Keeping things in order

When we started in on this property investing adventure, we set up a business to handle all the property investing affairs. However at the very beginning we were spending money out of our own accounts. This was a bit of a nightmare from the keeping track of things perspective.

It didn't take us long to setup a bank account in the company name and have both eftpos and credit cards attached to these accounts. This was great for keeping track of monies spent for company expenses

By keeping all the transactions coming from one set of accounts, we are able to download a csv file from the bank every month, this is a great help for accounting. And there is no reason why you can't do this for all your accounts, I have started doing this.

I would also recommend getting an accountant, make sure that the accountant is actually interested in or better yet has their own investment properties. We were lucky enough to get an accountant that would agree to an up front cost, which would be fixed unless there was heaps of unforeseen work.

He was also keen to help us help him, by setting out all out income and expenses in a format that he would find helpful our bill may be less then the agreed price also. This also helps us keep an eye on what is going out and what is coming in. Each month we download the latest transactions for each account from the bank and update the spreadsheets. Once we had setup all out spreadsheets adding the new transactions is fairly simple and doesn't really take much time each month.

Final thought, keeping separate accounts is a great way to keep track of company / personal expenses and income.