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Tracking rental property expenses seems fairly trivial. You build out your excel spreadsheet, you add in your properties, all of your income, and all your expenses, subtract to find the difference, and then you’re set, right?
In theory, yes, but we all know that life doesn’t really work that way.
The true problems begin once you start to scale your business. As you gain more properties, things become complicated. “Did I pay for the plumber to come and fix the leak in unit 14?”
Oftentimes, I found myself completely forgetting about transactions entirely. Not only was I missing out on an important aspect of my business, which was tracking every last penny to see how my properties were actually performing, but I was missing important deductions that I could use to write off at the end of the year!
Even more problems arose as my life became increasingly busy. As I’m driving from property to property, mixed in with a trip to the grocery store (to grab some chicken for dinner), then back to the hardware store, and then finally back to the property in question, I would make small notes in my phone to remind myself to not forget to “add $129.22 charge to excel spreadsheet”.
Finally, once and for all, I wanted a system that would de-complicate my messy portfolio, but would also satisfy my OCD when tracking every minor detail.
Enter Rentastic. Rentastic is built and designed specifically for your rental property portfolio. In fact, it was programmed and designed by real estate investors, so you’re certain to get the features and capabilities that you really need.
Tracking expenses has never been easier. In fact, with the Android and iOS apps available for download, you can easily classify your transactions and manage your business, whether you’re at the grocery store or getting your oil changed.
I used to spend hours at the end of the year, compiling receipts and all the paperwork, adding everything in, and making sure I haven’t missed a single transactions. I can now manage my business, literally in seconds.
Rentastic was initially built as a selfish endeavor — to help improve MY life and MY business. But it quickly evolved into something more than that. We empathize with the daily problems an investor faces. We know what make you tick, we know when something mundane should be left to a computer, and that’s why we developed this app. Do yourself a favor and save yourself countless hours.
Rentastic is designed to help manage your rental property expenses, and just that. We don’t want to get in the way of anything else. Because of that, Rentastic has been designed to be incredibly user-friendly.
After signing up for the app, upon first login, you’ll be presented with a blank screen and three large bullet points. From here, it’s as simple as:
From here, you’re done! Need to sink your teeth in a little deeper? Here’s a quick video walk-through to see how it works in action.
As mentioned earlier, Rentastic is designed to make managing your rental property expenses as pain-free as possible.
Of course, with any app, the first thing you have to do is sign in if you already have an account, or create an account if you’re a first-time user.
All we ask for is a name, e-mail, and password to register. Once complete, you’ll be sent a verification email. Click the link in the email and you’ll be on your way!
After verifying your account, you’ll be taken to the dashboard. You’ll be asked to complete the three main bullet points that drive the entire app:
From here, let’s get started adding our first property.
The app obviously wouldn’t make sense unless you had a property to track in the first place. To do so, click on the “Properties” tab on the sidebar to begin adding in several of your properties.
If you had an properties added previously, they’ll live here. Likely, since you’re reading this guide, you’re a new user and won’t have any added yet. To add a new one, click on the “Add Property” button on the top right corner of the page.
Upon clicking on “Add Property”, you’ll be asked for the details of your property, including a photo, to make it easier to sort out.
From here, you’ll enter basic information such as the property’s full address, loan amounts, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, etc. The more detail you can provide Rentastic, the better. To make it more convenient, we’ve teamed up with Zillow to automatically fill in some of the details contained within their database.
You will see this happening after you have put in the complete address of the property. Please note that the autofill only works if the data is accessible to the public. If the property isn’t listed anywhere on the internet, or it’s relatively new to the market, this function may not work for you.
After finishing up, you can click on the “Save” button to add the property. It will now appear every time you click on the “Properties” tab from the side bar. This would also include the other properties that you have previously added for tracking.
When you click on a property, you can easily check in to see how it’s performing.
Until we link a bank account and start classifying transactions, this page is going to be mostly blank from a metrics perspective.
Adding a bank account helps Rentastic determine how your property is performing. To add a bank account, click on the “Bank Accounts” tab in the side bar.
From here, click on the “Link Account” button on the upper right corner.
We currently support thousands of credit unions and banks across the United States, with new ones being added regularly. If your bank isn’t listed on the main page, you can easily search for them by name. For demonstration purposes, we have chosen Chase.
Once logged in to your bank account, you will be given the option to choose which accounts you will link to your Rentastic account. You may choose to add more than one, but obviously only add accounts relating to business.
Once linking is successful, clicking on the “Bank Accounts” tab on the sidebar will now show you all the accounts that you have linked to Rentastic.
Rentastic now begins the process of importing your rental property expenses, up to 24 months in the past. You can check this by clicking on the “Transactions” tab on the side bar.
Drop down menus highlighted in red mean that these transactions are “Uncategorized”. By selecting each option, we can quickly categorize the transaction and assign it to an individual property.
Once you have classified all the pending transactions on your “Transactions” tab, head back over to the “Properties” tab, and click on the property that we added in the previous step.
You’ll see that the metrics and details begin to change and populate automatically. Many expense tracking applications try to project future values. Rentastic, on the other hand, only uses actual values. Because of that, your property performance metrics may look slightly low until you’ve got at least 12 months of data for Rentastic to pull from.
Scrolling down further, you can see the all expenses and income are listed by the month to quickly get an overview as to where your funds are going. You can easily view the type of transaction and a total tally per month.
Rentastic offers so many additional features, beyond what’s been covered in this quick article. Rentastic not only manages your rental property expenses, but has advanced reporting and metrics, rent estimates, various calculators, receipt tracking, and so much more.
Once you get fully immersed in the Rentastic ecosystem, you’ll wonder how you ever managed your portfolio and expenses without it. We give you full control in the palm of your hands. Let Rentastic do the number crunching for you, so you can get on with your day and keep working ON your business, and not in it.
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