Quickbooks for Vacation Rentals

I have often been asked about which software or service I use for the accounting aspect of my Vacation Rental properties. On line services for managing your Vacation Rental property accounting are starting to make appearances. Some look good and are relatively inexpensive. For my properties though, I plan to stick with Intuit's Quickbooks software.

I first began using Quickbooks several years ago for my wife's business, so the transition to Vacation Rental property was relatively easy for me. It was just a matter of setting up the business profile, accounts, taxes, etc. In just a couple of hours I was ready to go with the "new" business.

There are so many features in Quickbooks that I will not attempt to describe them all here. One of the most important to me is the ability to link with Intuit's Turbo Tax software at tax time. This makes my least favorite time of the year a little more bearable because I don't have to manually enter any of my VR data into my tax forms.

Another feature I use extensively is the ability to email invoices as .pdf attachments through the Intuit server without ever exiting Quickbooks. I customized one of the Quickbooks invoice templates to make a reservation invoice which includes check-in/check-out dates and times. I can take a reservation by phone and have the confirmation email, with the reservation invoice attached, in my customer's mailbox before I get off the phone!

You can even write checks with Quickbooks. If you own multiple properties and have a lot of checks to write each month, the check printing feature may be of benefit to you. Computing Sales Tax and Hotel tax is also a breeze - just a few mouse clicks and you are ready to write the check...or let Quickbooks print it for you.

Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement for Intuit, but this software has really helped us. With the price for the basic version below $100, it is also less expensive than most of the online services!