I’m in search of software to help me with my mid-term rental finances. Between bookkeeping, rent collection, and built-in banking, can Baselane be my Quickbooks and Keycheck replacement for running my Airbnb and Furnished Finder properties? Follow along while I give a real landlord review of Baselane, and see how I evaluate software for my real estate investments.
Resources
To see step by step how I bought a cash-flowing Airbnb, check out this video: How I Found a Profitable Airbnb Rental Property
If you’re interested in using Baselane for your real estate investments, get $100 bonus when you sign up for a Baselane bank account and collect rent with it using this link: Get $100 Bonus with Baselane
Transcript
I wear a lot of hats in the real estate business, and one of them is - cleaner, maintenance, marketing, secretary, bookkeeper. And to be honest, this year, I just haven’t been a really good one. This whole stack of receipts is things for one rental that I’ve been avoiding. My plan is to fix that right now while we’re together and see if I could get myself out of this mess.
I’m about eight months behind for keeping track of all this stuff. For one rental. And to be honest, it’s because I was afraid. See, I took this really awesome course on QuickBooks last year, and I got my books for another rental really beautifully in QuickBooks. And as a real estate investor, I’m in this constant struggle between balancing the tradeoffs of adding more complexities or adding more expenses.
The big problem I’ve been having with QuickBooks is that while getting one rental into it was awesome, I am trying to figure out if it’s worth paying for QuickBooks for every single rental that I own, or do I instead upgrade my QuickBooks plan and try to use locations and classes to get everything in my portfolio in one system?
Now, the class that I took did recommend doing that, but it comes with one caveat. I have two years of records inside of QuickBooks, and in order to switch to this idea of using classes and locations, I would have to upgrade my plan and then go back through thousands of transactions in those bank accounts and in that QuickBooks instance to reclassify everything with classes and locations.
And honestly, it’s just been super daunting. All of the last eight months I’ve been pushing away this task because of the other things that I’ve been doing. I have rentals to manage, renovations, to complete, lawns to mow when my landscaper doesn’t show up, rooms to clean. I’ll tell you more about that next time. And lots of other everyday business stuff.
This task seems kind of daunting and insurmountable. I also ran into a new problem with my midterm rental. See, with my previous rentals, I’ve done everything through Airbnb and that’s honestly taken care of so much for me and made bookkeeping a little easier because I haven’t had to deal with things like security deposits or refunds. Now that I’ve been finding renters off of Airbnb using sites like Furnished Finder, I have to do everything myself, including putting those security deposits in a separate bank account so that we can comply with local state law.
One other thing that’s been new is that if somebody is around for more than one month and they’re on this month to month lease, I’m in charge of sending them an invoice and collecting that payment using software. With my first off Airbnb booking, I literally had to scramble to get this figured out, but I didn’t want to lose the booking just because I had no clue what I was doing.
So right now I’m in a little bit of a mess and I’ve heard about something that supposedly might be able to solve all these things for me, all in one go. So we’re going to explore that together and I’m going to walk you step by step through the process I’m using. And by the end of this video, we can see whether or not I can replace QuickBooks, keep my security deposits in a separate account, and get my payments together for all of these monthly bookings where people have to pay directly to me through my invoices for renting out a mid term rental.
I found this software that’s also a bank account and also accounting software and also bill collection, and it’s supposedly built for landlords. I’ve looked around and I watched their demo videos and I think I think that I could avoid all of my pain with QuickBooks and get through this hard hurdle in my business and solve everything with one software.
But I’m not sure yet because I haven’t tried it. We’re actually going to try this live, and I’m not certain how it’s going to turn out, so you’ll have to watch till the end and see what the conclusion is. The one thing I forgot to mention is that it’s free and with QuickBooks right now I’m paying about $30 a month to just have the basic functionality I need to run one rental.
If I upgrade QuickBooks in order to do this thing with classes and locations, I actually don’t know how much it would cost. Let me check that real quick. In order for me to get the locations and classes in QuickBooks, I’d have to get the Plus or the Advanced plan. The Plus plan is $85 a month and the Advanced plan is $200 a month.
I can tell you right away, advanced is not going to work for my portfolio because that’s just too much of an expense. $85 a month. Maybe like that one’s questionable. But free! I mean, that’s the selling point of Baselane. So let’s take a look and see if this is something that would work. First of all, I’m going to close out of this QuickBooks garbage.
