Bookkeeping for rental owners, flippers, and small syndicators who need per-property numbers, clean entity separation, and records that hold up.
One bank account, eight properties, three LLCs, and a spreadsheet that stopped being accurate last spring. That is how most investor books look by the time somebody decides to fix them. It works fine until you want to refinance, bring in a partner, or figure out which property is actually carrying the portfolio.
We set up books where every property is its own reporting unit and every entity has its own clean set of records. Rent, expenses, capital improvements, and debt service all land on the right property. Repairs get separated from improvements, because one hits the P&L now and the other goes on the balance sheet and changes your basis. We work with investors in Lexington and across Kentucky, including Louisville and London, and remotely for owners holding property in more than one market.
Portfolio-level numbers tell you almost nothing. You need to know that the duplex on the north side nets 340 dollars a month after debt service while the single family across town nets 900, because that is what tells you which one to sell. We set up class or property tracking so rent, turnover costs, maintenance, management fees, insurance, taxes, and mortgage interest all attach to a specific address. Then the monthly report shows each property's net operating income and cash flow after debt service, side by side. Vacancy and turnover cost get tracked too, since those are the numbers that separate a good year from a bad one.
If you hold properties in LLCs, the entities have to be real on paper. Separate bank accounts, transactions recorded in the right set of books, and intercompany transfers documented rather than just moved. When you pay for a roof on property B out of the account for entity A, that is a loan or a contribution, and it needs to be recorded as one. We keep each entity's books separate, track member contributions and distributions, and maintain the intercompany detail so the structure your attorney set up is actually reflected in the accounting. Lenders and partners ask for exactly this, usually with a short deadline.
The difference between a repair and a capital improvement matters, and it is decided at the transaction, not at year end. Fixing a broken window is a repair. Replacing the roof is an improvement that adds to basis. If nobody makes that call as the money goes out, someone reconstructs it from a shoebox eleven months later and gets it partly wrong. We record improvements to a fixed asset schedule by property, track closing costs from settlement statements at acquisition, and keep the depreciation schedule current for your CPA. Baum's Accounting Services does not prepare income tax returns. It hands your CPA a file that makes their work fast.
A flip is a job, and it should be costed like one. Acquisition, holding costs, financing points and interest, every subcontractor invoice, and the sale costs on the back end. Track them against your original budget as the project runs and you know at week six whether the margin is still there, instead of finding out at closing. We bring the job costing discipline our founder built over five years as a construction company controller, and apply it the same way here. For investors running several projects at once, the rolling cash forecast is the piece that keeps a slow sale on one property from stalling the next acquisition.
Yes, and that is the point. Each entity needs its own records to keep the structure meaningful and to satisfy lenders and partners. Within an entity, each property is tracked separately. You still get a consolidated view of the whole portfolio, but the underlying books respect the legal structure your attorney set up.
That is fractional controller and CFO work. We model the hold against the sale using your real numbers, including basis, depreciation taken, remaining loan balance, and what the cash would earn redeployed. The tax consequence of a sale is a question for your CPA, and we make sure they have the records to answer it accurately.
Yes. Property management statements are a starting point, not the books. We reconcile their owner statements against actual bank activity, code the detail to the right property, and catch the management fees, maintenance charges, and reserve holdbacks that get summarized away in a monthly statement.
Other work in this area that tends to come up in the same conversation.
Insurance collections lag, write-offs pile up, and revenue per provider gets murky. The books get built so those things stay visible.
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Read moreBook a consultation and we will show you what the first ninety days would look like.
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