While the work out in the field is how real estate transactions come to fruition, the administrative tasks and other back office work demand a lot of time and effort as well. Not only do realtors have to spend time and effort to advertise properties, keep a pulse on the market and be in touch with potential clients, but most real estate agents also have to be mobile 24/7. So it is not surprising they want to spend as little time with accounting as possible. Thankfully, online accounting solutions take care of the dull bookkeeping, whether you’re sitting in an office or on the go. In fact, these clever solutions are capable of everything: you can quickly create and send estimates to your potential clients, record the prices of real estate properties and commissions in your inventory, manage the payroll of your co-workers, who can even track their own time, and even get auto-generated business reports for taxing purposes.
Online accounting solutions not only make the accounting process less of a hassle, but they also come with various features, most of which are mandatory in the real estate business. Here are some of those features:
With the quoting feature you can easily provide your clients an estimated price of the real estate and you can even forward that estimate to the potential client for consideration. Furthermore, if the client accepts your offer, you can easily turn the quote into a full-fledged invoice with the sales contract or other agreement attached to it.
Although this feature is good for storing your services with their respective prices, it is also a suitable to for keeping track of real estate transactions. This way you can easily create an invoice for your services based on an earlier quote or a contract closed with the client.
Probably one of the best and most handy features of any online accounting software is that you can access all necessary information from an app, whether it’s to check your bank transactions, create an invoice/estimate, record expenses, or update a client’s contact info.
With the payroll feature you can easily pay the monthly salary of your workers. Furthermore, since everything is recorded in the cloud accounting software (including time worked, the transactions made etc.), you can calculate individual commissions based on the performance of your co-workers and even pay them automatically.
The cloud accounting solution is capable of creating your business reports based on what you enter into the software with minimal manual input. In fact, you just have to provide access to your books to your accountant who, after a quick checking, can simply validate your books.
Nowadays everything – including invoicing, expense management, tax filing, payroll, document storing etc. – has its own dedicated solution. Since online accounting programs are intended to replace as much of the above software as possible, many fear that they have to get rid of their old solutions. However, those fears are completely unjustified: accounting companies always offer and support an API, meaning that online accounting solutions can integrate with hundreds of different third-party applications. Whether it’s CRM, time tracking tools, payroll software or solutions for invoicing, expense, project and document management, your new accounting software will definitely have a way to make it part of an advanced cloud environment.
Gusto, the online payroll management software that can deal with all government payroll taxes, compliance, and filings, is such a third-party app, but we can also mention more obvious solutions like PayPal. You can also integrate full-on applications like Tradify which can manage virtually everything like quoting, invoicing, job scheduling, timesheets and even GPS tracking. Moreover, you can integrate Google Apps like Drive and Gmail or even the powerhouse that is Microsoft Office in your accounting solution for managing complete contact lists, staying in touch with your customers and co-workers and storing valuable documents.
Since the real estate business is about making the best deals possible, it is only appropriate to present you the best deals of the online accounting solution market which have all of the solutions we listed above and more. But no matter whether you pick Xero or QuickBooks Online, it is guaranteed you will be satisfied.
Xero is a progressive and innovative online accounting solution that enables you to manage your accounts more effectively and make your accounting hassle-free. Some of its features include invoicing and quotes, bank reconciliation, inventory, mobile capability, third-party apps, purchase orders and payroll. The mobile version of the software, Xero Touch, makes it possible to access all your accounting data instantly from wherever you may be. Xero integrates and works well with many other third-party applications (such as advanced solutions for CRM, point-of-sale, e-commerce and more). You have a choice of three pricing plans – Starter, Standard and Premium – all of which have slightly different features and a reduced price for the first six months. Xero also provides a 30-day free trial. Customers enjoy efficient and reliable support from Xero online teams. Xero’s US headquarters is in San Francisco, but this publicly listed company’s products are used in over 180 countries. The company has garnered impressive experience in the area of cloud computing and accounting and has continued to innovate and create new products for the market.
It is quite unbelievable that U.S.-based online accounting company Intuit Inc. has already been on the market since 1983. But the success of its main product, QuickBooks shows that they aren’t just simply lucky. The software exists as downloadable software for desktops, and a cloud-based accounting solution dubbed QuickBooks Online, which the company quite aggressively promotes. This latter version, of which we will be talking about, is ideal for everybody from simple sole-proprietors to bigger companies. Regardless of the chosen subscription, you can create invoices, expenses, and estimates with a few clicks, quickly manage sales receipts, create and print checks, payrolls, have multiple tax rates, real-time banking and reports. You can integrate the software with over 300 third-party solutions, and be entitled to full customer support. You also have the option to try out the software completely free of charge for 30 days. Skipping this trial period you get a discount from the monthly subscription fee for six months or a whole year. But if you don’t like the software, you still have a 60-day money back guarantee.
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