I took a look around and basically says that it was developed by the fine tech industry. So people in New York and stuff that care about financial technology. And I don’t think that Baselane in itself is a bank account. I think it’s a software that’s built on top of banks, similar to things like Relay that I’ve seen in the past.
I literally have not signed up for this before, so we’re going to do that right now. I’m a landlord. I’m a renter. Which one? I’m a landlord. All right. So filling out the first page is pretty easy. Now we’re going to go ahead and give it our phone number, which it probably needs for two step verification. So we’ve got our verification code.
Take a look at finding it. Okay. So first up, it ask me how many rentals I own and now it’s asking me to input them into the system. I don’t know if I’m going to put them all in here, so I wonder if it’s good to. Let me just start with one. Let’s see. It’s asking me where I want to start.
Do I want it to open a landlord banking account? So I want to start collecting rent online? Or do I want to set up bookkeeping and analytics? And it tells me that all the features will be available to me later. I kind of need all of these, but I do have an existing bank account where all these transactions are living and this is where like the majority of my pain is right now is that my books are behind.
I do need to get that bank account going because I literally have some rent and security deposits that are out there in the ether sitting with a payment provider that I haven’t collected out of the payment provider because of my bank account issue. That’s awful because these tenants have already moved in so they’ve paid their rent, the paid the security deposit, and eventually they’re going have to pay rent again in like 20 days.
And I got to figure this out soon. So I think for the sake of getting started, like trying to solve my QuickBooks pain might be where we should go. So let’s try that first. And then after I get all the transactions in there and start to get a feel for what it’s like doing bookkeeping in here, then I’ll get to opening the bank account and collecting rent online because I’ll need to do those things soon to going to link to my existing bank accounts, which is great.
Just needs my rental property address and my banking credentials. The one thing that’s like my spidey sense is going off on this. I think they need my rental property address so that they can do the other things in the future, like the rent collection and just making the interface nice. But at the core of this, I know how free software works and a lot of free software works because they’re collecting your data.
I’m just curious, you know, like, what are they getting out of collecting? I don’t know though. I’m being cheap. So this is free software. I have a problem. It claims it can fix it. Let’s keep going. All right. So now we’re going to link bank accounts. Okay, so they use Plaid. This is very common. It seems like all of the online banking technologies are using plaid right now. I know Relay
It uses Plaid. I know Novo uses Plaid. So this is pretty common. Nothing to worry about. I don’t know how far back you can pull transactions. Like I really need it to go back to like October and it’s June, so we’ll see if it can do that. Okay, so it’s offering to auto tag my transactions. I’m looking at this stack of receipts and I’m wondering if I should say yes.
My issue with auto tagging is that I’ve tried this in other accounting software and it’s sometimes wrong. But is it worse to be sometimes wrong than mostly right? I don’t know. So I don’t know. I guess I should try auto tagging for the sake of this video, so let’s go for it. What could go wrong? Either way? I’m either going to have to manually change all of them because they’re empty or manually changed all of them because they’re wrong.
So let’s go for it. Like it’s only going to add my property to the bank account. I only use one bank account per property. I guess I’ll do it. It’s not what I thought it was. Okay, so this is the moment of truth. What did it do? How much did it pull in? Is it going to save my bacon?
I don’t know. New to Baselane? Schedule a 15 minute demo call and learn how baseline. Oh, it’s not Baseline. Sorry. Everywhere in this video I’ve set it wrong. Baselane. I don’t know. I’ll schedule a demo call 15 minutes. I mean, I think I’m spending way more than that on this video, so I’ll talk to that later. It doesn’t look like auto tagging did anything besides putting the property tag on it.
That’s kind of useless. Okay, so let’s see how far back it goes at least, and see if that’s a redeeming quality. This is kind of impressive. June 20, 23 2021. It went back to years of transactions. That’s pretty good. Oh, props. I don’t know if that’s because how much history. That’s my bank. That my other bank that allows to be transferred via Plaid or if that’s a functionality of Baselane.
So I don’t know that’s but that’s nice because I was worried I would have to go to my bank, try to find history beyond these two years, export the data, get it back in, etc. So everything should be here that I’m worried about, at least. So now the big question is what sorts of categories are we to get?
So one of the key things you want to do if you are playing bookkeeper and landlord is that your chart of accounts makes sense. And the way that I was taught to do a chart of accounts is to at the highest level, have it map back up to Schedule E on the US tax Form 1040. So Schedule E is meant for rental property income.
