What Accounting Software or Systems do you use for your investments

Hi Everyone

Are you guys using any software or system to track down your investments? Can you recommend one you are using or one you've used in the past. If you are using spreadsheets - how do you normally send your data to your accountant? I'm currently using a simple spreadsheet to log my income and expense; but I'm looking for something more automated, that I can just hand to my accountant come tax time and prepare my return based on that.

If I end up getting a software, what functions would be:
a. Necessary
b. Good to have.
c. If you have to get one - what's the most important feature you would like to have?

Thanks for your help.

 

Big fan of Xero myself and what they're offering.

It's cloud based bookkeeping software that can be used anywhere on most devices, basically you link whatever bank accounts you want and it pulls through the transactions which you then allocate.

You can pretty much automate the entire process with bank rules. There are also a ton of add ons to add support for particular needs, there are several very good ones for managing rental properties for example.

When it comes time to hand over you literally just pop the accountants email address into the invite box and they will have access in there (alternatively you can invite them at the start and they can access whenever you need help, depends on your relationship with the accountant!).

It's worth calling your accountant or a few others and seeing if they can sign you up as most firms that use it will get a decent discount on the subscription cost.

As far as making it as easy as possible for everyone it's a great solution.

As for your questions...

a) Needs to track income and expense and allow descriptions to accurately allocate them. This is the very core feature for mine.

b) Tracking of capital purchases is a nice bonus, accurate cash flow/p&l positions that can be quickly produced is good to track performance. Ratio analysis isn't bad either if you're a bit more advanced and understand them (or know someone that can guide you) as can get a quick understanding of your liquidity. Things like live bank feeds to reduce the data entry is great, if it can operate as a document storage system as well that's another massive bonus as tracking all those invoices can be a pain in the ass.

c) See a) for me, that's the core but these days you should probably be aiming for pretty much all of b) as well.

 

Thanks Wogitalia, Im with you - It would be good to have a system thats got the ability to track capital purchases and do some nifty calculations/analysis on the side like the ratios you said above, or maybe even track my tax position based on my last year's tax return + current year's available data - say at any given point in time. Would be handy if you've bought or sold a property during the year. Anyway, i'll check Xero + any available add ons.