A second checking account and thirty minutes on Sundays fixed my books
I've got four rentals and I'd stopped pretending my books were real. Everything ran through one business checking account, deals in progress mixed with rentals, and every March was a fight.
What I changed in January, and it wasn't complicated.
One, split the accounts. Rentals into one checking account, active deal money into another. Cost me an hour at the bank and $12 a month in fees on the second account. Just that split made the rental P&L readable for the first time, because I stopped having sixty transactions a month that had nothing to do with the rentals.
Two, 30 minutes every Sunday. I reconcile the week, and anything I can't categorize in ten seconds goes into a holding account called "ask" with a note. Photo of the receipt attached right there.
Three, I dropped from a monthly bookkeeper to a quarterly review at $400 a quarter. She goes through the "ask" account, fixes what I got wrong, and tells me what she needed and didn't get. That's $1,600 a year instead of $4,200.
What nearly broke it: February. I skipped three Sundays and came back to 140 uncategorized transactions and no memory of what half of them were. That backlog took me four hours and I nearly quit. The weekly rhythm is doing all the work here, the software isn't doing much.
What I'd keep: the "ask" account. Before that I'd guess at a category to make the screen turn green, and a wrong guess looks exactly like a right one three months later. Now my wrong guesses are labeled.
My preparer's fee dropped $600 this year, so the whole thing paid for itself.