And if you could have these top level categories show up that way when it comes time to tax time, it’s so much easier to figure out what money went where and your accountant will love you. So my books for my other rental property inside of QuickBooks, I built myself because I needed them to be special for running an Airbnb.
What I really wanted to be able to do is use those books not just for taxes, but also to analyze my business spending. So in a short term rental, you end up with a lot more different kinds of expenses than you do with a regular long term rental. Because it’s furnished. You provide supplies, linens, cleanings, all this stuff and stuff breaks more often.
So I want to keep an eye on those expenses. Now, this property is a furnished rental, but it’s a mid term rental, so we’re not having cleanings every three days or things like that that incur lots of transactions. So I’m wondering if it matters to me from the business level to be able to get this beautiful layout of everything I want in my business.
I know that’s going to be a trade off moving to a software that’s not built for robust accounting, but maybe it’s worth it. So let’s keep going. This is kind of lame, you know, like this check. I know what this check was. This because it’s happened very recently. This check was for somebody to wash the outside of this rental and make it look nice.
So essentially, it’s another type of cleaning. If I look at my Airbnb chart of accounts, like the Super special one that I built, let me see, like how I would have categorized that and see how that bubbles up to Schedule E and whether or not that would work inside of baseline for me, this is a chart of accounts that I love that I built.
The other thing I’ve really loved about using QuickBooks is that I was able to break apart things into this idea of cost of services sold. It’s similar to COGS cost of goods sold in, say, a retail business. When you’re running a business like a short term rental, you want to be able to track what directly impacts how much money you make.
So paying for cleaners on turnovers is super important because if you don’t have a clean short term rental, you don’t have a business. But paying for something like Microsoft Excel so that you could build sweet spreadsheets like this, does it contribute directly to the bottom line of your business running? Because you can use something like Google Sheets, for example.
So those types of things just end up in this other bucket that I call expenses. So if I go and look for software, so I have this other category called expenses where other software subscriptions like Microsoft Office would end up into. So I guess that maps back up to just a bucket category in Schedule E called expenses. So that’s for that.
Let’s look at cleaning - oh - perfect. I guess I was overthinking that one. They have a category for cleaning and maintenance, so what’s like that? Okay, the next transaction in this list is actually a payment to a credit card. And that credit card has a bunch of expenses related to this property. So I’m wondering if I can actually pull in that credit card and map that account too, because that’s necessary.
All those expenses need categorized, even though this is a payment towards the balance on that credit card. Let’s check that out. We’re kind of at a standstill. Like, I don’t want to take the next steps with Baselane unless I know that I could get all my transactions in here. So I guess there’s a couple other questions that I have that I think we could try to solve while we see whether or not these credit card transactions will ever import.
Here’s a couple of questions I have that would set baseline up to be my QuickBooks replacement. One thing QuickBooks does allow is 1099 NEC Filing. What you do is you set up a vendor in QuickBooks and then you can automatically at the end of the year, gather all that information and pay QuickBooks like 12 or 13 bucks per contractor and get that form filed e-filed even.
And you don’t have to do anything else besides verify that that’s the amount of money that you paid that contractor for the year and off it goes. So one other thing I’m wondering is can upload all of these receipts. So you really need to keep a copy of all of your receipts when you’re running a business and running rental properties is no different.
In QuickBooks, you could automatically add these photos that you take into the app on a transaction so that all of your receipts are in one place. One other thing I’m wondering is like if Baselane is a startup and it kind of sounds like one, can I take my data with me when I’m gone? So if I’m going to spend all this time categorizing all these transactions, is there a way for me to export all that and then put it into something like QuickBooks or a more large proprietary accounting software so that I haven’t lost all that effort on all of those years of work.
So that’s something I want to check. While we’re waiting for these transactions to load, I also want to know, like, can I have separate user logins? Since I told you that I’m failing at being this bookkeeper this year, one of my major goals this year is to hire a VA to start taking care of all of the bookkeeping for my properties so they don’t fall this far behind again in the future.
Keeping accurate books is super important to knowing whether or not your business is running well, and I already kind of know how that property is doing, but it’d be beautiful to have it in reports and in a way that can be looked at, at a glance and known for when I’m making decisions about that property. The other thing is like, is it easy to figure out, as I’m thinking about this VA that I’m going to hire?
I know that everything I do with a VA is going to have to be super trainable. Now, I’ve already looked on Fiverr and on Upwork. There’s plenty of people that already understand established accounting software and things that have been out there for a while, like QuickBooks and even Wave. I use Wave for other businesses and I love it.
