This article shows an overview of Extenteam's Accounting Services, a detailed list of common challenges property managers are facing and and how Extenteam can help in resolving these concerns.
Challenges Property Managers are facing:
1. Segregation and proper handling of funds between the property owners (PO) and the property management company (PMC). In some states in the US, the property owners’ money are required to be kept in a separate federally insured checking account commonly known as escrow or trust account.
Common questions we hear from partners/potential partners are:
- Do I need 1, 2 or 3 bank accounts?
- Which account should we use to pay for rental property-related expenses?
- How do trust accounting transactions flow?
2. While all of our clients use vacation rental management software (VRMS) / property management software (PMS) to automate and streamline their operations, majority of them are struggling with bookkeeping, accounting and financial reporting.
Here are what they are mostly concerned about:
- How can we ensure that property owners are paid accurately and timely?
- How can we ensure that our trust accounting is properly done?
- How can we ensure that our property management business receives an accurate amount of distributions every month/quarter?
- We want to have better visibility of our property management business’ performance and examine financial reports as needed, be on top of our figures and know where we allocate our resources.
3. Most of our partners/potential partners are either using an outdated method of managing their books or do not have their current systems set up correctly.
We often hear the following during discovery calls:
- We are spending a huge amount of time number-crunching and still unable to deliver reports on time. We’d rather spend our time somewhere else e.g. talking to clients, selling and growing our business, etc.
- We are maintaining tons of disorganized spreadsheets and run with the risk of mathematical errors.
- We have massive files of receipts, financial documents and reports and it's too difficult to find stuff without sifting through all of them.
4. Hiring an in-house team to do all the legwork can be relatively expensive and requires a longer transition and learning period vs. outsourcing to a team of experienced/experts specializing in the field.
Extenteam’s Solution/Offering:
- We dedicate time to understand the business of partners/potential partners, review their current processes and build a smarter and more efficient accounting/bookkeeping systems & controls e.g. chart of accounts, accounts receivable and accounts payable workflows which are compliant with US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) and best practices in the industry.
- We help partners/potential partners build their accounting transaction flow and provide end to end support on both trust and operational accounting.
- We understand technology and help our partners automate the repetitive non-essential tasks away by using cutting-edge solutions To name a few of the tech stack we are proficient with:
- Quickbooks
- Xero
- NetSuite
- Salesforce
- Bill.com
- Divvy
- Brex
- Expensify
- Fathom CFO Reporting
- Spotlight CFO Reporting
- We are also proficient with the best and widely used property management software (PMS)/vacation rental management software (VRMS) as well as online travel agency (OTA) & payment solutions in the industry, and have built workflows and processes around them through rigorous training and hands-on implementation/use with existing partners.
- Streamline
- Guesty
- iGMS
- LiveRez/LiveTrust
- Hostfully
- Hostaway
- Airbnb, VRBO, etc.
- Authorized.net
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Lynnbrook
- We are more cost-effective compared to In-house talent and competitor’s (40-50% savings).