HMO property management and accounting software?

Hi David,

Not for HMOs, but we use QuickBooks to upload our accounting information straight onto our accountants system (Pacific Ltd).

This works brilliantly as it cuts down on costs and leaves our accountants more time to concentrate on saving us money 🙂

See >> https://www.property118.com/member/?id=452

Many thanks for your comments Neil. How do you find Quickbooks to use?

Reply to the comment left by "Neil Patterson" at "13/03/2017 - 15:09":

Hello David, matter of fact I am launching a new property management platform for landlords like yourself at the end of this month? It allows you to advertise your HMO's, manage accounts, set reminders, links contractors together with the likes of yourself.

It is what our accountants told us to use and download so sorry I have no idea exactly what it was, but it integrates with their QB system.

Hi David
Give EZPZ landlord a look. I've used it for 8 years and while like anything you have to spend some time setting your business and properties up, it does accounts ( to the stage I just give my accountant the P&L sheet to do my tax return with) and property management with credit control, gas (and other check) reminders, It can break down figures by property/sub property and supplier/tradesman and expense category. I have a number of town houses divided into self contained flats which technically can come under the HMO regs, so I have for example property 1, with sub properties flats 1 - 4 but this could be just as easily bedsits or room lets. It does have some advertising and inventory options but I've not used these. There are options to use as an agent which you might need if you are managing for other familly members which I've not used.

I use quickbooks, but the flavor I use wasn't designed explicitly for property.
My version appears to be for a sub contractor of some sort, with stock management.
You can get the landlord version , but it costs mega bucks.

But it's very simple to love Quickbooks reliability over the years.
It has never crashed, EVER!

So I found a guy that had used Quickbooks for rental property and he taught me a simple way to do some good things with the program.

It has been brilliant since I got it in 2010.

Quickbooks uses, a chart of accounts, similar to SIC codes, but with a ledger account numbers instead,( you only see them once a year at tax return time)

It uses customers, jobs and classes which are the main features in its database structure.

So a bit of lateral thinking was required to figure out how Quickbooks can work for a landlord, if you don't have the landlord version.

So it's pretty easy to do.

What I'm about to describe may sound complicated, but once you have done it a couple of times it all makes sense.

Quickbooks has a Customer Centre, supplier centre, banking sector, reports sector and inventory centre.

You will mainly deal with the customer centre and banking centre.

Each new Quickbooks 'customer' is actually a HMO property or Single Let property and each tenant is a 'Job' for a customer.
So customer 1 would be a property such as
12 Acacia Drive.

So if you have 6 properties you only have 6 Quickbooks customers,(properties), to deal with for your reports for HMRC.

You then create a JOB (Tenant), for that Customer (property).
When a tenant leaves you deactivate the Job and you still have your list of properties on your screen and also a list of outstanding balances for each tenant, so you can instantly see who hasn't paid.

Your 1st Customer could be HMO number 1
The first job could be Stan Crupper aged 22 etc
That tenant is then assigned a class such as room 3.

The database now becomes very powerful for reporting just about everything and invoicing just about everything.

The guarantor would be the delivery name and address for that job.
As you add more tenants to each property, (jobs to a customer)

As previously mentioned,
Each Rented Room in a HMO has a 'Class' assigned to it, such as room 1, room 2 etc and it lays out your portfolio in a list.

Your expenses are assigned to a job and class, and if you tick a box, it can produce an invoice for your tenant to pay if it's chargeable to them, such as keys or broken windows etc.
You can add an automatic markup of profit to any expense that is chargeable.

It can pull off a profit and loss report for tenants, properties, expenses, tax or whatever you can think of in seconds.

You can tell it to Memorise a report such as a P&L for 2015-2016 and even if you change an entry, it is recalculated instantly.

It will memorize cheques, standing orders, direct debits and rental invoices as they become due etc.

It can split job (tenant), reports into rent received, invoices etc and if a tenant disputes a payment etc, you can produce a report listing all their payments since a given date or the whole tenancy.

I have used sage and peach accounting, but I love Quickbooks because of its reliability.

Despite my crappy description, it's very easy to use as it's based on pictures of cheque books etc.

This system as been advertised in YPN Podi at http://www.MLCS-SYSTEMS.com

I would have a look at them all to find the one that suits you best

Reply to the comment left by "KATHY MILLER" at "14/03/2017 - 09:16":

This site advertises Podio, but I don't use it with Quickbooks.

The link you showed required a monthly subscription of £19.99.

I just use a standalone version of Quickbooks 2010.

Do you use Podio Kathy?

What's your impression if you do?

Reply to the comment left by "Gary Dully" at "14/03/2017 - 20:10":

Hi Garry

No I dont use it but it did get a very good review by HMO users so thought it would be worth a look

Reply to the comment left by "Oliver Robinson" at "13/03/2017 - 17:41":

Please send me more info when platform is finish.

We use Xero for accounting, it is powerful program but some more complex things are time consuming to do. For tenants management we created special gdrive sheets with reminders, databases, tenants, houses, notices, contractors, deal analysis, shopping materials etc... Works fine for 200 (and growing) tenants.