While the work out in the field is how real estate transactions come to fruition, the administrative tasks and other back office work demand a lot of time and effort as well. Not only do realtors have to spend time and effort to advertise properties, keep a pulse on the market and be in touch with potential clients, but most real estate agents also have to be mobile 24/7. So it is not surprising they want to spend as little time with accounting as possible. Thankfully, online accounting solutions take care of the dull bookkeeping, whether you’re sitting in an office or on the go. In fact, these clever solutions are capable of everything: you can quickly create and send estimates to your potential clients, record the prices of real estate properties and commissions in your inventory, manage the payroll of your co-workers, who can even track their own time, and even get auto-generated business reports for taxing purposes.
Features
Online accounting solutions not only make the accounting process less of a hassle, but they also come with various features, most of which are mandatory in the real estate business. Here are some of those features:
Quotes
With the quoting feature you can easily provide your clients an estimated price of the real estate and you can even forward that estimate to the potential client for consideration. Furthermore, if the client accepts your offer, you can easily turn the quote into a full-fledged invoice with the sales contract or other agreement attached to it.
Best Online Accounting Software of 2017
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Inventory
Although this feature is good for storing your services with their respective prices, it is also a suitable to for keeping track of real estate transactions. This way you can easily create an invoice for your services based on an earlier quote or a contract closed with the client.
Mobility
Probably one of the best and most handy features of any online accounting software is that you can access all necessary information from an app, whether it’s to check your bank transactions, create an invoice/estimate, record expenses, or update a client’s contact info.
Payroll
With the payroll feature you can easily pay the monthly salary of your workers. Furthermore, since everything is recorded in the cloud accounting software (including time worked, the transactions made etc.), you can calculate individual commissions based on the performance of your co-workers and even pay them automatically.
Reports
The cloud accounting solution is capable of creating your business reports based on what you enter into the software with minimal manual input. In fact, you just have to provide access to your books to your accountant who, after a quick checking, can simply validate your books.
Integrating Other Software and Services
Nowadays everything – including invoicing, expense management, tax filing, payroll, document storing etc. – has its own dedicated solution. Since online accounting programs are intended to replace as much of the above software as possible, many fear that they have to get rid of their old solutions. However, those fears are completely unjustified: accounting companies always offer and support an API, meaning that online accounting solutions can integrate with hundreds of different third-party applications. Whether it’s CRM, time tracking tools, payroll software or solutions for invoicing, expense, project and document management, your new accounting software will definitely have a way to make it part of an advanced cloud environment.
Gusto, the online payroll management software that can deal with all government payroll taxes, compliance, and filings, is such a third-party app, but we can also mention more obvious solutions like PayPal. You can also integrate full-on applications like Tradify which can manage virtually everything like quoting, invoicing, job scheduling, timesheets and even GPS tracking. Moreover, you can integrate Google Apps like Drive and Gmail or even the powerhouse that is Microsoft Office in your accounting solution for managing complete contact lists, staying in touch with your customers and co-workers and storing valuable documents.
Online Accounting Solutions Recommended for You
Since the real estate business is about making the best deals possible, it is only appropriate to present you the best deals of the online accounting solution market which have all of the solutions we listed above and more. But no matter whether you pick Xero or QuickBooks Online, it is guaranteed you will be satisfied.
Xero
Xero, which has over 1 million subscribers worldwide, is one of the best choices for those in the real estate business, since it has everything they need. Aside from clever invoicing, a visual dashboard and the option to choose from multiple currencies you get a handy inventory to store the prices of real estate and quotes which can be turned into invoices in a jiffy. In fact, all these features can be easily accessed from Xero’s free iOS/Android mobile app which features a two-step secure authentication process for an extra layer of security. Although the software is capable of managing your payroll via an extra service, you have the option to substitute it with any third-party application of the 400 that can be integrated into the software. If you pick Xero, you can choose from three pricing plans, all of which include a 30-day free trial.
QuickBooks Online
Available for free for iOS and Android devices as well, QuickBooks Online has all features needed for your real estate business, such as easy quoting/estimating, fully automated business reporting, a handy inventory and the option to track the time of your co-workers. Furthermore, thanks to the extra service QuickBooks Online Payroll, this software is capable of managing your payroll, but it can also integrate with over 300 third-party apps. If you choose any of the three pricing plans, you can not only try out QuickBooks for 30 days, but you can also enjoy a 60-day money back guarantee.