Use Rental Property Accounting Software To Analyze Properties

With your day-to-day rental property management activities, it can be all too easy for real estate investors or rental property owners to lose sight of the bigger picture. How much have you spent on operating expenses this month? How many tenants haven’t paid rent yet? How much of your monthly rental income have you received?

This is exactly why periodically analyzing your finances is so important. You have to know where your finances are in order to plan where you want them in the future. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, then you’re in the right place. Below, we’ll discuss how to manage a simple rental property record keeping template Excel will support, but also how you can simplify this process with software to easily analyze your rental financial performance.

What to Look For

Analyzing your properties with a rental property tracker spreadsheet isn’t as simple as glancing over a few documents. Before you can build a spreadsheet that will be useful to you, you’ll first need to know what you want to learn from it. Here are a few things to watch out for:

• Irregularities. When looking over your spreadsheet, no matter the kind, you want to make sure that your numbers line up as expected. Did you make a larger profit last month? Does it look like you were overcharged for a service? Be on the lookout for things that may seem off. The more often you create reports and analyze them, the easier this will be.
• Underperforming Areas. Not every aspect of property management is easy. Do you have a few units that aren’t making as much revenue as others? Are you constantly receiving certain maintenance requests? Looking at your finances on a microscopic level from time to time can help to prevent catastrophe.
• Successful Areas. Likewise, you’ll want to be aware of any areas that are consistently performing well. Are your profits for a certain unit or building routinely high? Are you keeping maintenance costs down? Great! Find the reason if you can, then try to keep it that way.

Spreadsheets for Analysis

Now that you understand what to generally look for, we’ll discuss a few means of doing so.

Rental Property Balance Sheet

A record keeping template Excel can easily support is a rental property balance sheet. Keeping a balance sheet for rental properties is extremely important because they’ll be able to break down the worth of your assets, liabilities, and equity—essentially, how much your business is worth and how much you’ve incurred in outstanding payments to others.

Making a balance sheet is simple and important. Balance sheets can familiarize you with the most important big-picture details before you make any business decisions. They can also be helpful if you’re looking to sell your business, as you’ll have access to your business’s estimated liquidation value, shareholders’ equity, and more.

When analyzing a balance sheet, you’ll want to make sure that your total assets equal your total liabilities and equity. This is the “balance” that lends its name to the title of this report. Additionally, you want to keep a close eye on your liabilities, as you will eventually need to reconcile your debts. It’s best to keep that number in the back of your head so you can’t be blind sighted.

Profit and Loss

A profit and loss statement (also known as an income and expense worksheet) is a great place to start if you’re looking for a general rental property tracker spreadsheet. They’ll track your finances over a given period of time, so if you want to take a look at the finances, metrics, and profitability of last October, for example, a P&L will do the trick.

Additionally, they’re great for checking your NOI—Net Operating Income—which subtracts your rental property expenses from your effective gross income to find your overall profits for a period. This number will reflect the profitability of your business before accounting for variable expenses, depreciation, capital expenses, property taxes, and mortgage payments.

Many landlords generate profit and loss statements on a quarterly, monthly, or yearly basis so that they can compare the financial success of their business over time. You can find a landlord rental property spreadsheet template free online, but if you’re looking for an automated option, we recommend trying out rental property accounting software like Ledgre.

Cash Flow Statement

A cash flow statement is another important landlord rental property Excel spreadsheet free for anyone online. It will report your cash-based transactions—rental property income, operating expenses, and more—while offering you key insights on this data. Wondering what the current state of your finances is? You need a cash flow statement.

Perhaps the most important metric from this statement is its namesake: net cash flow. It’s similar to your NOI, except it does take into account mortgage payments, taxes, financing and more. When estimating your profitability, look to your NOI. When finding the true amount of cash you have left over after all of your expenses, look to your net cash flow.

Simplify the Analysis with Software

Analyzing your finances with documents such as a rental property tracker spreadsheet is a great place to start for successful property management financial organization. There’s a lot you’ll want to keep track of, however, and you may run into the issue of having too many spreadsheets in too many different places.

Even if you’re well-versed in spreadsheet management and your current system works fine, you may be surprised by how simple rental software can be (and how much of the process it can simplify). If you like the hands-on aspect of spreadsheets, then software will by no means remove you from the process. In fact, it’ll help you be as in touch as ever while saving you from the more monotonous tasks of bookkeeping.

Accounting software tailored specifically for landlords can sync all of your financial information—across properties, portfolios, bank accounts, and more—so that you can store everything in one place. Plus, with rental property accounting software, you can almost entirely automate transaction tracking, which will keep your books up to date with minimal effort.

You’ll have instant access to profit and loss statements and other key reports, saving you the time and hassle of compiling spreadsheets and analyzing them yourself. These reports can even update themselves if you’ve synched your software account with your bank.

Analyzing your real estate investment properties with spreadsheets is a hassle—but with rental property accounting software, it doesn’t have to be.