Drowning in Minutia

A couple months ago, it was brought to my attention that we may not be utilizing QuickBooks to its potential for our business. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Since the inception of our business, I have built elaborate Excel spreadsheets to track our individual property expenses, tenant income records, and investor loan records. I also had come across a real estate investor course (specifically geared towards setting up QuickBooks for our specific business model) that I thoughtfully placed on a shelf to collect dust for a couple years.

Finally, after enough frustration with the way we were set up by our accountant, I hired someone to read the course. It was implemented so we could start the year on our new accounting system. QuickBooks is now set up so that it tracks everything for us that I used to input into Excel manually. Between myself and my assistant, this will save us from a monotonous 4 to 6 hours per week of inputting data. Not included in those #'s is the time spent just thinking about not wanting to do it.

In the age of the Internet, there are so many quality programs and systems that can save both time and money. It's realizing that other ways of getting things done are out there that is difficult to see sometime.

What do you spend time doing in your business right now that could be handled more efficiently through the utilization of software?