I said I'd fix my uncle's books for free. Eleven weeks.
My uncle has four houses he bought between 2008 and 2014, all in one small city, all rented long term. He's not sloppy about money. He's just been doing it the same way since the first house and the way is a manila envelope per year.
I offered to put it into software for him because I'm learning this and wanted the practice. I thought it'd be a weekend.
Week one I found out that every tenant payment for four years had gone in as one line called income, which meant security deposits were sitting in there as if they were rent. That's money he holds and owes back, so it shouldn't be income at all, and it made his gross look bigger than it was every time a tenant moved in.
Week three I found a $9,800 payment in 2019 marked "repair." It was a full roof. Whether that's an expense in one year or gets depreciated over a long schedule is exactly the kind of thing that needs a CPA rather than me and a search bar, and I told him so and stopped touching it.
Week six was the insurance. One policy covering three of the houses, one payment, no split. So none of those three houses had a true expense number. I split it by insured value because that's what the declarations page gave me, and I wrote a note in the file saying that's what I did and why.
Week eleven I gave him a report per house. The house he's always described as his best one is his second worst. The difference is a sewer thing in 2021 he'd stopped thinking about.
He said thank you and put the envelopes back in the closet anyway.