Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on which category you fit in:
- You are currently using spreadsheets to keep track of things – Definitely Yes, RentMaxPro will keep track of everything that your spreadsheet does, and more, and will do it all with less hassle in less time. And it will produce a lovely year-end Workbook that your accountant will love (and so will your wallet, when your fees go down!).
- You are just starting out as a Landlord and plan to grow your business – Definitely Yes, Set yourself up from the get-go with systems in place that will streamline your operations as you add more units and more tenants.
- You rent out your basement suite and have no plans to do more – Probably No. While RentMaxPro will certainly keep everything nice and tidy for you, it is probably overkill for such a simple operation. Having said that, if you expect a lot of expenses that you will want to deduct against your rental income, this might help keep track of them all. And for just one unit membership is free anyway, so maybe.
- You manage hundreds of units for yourself – Possibly No. RentMaxPro can certainly do all that for you but, at present, it might be a bit cumbersome for that many units,just in terms of navigating around so many properties and tenants. It is primarily intended for smaller businesses with under 100 units.
- You do your bookkeeping by throwing all your receipts into a box and giving them to a bookkeeper (or worse, your accountant) at year end – Probably Yes. Unless you really have very few expenses, and can remember what they are all for, you will almost certainly save yourself time and money by using RentMaxPro. The three big problems with your current strategy are:
- Some of the receipts will undoubtedly get lost or become illegible, which means less tax deductions.
- The details of some (many) of the transactions will have been forgotten, which means when the bookkeeper calls to ask you about that Home Depot expense from six months ago you won’t have a clue. That makes it hard for her to claim it as a legitimate tax deduction.
- If she is trying to reconcile your bank statements with your receipts she may ask you to hunt down the missing receipts (again from months ago) so that she can properly enter them. That can be a huge time waster. Even if all the receipts are there, and are legible, the reconciliation process is a thankless time-consuming grind. And when you are being billed by the hour, that means money.
There are three key ways that RentMaxPro can simplify the above:
- You can enter expenses, and upload a photo of the receipt, using your phone as you walk out of the hardware store. That means the receipt will never be lost, you will never forget what the expense was for, and the expense is there ready and waiting to be reconciled with two clicks of the mouse.
- You can have your utility bills automatically imported so you never have to manually look up and enter those.
- You can remember and automate commonly repeated expenses so that you don’t have to manually enter those also.
All these entries will then be sitting there ready for stress-free two-click reconiliation(take a look at the Auto Match video to see how) .Whether you the do the reconciliation yourself, or hand it over to a bookkeeper to do, you will be saving a lot of time, trouble and expense.
- You have tenants who are erratic with their rent – Definitely Yes. Keeping track of who has paid what and when can get confusing. Simply enter the rents as you receive them, and you will always know who is up to date and who is behind. And you can set it up to atuomatically add a Late Fee to their account when they are behind.
- You need an efficient way to store documents concerning tenants and properties – Definitely Yes. In addition to all the bookkeeping and financial tracking, RentMaxPro will also store digital copies of all your crucial documents, and will make them accessible to you wherever you have internet access. They will be attached to the appropriate property and/or tenant, so you will never lose them.
- You use other people to do maintenance tasks – Definitely Yes. Initiated either by your tenants or by yourself, you can set up maintenance requests that you can then send to your maintenance people. And as they present their bills and receips to you, you can link those to the service requests so you can know exactly how much each project has cost.
- You already have a property manager who also does your financial record keeping – Probably No. If the system is working well for you, then why change it? But if you find they are charging a lot of money for not a lot of work, then you might want to consider switching. There will be a bit of work to do the switch, but after that you will have much tighter control over things.
- You are a property manager and look after other Landlords’ rentals – Possibly No. At the moment we do not have the facility to separate out properties by different owners or to produce reports for each owner. If this is a feature you would like, let us know and we will do our best to implement it. However, you could set up a separate membership for each owner, and you can give each one access to his own site. If you set them all up using the same email login (yours) for them all, you can easily switch between accounts whenever you are logged in.
Still not sure? Why not sign up for a free account and test it out with just one of your units for a while, and see how it goes? Or get a month free for your entire property portfolio to really know.
And if you have any questions, just ask. Our mission is to make life easier for Landlords. Let us help you.