Rent lands in one account. A roofer gets paid from another. The letting agent takes their cut before you ever see the money, so the figure arriving is not the figure earned. Receipts are in an email somewhere, or a glovebox, or gone.
With one property that is annoying. With six it stops being possible to hold in your head, and you genuinely do not know whether you are up or down until someone tells you nine months after the fact.
This is the thing everything else depends on
Tax planning only works if the numbers are current, because you cannot plan around a figure nobody has. Accounts only arrive quickly if the bookkeeping is already done. A broker only gets an answer this week if the data exists this week.
So although bookkeeping sounds like the least interesting thing on this site, it is the one that unlocks the other three.
What changes
- Everything in one place, on Xero or QuickBooks, with each property identifiable rather than mixed into one pile
- Rent recorded gross, with the agent's fees shown as the cost they are, so you can see what the property actually earns
- Receipts captured as you go by photographing them, rather than hunted for in March
- A number you can actually look at, at any point in the year, instead of waiting for the accounts
- Repairs recorded with enough detail to tell later what was actually done, which is what decides whether it is a repair or an improvement
Already on something else, or on nothing at all
Every client works in Xero or QuickBooks. If you are not on either yet, we move you across, and that migration is part of taking you on rather than a separate project with its own invoice.
If you are currently on spreadsheets, that is fine and extremely common. If you are on nothing, that is also fine. The first job is getting the current year straight, and after that it is maintenance rather than excavation.
Who this is for
Landlords with more than one property, or with one property and an agent in the middle making the numbers harder to read than they should be.
If you genuinely enjoy doing your own books and they are up to date, keep doing them. We would rather look after the planning and the structure for you and leave the data entry where it is working.