Running a property portfolio (whether it’s a single investment property or row of terraced houses) is hard work.
But if you’re a landlord, you probably relish that hard work, because you love it. What a shame, then, that your enjoyment is so often spoiled by numbers.
There are so many numbers involved in property. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and inadvertently make mistakes – unless you know what you’re doing.
The good news is that Xero Accounting will make your life far easier and give you back the one thing you can’t buy: time.
Here are three of our favourite Xero Accounting tips for landlords. Don’t leave home without them.
1. Save some time for yourself
One of the best things about modern accounting software platforms like Xero is how much time they can save you. They do this by automating the regular, mundane accounting tasks that would otherwise take you forever to complete yourself.
There are two things you can do immediately with Xero to save yourself a shed load of time and remove those repetitive tasks from your to-do list.
- Set up repeating invoices for each tenant. This will ensure they’re delivered on time, automatically, and without any effort on your part.
- Set up GoCardless to receive rent via Direct Debit. When integrated with Xero, the rent will automatically be reconciled against those repeating invoices.
Add up how much time you spend undertaking the above tasks manually at the moment. You’ll be amazed by what you’ll get back just from automating them in Xero.
2. Get on top of the numbers
Having a bird’s eye view of your property business’s performance is vital if you’re to grow it profitability. More importantly, gaining a grasp on the numbers will help you identify any potential problems before they bite you hard.
With Xero, you can set up tracking for each of your properties. This enables you to report on the P&L for each property and help you make future investment decisions.
It’s also worth setting up each property’s bank account as a live feed in Xero. Combined with bank rules, you can then automate the entire reconciliation process and rest safe in the knowledge that your reports will be accurate.
3. Make use of integrations
Xero has a tonne of really useful integrations with third party systems.
There are two in particular that are worth checking out.
- Hubdoc. This is basically a big vault for all of your financial records. It automatically imports bills, statements, emails, and receipts and sorts them neatly into folders. Find out more about its integration with Xero, here.
- Wise (formerly TransferWise). If you make a large number of payments to suppliers each month, you can do a lot worse than link Wise to Xero. This will enable you to make batch payments super-fast and efficiently.
If you’re running a larger property business, there are lots of property management applications that integrate brilliantly with Xero, too. Just head over to the app marketplace and search under industries for property.
We hope you find the above tips useful, but if you’d like to find out more about Xero, or discover how to get the most out of your existing setup, just get in touch with the Trinity team.