I just haven’t used it for my rentals. So I know that on Fiverr and on Upwork I can find people who are trained in QuickBooks and are trained in Wave and are actually trained as bookkeepers. So can I. I’ve looked at actually we could go look together when I look on Fiverr and when I look on Upwork, there’s nobody that lists Baselane as a skill, so anything is teachable, but is going to be that much harder to get somebody who does have clients in those other softwares to go ahead and learn yet another software for bookkeeping?
I actually don’t know. I haven’t tried. So let’s take a look at Fiverr real quick and I’ll show you that it’s been super hard to find anybody see like Wave Apps is in here. I’ll do bookkeeping for Wave, but if I look for Baselane - no services found for your search. So something to consider here. Man, I’m so bummed I can’t get to my transactions for my credit card.
Okay, I just have to get over it. Let’s answer those other questions. All right. So we’re going to go and check out analytics and reporting. I have no idea what’s under here. Hopefully, it answers some of our questions. Okay. So it has cash flow analytics, the cash flow statements. Tax package. Okay. So here’s what it says about what the tax packages I clicked on tax package thinking I was going to find those 1099 NEC forms that I was talking about, but it doesn’t look like they’re here.
The tax package is a consolidated report of your property financials that can easily be shared with a tax preparer, investing partner lender, or anyone requesting your financials. Select the time period and the properties for which you want to run the report and click download and Net operating Cash Flow report and the ledger of transactions. All right. My next question is, can I upload all these receipts?
Let’s go check it out. Okay. So it’s telling me where this came from. Oh, add attachments. That’s exactly what I want. Okay, so it uploaded. That’s great. And it lets me add notes. Maybe that’s for an accountant, but I already know, like every CPA that I’ve dealt with, a lot of them don’t even want to use Wave. So it’s QuickBooks or Bust.
For most accountants that deal with real estate, and I don’t imagine these notes are going to do any good unless they can be exported out. I don’t know. And it shows me that I have a receipt, so that’s nice. If I’m going through at a glance and trying to figure out if every transaction has a receipt stored with it for future reference.
So that question is answered. Okay, so say you spend all this time categorizing these transactions and uploading these receipts and matching everything. So can you get your data out, including with the receipts like including with the receipts is important Wave does it? I know that QuickBooks can do it. I haven’t used other software, so I don’t know what else they can do, but I feel like that’s a big one.
So let’s see, I just click the download button and it gave me a CSV. Like it’s not even a zip file. Oh, I literally do not see what I’m looking for anywhere else. So maybe in my user information business profile password dashboard, I can buy insurance. That’s not what I need. Okay. This is really the only button I see for this is on the transactions page and all it gives me is a CSV.
I mean, I already have a CSV for my bank. So. So really downloading those transactions only gives you the categorizations you’ve done in the notes. It’s not a beautiful package that I can that I could just import. Like, will it work? Like, can I take what I just did and put it in Wave? Okay. I got to spend a minute like creating a fake business and wave, which is awesome.
I love you. Wave. Maybe. Maybe I should just do bookkeeping in Wave. I don’t know. Okay, so here I am in Wave in my fake property. And if I go to accounting transactions, I mean, I can upload a CSV file, so I don’t know. Let’s try it. There’s only one item I categorized over in Baselane, so we’ll see if it captures that one category and puts it over here.
So just an experiment. Select the account for which are uploading transactions. So I don’t have one on here. It didn’t work. That was the wrong How do I do this? Yeah, that didn’t work at all. And I think what it meant by description wasn’t categories. And maybe that’s a failure on Wave. I might have to delete the entire account, the checking account.
This was not supposed to turn into a Wave tutorial. We are off base. We’re going to try that upload again. I don’t think I’m going to accomplish my goal. I actually think this is going to turn into an utter failure, which is a total waste of time. I’m starting to think I need a new plan. I don’t know who said this, but I think it’s very true.
When you find a software that tries to do everything, it usually means that it can’t really do one thing well. And although I think Baselane could have a ton of potential to be my QuickBooks replacement or even my Wave replacement, like I have not considered keeping track of these properties in Wave, which is free and allows you as many accounts as you need for all your businesses.
