I spend about one hour per month on bookkeeping for my entire real estate portfolio.

That's it.

And I can pull any report, answer any question, and sleep easy at tax time. How does that happen? These four systems that I'm about to show you. I'm not a professional accountant or a finance major, so if I can do it, you can too. So let's break it down. If we haven't met yet, my name is Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson and on channel, I teach you how to use real estate investing to achieve financial freedom so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. And this is a Coaches Corner edition of the podcast, which just means I'm a little bit more informal. And I'd just like to have a chat with you about something that's been on my mind. And this topic in particular is one that I taught to my private community rental property mastery recently and had really good feedback. And so I wanted to share it with you to let you know how it works as well. So before we get to the four systems, I want to start off by talking about why bookkeeping? Because a lot of people think this is just one of those boring topics, something you have to do after hours. And it's not really one of the most important things in your business. I would argue, though, that bookkeeping is extremely valuable. And I use the story of The Matrix, one of my favorite movies. And Neo, as you see here, became the superhero of the Matrix because he slowed down time. He was in this computer program, and he learned how to slow things down. And he saw the entire matrix as a series of zeros and

ones. Because of that, he could stop bullets. He can jump through over cars and do all sorts of stuff.

Well, I find bookkeeping to be sort of a similar superpower in real estate investing and small

business because if you know your numbers, if you have a really organized business, everything

slows down. You can see your entire business, all the transactions, all the future things that are going

to happen.

You can start seeing trends in numbers.

And because of that, you can be a superhero of real estate investing.

So don't think this is something boring that you just have to do.

Think about this and what kind of power is going to give you in your business. So with that said, here are the four systems of my own bookkeeping system and my real estate

investing business. I'll go over them real quickly and then I'm going to dig into each one in

more detail. So number one is a system called your books or you used to be called more your ledger.

This is where you record every transaction that happens in your business. So you have to have a computer or it used to be a paper version of all these transactions. And typically you keep this in like a spreadsheet or a software. I'll talk about some of the softwares that you might be able to use as a real estate investor. I personally use quipbooks in my real estate investing business, but you can use whatever works for you. But the main point is you have to have a record. You have to have a digital record of everything that's happening in your business. And I'll talk a little bit more detail about that. But then number two, you have a parallel system, which is record keeping, or you could think about it like saving all your receipts, paperwork, things that are proof of all those

transactions you have. So I say in parallel, these two things work together because if the books

are your recording of all the transactions, your record keeping is the proof that those things

actually happen. So especially if you get audited by the IRS or some other organization,

you need to make sure you have proof. And so I'm going to talk about where you can store these files, how you make it so it's not so cumbersome, and what software I use as well. And then number three is having a system of checklist. So this is really just about being organized and what are the kinds of things you need to do every month, what kind of bookkeeping tasks are there, and just making that easy. that isn't the first thing that makes you money in your business. You don't want to have to spend a bunch of time remembering or forgetting what's going on. So checklists are really important to use. And then number four, this is really the payoff of the first three steps is that once you have all that organized and you have a system set up and you're doing it regularly

with checklist, then you can actually get data that helps you run your business, helps you think

ahead of time, helps you learn from past mistakes and things that have gone well. And this is a series of

spreadsheets and reports. So this is like the output of your bookkeeping system so that you can do things

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