Real Estate Professionals need good bookkeeping practices and workflow to properly operate their businesses. From the single agent to team leaders, and all-size offices, the demands of handling their daily schedule take precedence over the required bookkeeping.

Here are three mistakes I have found real estate professionals too often make in running their business as it pertains to bookkeeping:

• Avoidance – the attitude is often “I will do it later.” Too often, real estate professionals really don’t do the bookkeeping until the end of the year, or early in January. And the primary reason it is done then is to get ready to prepare taxes. This is not smart – the rush to get things done often means mistakes, missing documents, and overlooking important transaction information.
• Ignoring Technology – simple, easy-to-use apps, like a mileage tracker, is not being used. Or if it is being used, it is not integrated into the bookkeeping system. As a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, I have seen real estate professionals paying more for the mileage tracker app than it would have cost to pay for QuickBooks. And QuickBooks includes a free Miletracker with automatic integration into QuickBooks. Another free app allows real estate professionals to take a picture of a receipt, and it is automatically added to QuickBooks, keeping the bookkeeping up to date.
• Bank Integration – Real estate professionals run their business based on their bank balance, and not on their true financial situation. QuickBooks will link bank accounts (and credit cards too so you can quickly determine current profit and loss. For investment properties, where rent payments are collected, bank linking allows tenants to be invoiced, and ACH transfers can occur automatically.

No matter what bookkeeping software you use, you should take advantage of its capabilities to help you run your real estate business. It becomes more important for some, like those doing rehab and flip projects.

Some real estate professionals turn the entire bookkeeping process over to a bookkeeper. Rather than taking8 to 10 hours a month on bookkeeping, they free themselves from the chores so they can do what they like best: selling real estate. That’s why I have a Virtual Bookkeeper Service program for real estate professionals called Sell More.