And you can actually go through each one. And I could even I know in Wave, I’ve exported my data before when I had a business, I had to move around. I have been able to make guest accounts for people in their waves not connected to my bank, like isn’t my bank. I feel a little more comfortable like creating a user account that’s attached to Wave that wouldn’t have like access to creating virtual debit cards and some of the other stuff that can you have the power to do inside of Baselane.
I really wanted to like find this software that I love and find it in Baselane. Like the fact that it’s free software and that I can’t get everything that I did in it out of it is the biggest red flag because I have used a ton of free software before, and free software dies sometimes because they need money to fund it.
And I’m not saying Baselane is going to die. I mean, it sounds like they have different ways of making money, just like Wave does. But I don’t like putting all my eggs in a basket because I’m already stressed out about the fact that I’m so behind on all of my bookkeeping and the idea that maybe like a year or two from now, the work in the effort that I do now to fix this and to get this on track might be gone is unsettling to me.
This was supposed to be about Baselane, and I’m just talking about Wave. I don’t know what’s going on. Hey, well, I spent all this time complaining about Baselane, my credit card transactions showed up. So then the next thing that I always wonder is how does software deal with transfers? Especially when you’re talking about a payment like from a checking account to pay a credit card.
So that’s one good check right here. I guess what I’m used to is like in Wave, if I say it’s a transfer between two accounts, like it visually indicates the two accounts that it’s a transfer between like it tags, for example, that this payment from my rewards checking account would be a transfer to the Capital One credit card, but it’s not doing that.
So am I just too picky? I don’t know. Can this be fine? Maybe it’s fine. I don’t know. One question I never answered about Baselane is can I have a separate user account that like, maybe I can change permissions too? And honestly, I don’t see that anywhere as I’m getting going around here. Okay. So my question is, can I invite other users to manage my transaction categorization and attachments?
So basically, like my receipt uploads, this would be something that I would want to hire out for like a VA. I guess they’re going to get back to me on Monday. This is going to be a multiple edit video. One other thing that’s important on your rental property, so you need to be able to split transactions. I know you can split transactions in Baselane but I’m curious what it looks like.
So I’m going to take a look at what how I categorize a mortgage transaction in QuickBooks and then see what where that maps into my chart of accounts and see if I can bring it back over here. I have a bad feeling I’m going to have to stick to QuickBooks. Okay, So my camera died and lost a little bit of what I was saying, so hopefully it wasn’t too much.
Really what I want to get down to is that there’s a certain level of customization you need to be able to do in bookkeeping for a rental in order to make sure that everything that possibly could be a tax deduction is accounted for. The issue that we have here and I’ve taken a look on Baselane’s help pages is that currently you cannot create customizable transaction categories.
So I’ll just take a look here and I went over to their help section. I actually found the it’s help that basically help.baselane.com and I searched for categories and found this question Can I add my own categories? And they said that they don’t currently offer customization, but maybe they will soon. I would say that until they offer this feature using it for categorizing your transactions, if you have things that need to be split like mortgages or stuff that just needs to be really well detailed, that this is not the solution for you at this time.
There are softwares out there like Wave, which does allow you to create custom categories and transactions and custom charts of accounts that you could theoretically do this in. I started playing with Wave while trying to take a look at Baselane, and honestly, I’m just mixing up softwares here and you’re probably here to find out if Baselane is for you, which is what I was trying to do.
I’ve been trying to figure out if Baselane is for me and I’ll tell you right now that without this feature, this is for sure a no go for my bookkeeping needs. And if you have a mortgage that has taxes and insurance in escrow or private mortgage insurance or anything, that’s not just your principal and interest. I’d recommend that you stay away until they get more categories for you to be able to really keep track of.
Also, the fact that the reporting is pretty minimal is not the greatest because you’ve got to be able to keep track of principal pay down how much you owe on a property and get better reporting around that. So at this point in time, Baselane won’t work for me for my transactions. So I still have to find something else to take care of all of these receipts.
So in the meantime, I want to take a look at the other sticking point that I have run into in case Baselane does solve this categorization and reporting problem. And for me, that’s rent collection. So I mentioned that I had found my last tenants through Furnished Finder, and Furnished Finder partners with KeyCheck. KeyCheck allows you to do the background checks.
And it was actually kind of the easy button for me because I had not spent a ton of time researching how I was going to handle leads that came from Furnished Finder. So I went ahead and signed up for KeyCheck to do the background checks through that program. And noticed that they also offer rent collection and they take automatic payments every month if you set it up that way.
