What's a class? Forty minutes later I was still nodding.

I have four units across three buildings and my books have been one bucket since the beginning. Rent in, expenses out, a number at the end of the year that I hand to my tax person and don't look at again.

On a call with a bookkeeper I asked a question I'd been embarrassed about for a year, which was what a class is, because I'd seen the word in the software and in threads here and had no idea. In my software it's a tag you put on a transaction so the same expense account can be split across different properties. So "repairs" stays one account and every repair carries a tag saying which building it belongs to. Some people use locations for this instead. Either way you get a profit and loss per property out the other end.

She shared her screen and applied it to three months of my own data as an example, tagging by hand, guessing at some of them from the memo lines. Forty minutes. She did not charge me for it, which I think was a sales decision and a good one.

The result was that one unit, a one bedroom in the older of the three buildings, had eaten every dollar of profit the other three made in that window and about $600 more. I knew that unit was annoying. I did not know it was the only reason my year looked flat.

The tagging was three months of guesses, so I'm not treating it as a finding yet. She's redoing it properly back to 2022 and I'm paying for that. But I'd been staring at one bucket for years and the answer was in there the whole time, just mixed together.