.
- Create a seperate chart of accounts and general ledger. Track the property(s) in a seperate file using Quicken or QuickBooks. This makes it very easy to get a picture of income and expense for the investment.
- If you have multiple properties, track each one seperately. This way if you sell or do a project on any of them, it will not impact any of the others. If you are using QuickBooks to track your investment properties, setting each property up as a unique class will allow you to track each one seperately but to then view the entire portfolio P&L together.

Best of luck!