And they can do it either with a credit card or with automatic withdrawals from a bank. But one issue that I had with KeyCheck was that setting up this monthly recurring payment didn’t seem to work correctly. And no matter what I Googled or where I looked on forums, everyone agreed that there were issues with it. If you had a month to month agreement instead of a year long agreement, and if you had a booking that started not on the first of the month and didn’t end on the 31st of the month, where my issue ended up happening is that I was advertising my property at a monthly rate.
And the issue that the KeyCheck software had was that if the month was 30 days or 31 days, it was dividing my monthly rate into a daily rate. And I think they ended up doing that on the shorter month. And because my booking spanned over three months, some months, 30 days, some months, 31 days and some months with not for 31 days, it was not able to prorate it appropriately and set this nightly rate that was obscure and that I had no control over in order to go back and fix the monthly rates that I was trying to charge this guest.
So I ended up in kind of a convoluted situation where I created multiple setups for this for the tenant to be able to pay me through. And the way KeyCheck works is that it sends an email to the tenant, the person who is responsible for paying. And if I create multiple payment plans, one for each month to take care of this oddity in check, they have to click on a private link on each one of those emails in order to authorize the payment to happen.
My guess is that although I did successfully receive the first month’s rent that the second month rent is going to be a problem because this person likely thought that there was only one email to click on and didn’t see the notification and didn’t want to go through the app all again because they did it once and they thought it was set it and forget it.
A lot of people are used to using online payment systems and when there’s glitches like this that are unexpected, it just makes everything kind of harder. So between that, I was hoping to solve this weirdness with keep check and not have to rely on it again in the future. So let’s take a look at what it looks like to set up a rental payment plan for Baselane and see if at all it would work for a landlord who’s only trying to do some basic stuff or maybe owns a property outright and doesn’t need some of those mortgage features I was looking for inside of the transactions categories.
I’m going to I actually haven’t tried this yet, so I’m going to head over here to rent collection. This is good. So I definitely am excited to accept rent by ACH. Baselane has a very interesting claim that I like compared to KeyCheck. So if you receive rent via ACH, you don’t get charged a fee as a landlord and the renter also does not get charged a fee.
The biggest issue I have and a lot of reasons why people want to book things through Furnished Finder is that they’re trying to reduce the number of fees that they have tacked on to their monthly rent. With Airbnb, you get a lot of benefits for those monthly fees. And again, I’ll talk about that in another video, when I compare Airbnb to Furnished Finder.
But this is awesome because if you use a credit card, it’s natural that you’re going to get charged a transaction fee sometimes depending on which software you’re using that transaction fee will be charged either to the landlord or to the tenant. But either way, I’m all about saving money. So being free for both parties in Baselane is awesome.
So let’s try this out. Let’s see what it’s like to set up a rent collection. I’m actually going to try to mimic a lease that I was having trouble with in KeyCheck and see how it works. I don’t have any recurring fees with this, but I do need to have one time fees. Why does this have to be so confusing?
I really wish the software would understand that although they’re starting on June 1st, like you should divide this monthly rent by June 1st and prorate it. In fact, the way I had to do it before was go to Google and do a prorated rent calculator. You can see there, I’ve definitely searched for it before and I’ve used this good calculator is one.
So what I ended up doing is yes, okay, they’ll move in on the sixth and calculate it. Right. So this is the prorated amount. So that it’s $93 per day. So this is the prorated amount for June. This is what baseline should know that this is prorated. Like why do I have to go to another website Building this calculator wouldn’t be that hard to add to the software.
So. All right, let’s go this far. It’s weird. I mean, it depends on when you’re talking to them since it’s a prorated amount and it’s a furnished rental, I want that prorated month’s rent to be paid before they move in. It’s okay if it’s just the day before, and I do have one time fees. I have a cleaning fee for when they move out, so I’m going to include that.
Interesting. It let me do everything else in the past for collection dates, but this fee due date has is stopping me from going into the past. So I don’t know. That must be a bug in their software. I don’t know what’s going on there. Funny that I had to do the pro-rating in another software, but let’s continue.
Well, there’s something wrong with the screen. So I thought it was charging rent up there. But yes, this is the security deposit due on June 1st. The prorated rent, the one time fee, then the rent and rent, which I wish it didn’t say rent and fee because I’m not charging any more fees every month. Okay. So now it’s asking me to where I’d like to receive rent.
