RENT Magazine Q4 '21

FOUR ESSENTIAL ACCOUNTING TIPS FOR RENTAL PROPERTY OWNERS As the owner of rental property, you may find yourself busy juggling a number of tasks. With handling service requests, ensuring your units stay occupied, communicating with tenants, and growing your rental portfolio, it can be overwhelming. When there’s so much happening, it might seem easier to push the accounting aside for a later date. You may procrastinate because you dread sorting out the mess and manual admin – bank statements to comb through, outstanding payments to chase, and receipts to find before you’re able to sort out your taxes or review your financial position. But it doesn’t have to be that way! We’ve put together four tips that can help you establish good accounting practices so that you can get the most out of your rental portfolio with less stress. FOUR ACCOUNTING TIPS FOR RENTAL PROPERTY OWNERS 1. CATEGORIZE YOUR FINANCES

portfolio and when tax time comes around, you can avoid the tax prep scramble. 2. STREAMLINE RENT COLLECTION Keeping rent payments coming in regularly and reliably enables you to forecast your income and plan more easily when it comes to paying bills or investing in maintenance and renovations. However, some property owners still opt to use the old-fashioned method of checks for receiving rent. This can result in delays and uncertainty about how much cash you have on hand and can also be a poor experience for your tenants, some of whom may seldom, if ever, write checks.

Rental property finances can get complicated fast. Whether you have just one rental property or manage a portfolio, there are security deposits, property expenses, rent payments, and interest to keep track of. One way to prevent things getting out of hand is to categorize your finances as soon as they come in. You can do this manually or you can find accounting software, such as Xero, that is designed to do most of the work for you. Not only does this help reduce manual admin, it means you have data at your fingertips to see the return on investment across your property

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