Per door or per entity, what is the right unit for pricing landlord books

The unit that actually tracks hours is bank and card accounts rather than doors. A nine door LLC with one checking account and one card is two reconciliations a month no matter how many tenants. A sound structure is a base per entity, something like $200, then $15 a door on top for the rent roll side, then a separate line for each additional account past the first two. Your second client would price out at roughly triple the first under that, which sounds about right against your four times.

Slightly sideways question since I'm in the middle of licensing paperwork already: does taking money to keep someone's books require a license? A guy at my brokerage told me you need a CPA to touch anyone's books but that sounded off to me.

@ryanmck27 no. Keeping the books, reconciling the accounts and producing a P&L and balance sheet is generally unlicensed work. What is restricted is calling yourself a CPA, signing off on audited or reviewed financials, and in some states preparing returns or representing a client in front of the tax authority, and those rules differ state to state so check yours. What you actually want is errors and omissions coverage, because the failure mode is a client blaming your categorization for a return that got amended.

If either of those clients ever hands you the management side, the trust or escrow account is where flat pricing stops working. Most states require the security deposit and rent trust account to reconcile to the penny against a liability schedule per tenant, and the requirements vary by state. That one reconciliation routinely eats more hours in a month than the entire operating account does. Price it as its own line item or you will do it for free.

Three LLCs isn't one client at four times the work, it's three clients who share an email address.

What do people charge to fix the first year before the monthly starts? I looked at hiring someone for my own stuff and every quote came back with a cleanup number attached that was bigger than the annual fee.

@aliyah_b the two structures I've seen quoted are hourly at somewhere in the $60 to $90 range for cleanup, or a flat fee per month of backlog, so twelve months behind gets billed as twelve units at maybe half the ongoing monthly rate. The second one is friendlier to the client because they see the number up front. The risk is you quote twelve months of backlog and then find out there were four credit cards nobody mentioned.

The reimbursement thing on your second client is the real cost, @angela_burke. Every time the one LLC pays a bill for another one, that's a due to and due from entry in two sets of books that have to agree, and if he only remembers to move the cash sometimes then you're carrying balances that nobody reconciles until year end. I'd price that client as three entities plus an intercompany line and tell him the intercompany line goes away if he stops doing it.