I’m going to go for an external account here since that’s what I’ve got set up already. I’ll just connect it with Plaid again. I’m actually surprised that since they have that connection for the transactions, that they can’t use it again. But I’ll go ahead and reconnect it. That’s interesting. It just told me what I said. It already had a connection with this bank, but sounds good.
This is cool. So I like this. This is actually splitting up the rents and fees already compared to the security deposits. And like I said before, this is a state requirement in a lot of states. So the fact that it’s kind of forcing you into that situation is very nice. This seems buggy. I should be able to use this, but it keeps taking me in this loop.
I’ll give it one more try in case there’s something missing. Okay. So something’s clearly not working here, and I’m not sure what it is, but for some reason I can’t use my external accounts to collect rent, so I can’t move forward. So it appears that some banks that are potentially online only have been disabled from collecting rent into them.
The bank I am trying to connect is an online only bank, so that’s possibly what’s happening here. I also find this a little ironic given that Baselane is a piece of software over another bank. So technically it’s an online bank as well. I can’t finish testing this feature, so I can’t really give you a good review of what it’s like to try to collect rents in Baselane.
That’s a bummer. I think the only way that I’d be able to do that is to go ahead and open an account with baseline so that this part works. But I really don’t want to have to do that in order to test this feature. I guess this whole experiment is really starting to fall apart on me. I mean, it makes sense that they really don’t want you to be using all these features without using the bank account.
And the bank account is really how they make money. But it’s also interesting because they offer such big perks on the bank account. It’s hard to know how much they are really making on the deposits because they claim that’s how they make their money on this free product. So right here it says if I get their bank account, it’s got 4.25% interest, 5% cash back.
I think that’s on the debit card, which is pretty cool. No account fees and no minimum balance. Now, finding a business banking account without a minimum balance is actually pretty difficult. So that’s I guess that’s a plus. Okay. So it created that virtual account for security deposits. And I guess I’ll just use the main account for rent and operating expenses in other banks and on other properties I do try to use the profit first model, but it gets kind of complicated.
So I don’t know, for a simple rental like this, I think I’m just going to keep it with a security deposit account and a main operational account for now. And maybe down the road I’ll add another virtual account for taxes. Okay, so now we’re getting somewhere just for the sake of this demo and trying to get this all set up, I’m going to go ahead and just use a fake tenant in here.
And I’m actually going to use an incognito window to see what they see because I did this with KeyCheck and this is how I found out some of those weird things that were happening on the tenant side as well with KeyCheck. It was by viewing it myself. And there was one other thing with KeyCheck that I didn’t really like, and it was that it, it confused my tenant and it told my tenant that they needed to buy renters insurance in order to continue paying rent for the property.
And although I appreciate that it’s encouraging people to have renters insurance, the problem with that screen is that it actually if you didn’t fill it out, it forced you into a sales screen to sell you renters insurance, which felt a little bit scammy. And I don’t ever want software that I’m using for my rental business to make my tenants feel like they’re being scammed.
Like, that’s just not okay. So I do want to see earlier I saw basically in trying to sell me as a landlord insurance, So I want to see if it’s trying to do something funny like that on the tenant side just to be safe. Okay, so it’s having me confirm basically the terms of my rental agreement. Okay. So this is going to confirm and invite the tenant.
So let’s take a look at what that looks like. Oh, this is cool. I don’t even have to try to open up fake email. I can just copy this invitation link, open it up in an incognito window and see what this looks like. It looks like I didn’t really finish setting up my new bank account with verifying my identity, but since the whole goal was just trying to get to this point where I can see what this whole experience looks like for this app and whether this is going to work for my business, I’m going to skip verifying the identity for now because I’m not sure if I’m going to keep this bank account or
not. Okay, so this doesn’t look bad. I like the way the interface looks like. It tells me exactly what I’m looking at and tells me the property address. I’m going to create a fake password here. I’ve activated the account confirming my name - my name that’s on the fake application. And then I have to provide a phone number. Okay, I’ll use a Google voice number because I don’t want to use
my cell phone. No, they got me. I can’t use VoIP. All right. I really don’t like that. It says this is the first payment due on the monthly rent is probably nomenclature, but I can see this being confusing to a tenant. So the fact that this pro-rated rents over here doesn’t really explain like the date range that is prorated for.
I think that can be improved. Okay, so it’s all on here, the security deposit, the prorated rent cleaning fee, the interface is clean. This is much nicer than KeyCheck. How do you want to make payments? Great. So it tells me here my bank using my bank accounts free, using a debit or credit card, it adds a fee. So I could add a bank account.
