In this instructional video, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping shares three core accounting practices for landlords and property managers. First, she stresses the importance of keeping business and personal expenses separate by assigning a dedicated credit card to each property or LLC, warning that commingling can trigger IRS audits and disallowed deductions. Second, she recommends using Intuit Merchant Services to collect rent electronically, which integrates with QuickBooks to automate invoicing, payment recording, and deposit tracking, reducing reliance on paper checks. Third, she demonstrates how QuickBooks Advanced’s multiple‑invoice feature can bulk‑create and send invoices—such as late fees or budget‑adjusted dues—for hundreds of units, a workflow especially valuable for homeowners associations and large rental portfolios. Throughout, she highlights the time‑and‑money savings of automation and invites viewers to join her QB Community Live group for further support.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I wanted to put a little video together to go with the blog post today, and I wanted to tie it back to a little bit to a blog post I did a couple of weeks ago. So this week is all about real estate and working with real estate companies. So I actually own real estate and have rental properties. Up in Rhode Island, and I know the pain of being a landlord. It's not easy work or easy money for sure. It can be very rewarding, however. But one of the things I wanted to mention that has happened with some of the clients that I have is that they use their credit card. They may have several credit cards, and if you have several properties, I recommend having different credit cards for different properties so that way you can keep all the— especially most of the properties are in their own individual LLC. Have a credit card for each one so that way you keep the business expenses separate. It's really important to keep the business expenses separate from your personal. So a lot of times we get busy, we multitask, we think we can do a lot of things. It's very common that you might grab the wrong credit card. They sometimes look the same. If you have 5 Chase cards, it's good to like maybe even put like a label on them or something so that you have a way of knowing which, which business or entity they go with. So that's one of my tips for keeping the books nice and clean. I can honestly tell you that I had a client that did not do that, and he used his personal credit card and used it for business expenses. And it was for repairs to his maintenance of his fleet. And he had some big charges. The trucks were getting older, and he used his personal card so he'd get points so he could travel. And the IRS audited him and When he saw— they saw how intermingled and how he was using his business card, his personal card for business transactions, they actually came in and they disallowed all of those, even though we had receipts that clearly said that they were for the trucks. It was $8,000 or $9,000 at the time. So really important, try to keep your business transactions separate from the personal. Even if you are an LLC, it's just good practice to keep everything separate, right? So you're not having to put everything up into the owner's equity account. So that's my tip number 1. Tip number 2 is with real estate and with apartments, and in particular the landlord or even rental properties. It's a good idea to— when years ago they just knew to come in and pay the rent on the 1st, they would come into the office or they mail their check. Now we've got Intuit Merchant Services and it's great. They can pay electronically. It's safer than a check. So you can sign up for that if you're interested. Come find me and I'll help you with that. I can help connect you and get you maybe a little bit lower fees. On depending on the service that you pick. You don't have to go with Intuit, but Intuit's really the best one because you can create the invoices in QuickBooks, send them out to the tenants, they pay, it records the payment and the deposit, it groups them. So you've now automated that whole accounts receivable flow. I mean, it's amazing. Saves time, right? Time is money. My third tip is if you're interested in automating, especially if you're a homeowners association, I work with several of them. And they tend to have maybe a lot of homeowners under the, under the one, under the one company, but one that has 400 units. And it's difficult when the board does their annual meeting, and down here in Florida, they tend to do them in the beginning of season, at the end of season. So our season ends in the end of March, usually in that first quarter. So they tend to have that cycle because really the people come back in the winter, and that's really the biggest robust part of the year for us. So a lot of times they'll have the board meetings before people leave in March, and the board will approve a new budget, and then the new budget starts April 1st, and the new budget may increase. Maybe we just had it happen with the past hurricane, didn't cover the damages, there wasn't enough funds in reserves, so they added— they increased the dues so that they could cushion back up the reserve fund. When that happened, that's 400 invoices, and at the time we were using regular QuickBooks Plus. So they had to go in and individually update every single one of those invoices to the new amount. But now we've moved them into Advanced. So let me show you how cool that is because now we can do it really quickly. So let me share my screen. So here we are in Advanced and I just pulled a sample file because it's just easier and I've already created a late fee. So I'm going to show you because we use this for an apartment rental company that has quite a few tenants and we do it for late fees and it's a great example and the same thing can be done for those dues I was just speaking about. So what we're going to do is we're going to come over to the plus sign, which is the quick create button, and come over to multiple invoice feature. I'll just take you briefly through the steps. It's very simple. It's really easy to do, and there's a video that will show you how to do it. So I'm just going to grab one of the tenants that I know is in here. I'm just going to grab Dylan, and I'm going to create the invoice, and it's due on receipt. I'll use today's date and I will just use late fees, the one I just created. And it's all going to pre-populate. It's a non-taxable thing. I can send it to him later. I actually can't because he's not— he doesn't have an email. And it was just— it's a $25 flat fee. So I collect the list on the accounts receivable report and I just select the tenants that these are going to go to. So with, you know, if you did 500, 600 units, you may have a handful of people. It's usually the same people all the time. Now if I want to duplicate this and make this for multiple, this is how simple this is. I'm going to come over to these little radio buttons over here, duplicate invoice from multiple customers. So you can duplicate it individually, you can add a line item, delete from right here, but I'm going to duplicate from multiple and I'm just going to grab my customers, right? So I'm going to come in here and grab John Melton. He's one that didn't pay me. I'm going to grab— see who else I can grab. Travis, I can grab. Just can come through here and pick Kate. You get the, you get the idea. I'm not going to go through too many. I'm just going to hit Next and it just made late charge invoices for all these people. I can click Send Later because these people actually have invoice, have emails, so I can click Send Later and then just hit Save. Simple. That easy. So it'll save and populate them and you can send them out by going to the main page where the sales are and just batch send them. But that is all. That's how easy it is to create those invoices. With Advanced. Time savings. Time equals money. I can't say that enough, right? So I really love automation and workflows and things like that. That's a big part of my business is to find out all these great things. And I have to say, this is one of my favorites. So there's quite a few features in QuickBooks Advanced I love, but this is definitely one of them because of the industries that I work in. So when I work in homeowners associations and rental properties and things of that nature. This works wonderfully. If you're a landscaper, if you're a pool service, anyone who does like that individual service, this works great. There's also another part of that feature where you can actually do this invoicing in detail right in Excel and import it. Now let's show that in a future video. So I hope that was informative and helpful. If you have any comments, please reach out to me. If you have any requests for a blog or any questions you need me to help you with, I'm open to do that. Feel free to join our Facebook group, QB Community Live. We're off to Vegas next week, so we're gonna have a little fun. And I hope you enjoyed the video, and we'll be back soon. Bye now.
