Im at the point in my business that I need a bookkeeper. We have multiple parks and its taking too much of my time to handle all the bookkeeping. We have a virtual assistant who enters all the bank statements into quickbooks but she is not a licensed book keeper.
I would love to hear from some of the owners who have multiple parks on your exact practice handling bills and bookeepers.
Do you have your bookeeper pay your bills and enter it through online bill pay and then on quickbooks? If so, do you just give them access to all your bank accounts? Does your bookkeeper handle bills just once a week? Also, is it necessary to find a bookkeeper who is very knowledgable with real estate?
Would love to hear the day to day operations of how you handle all the bills, paperwork and reconciling.
We have a bookkeeper in India that we found off odesk.com for $7/hour. He has read-only access to all our bank accounts. You do not need to have a bookkeeper with any particular real estate skills. We do have a CPA who does all our annual tax work, and he rolls-up the real estate income with all our other income. He is available to give advice to the bookkeeper for anything ‘tricky.’ The most ‘tricky’ thing your bookkeeper will need to learn is how to handle option consideration on RTO contracts. However most all of us have moved away from RTO, to rent credit programs due to the SAFE Act. So there is very little left that might be difficult for your bookkeeper to figure out.
Our manager writes legibly on the deposit slip who has paid what amount. Our bookkeeper then also tracks who has paid what amount. If there is a discrepancy on who has and has not paid, then it gets flagged up to us. Otherwise our bookkeeper and our manager keep one another in check. We’ve tasked our bookkeeper with also being our ‘Revenue Assurance Officer’ - which basically just means he also logs into our accounts several times throughout the month to look for any bounced check alerts. If/when he sees them, he flags it to my manager and copies me. My manager then immediately serves the tenant with a Pay-Or-Quit notice and makes a note to never again accept a check from that resident - they must pay with money order from that point on.
We still pay all bills ourselves. F&D generally say you can do that until you get to about 500 lots, then it needs to be turned over to someone.
Thanks for the info Jefferson. Its great to have this forum to help with running a more efficient business. I think I need to relinquish more tasks to my bookeeper like you do and free up my time to do more important things.
Just so Im clear on how you handle things. You pay all bills and enter the bills into quickbooks. Then your bookeeper logs onto your online bank accounts each month gets the bank statements from there and then reconciles each account? Is that the jist of it.
One last question, does your bookeeper log onto your computer through a teamviewer type of application in order to reconcile quickbooks?
We just pay bills like mad, enter nothing into QB, and let our bookkeeper clean up the mess. (:P)
Our bank issued a separate username and password to our bookkeeper. He logs in from India just like we do right herein the 'States to see all the accounts online. The only difference is the ‘Bill Pay’ tab is disabled for his login. Thus, only we can set up a new payee and cut a check. But our bookkeeper can log on at any time and see all the activity and update it into the QB file stored on his computer. He then emails a copy of it to me.
Everything happens through a regular web browser browsing to the bank’s website. No one is logging into my computer remotely. (Except NSA.) :?
Jefferson - I’d imagine (hope) by now you have someone pretty solid off Upwork that you’d recommend for both QB and RM? Anyway you might be able to share?
Jefferson,
You have an old post from November of 2013, are you still using desk.com? We are looking for a bookkeeper. Any suggestions? We are in Indiana. ( Not sure if that matters?)
Cheers,
Grit