And this is pretty neat. It uses plaid, the same system that has been used the whole time throughout this demo to set up this bank account. I’m clearly not this Jerry character, so I’m not going to go ahead and do this step. But since we’ve seen Plaid over and over again in this demo, I think we can be fairly comfortable with thinking and believing that it’s going to work.
So I’m going to click the Skip for now button and see what that does. This is what I see as a tenant user. This is nice, so it gives them invoices. This would be helpful for somebody. If they’re getting reimbursed because they’re traveling, they’ll see your payment history in case there’s any issues with payments. Nice. And you can see details about the landlord and the collection terms.
Okay. So this is confusing to me. What the deposits held is - prorated rent doesn’t get returned, at least not on my terms. So I’m not sure why this pro-rated rent is under deposits held. Here’s the section for payment methods. Lets me change my name and password. There’s help for the tenants. Has a little quick tour on there. Enroll in autopay.
I like that a lot of people would love to enroll in autopay, especially if they’re a traveling professional and they just want to set it once and forget it and know that they’re taking care of the whole time they’re on their stay. And I can’t receive rent payments until my identity is verified. And that makes sense. Like you really can’t open a bank account without an ID and they didn’t ask me for one.
I think that’s what it’s probably asking me for here. The one thing that I saw in a demo that I don’t see here is being able to attach the lease to the tenant so that you can have like basically everything about the property in one place. I do have a different type of file system I use for all my properties, so it’s no big deal.
But it would be nice if that feature was in here. I liked the idea of keeping all the information about a tenant and a rental in one place, including like when they’re paying and all that so that it’s attached and references all from one app. This is interesting. Like since they’re a banking platform, I guess they’re also advertising getting loans for new rentals.
I don’t know if I would use something like this. They do have rehab loans and yeah, it’d be it’d be interesting to see what their rates would be like. Okay. So based on this overview, this was a very wild and off script experimentation to try basically and show you what it’s like in person, show you my reaction to it and see if I could solve my problems all with one piece of software.
Unfortunately, the conclusion for me is that right now basically can’t solve all of my problems and it can’t help me with my backlog of receipts. The reason I won’t choose it for bookkeeping is because I really think there are some pieces of it that are missing that would be important for a landlord, especially if a landlord has a mortgage.
Not being able to customize your categories in your bookkeeping application is kind of a big no no for me, although it’s great that it maps to Schedule E on the tax forms, there are some critical pieces that are missing on there that could make it so that you miss some deductions that you rightfully earn as a landlord. So not worth it for me at the moment.
I’ll keep an eye on that functionality and I’ll probably have to go back to some other software to deal with all of this. Now, where I think does shine is that it didn’t take much time at all to open the bank account, which I thought incredible compared to some other banks I’ve worked with. And the second piece that really I enjoyed after my poor experience with KeyCheck is the rent collection.
Having that set up that quickly, that nicely, and the interface that the tenant sees is very nice. I’ll take that all day long. The one piece of it that I thought was kind of silly was that they would not connect to my online banking platform and let me collect rent into that bank. The reason I think this is a little silly is because at least to me, on the surface, Baselane appears to be an online bank as well.
Like same thing as the other bank that I was trying to connect to it. So not allowing me to do that actually forced me to have to create a Baselane account to use that functionality. I don’t know if that’s typical and if I would have ran into that if I were using like a Chase Bank or a US bank or any other national brick and mortar bank, I just happened to not use one of those as my main banking account for this property.
So that’s something that I didn’t like. But because it took no time at all to set up the bank account, I guess it’s okay. What I also liked once I set up that bank account, was being able to create those virtual accounts for security deposits very quickly, and I imagined that I could set up other accounts for collecting taxes or anything else
I might need. Some of my other short term rental properties. I have to collect short term rental taxes on for short stays. So I definitely want to make sure that that sort of thing is accounted for if I were to use this for other types of properties. So overall, I think for me I might try Baselane for the bank account and for the rent collection.
All of my transaction categorization, my bookkeeping that’s going to live somewhere else for now until this becomes a stronger pull for me to switch to. So in the meantime, I hope that this walkthrough, this exploration of the software was helpful for you if you’re considering baseline. Otherwise, I hope to see you next time. If you’re interested in more on short term rentals, mid-term rentals and overall adventures in real estate investing,
YouTube thinks that you’d like to see this next video. So go check it out.