The end of the year is the best time to evaluate your various systems and procedures, and make any changes needed to improve efficiency in the new year.
Record-keeping, particularly when it comes to tax-related documentation, is one way in which small businesspeople, like real estate professionals, are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and accuracy. One tool for doing this is deductr, another of the vendors we interviewed at the California Association of Realtors Expo. They provide a web and mobile-based service for tracking expenses, deductions, and even mileage!
As with our other interviews, our goal is to bring you information about ways to make your business better. This is not a paid advertisement for the product, nor is it an explicit endorsement of one product over another – it’s just an interesting conversation with someone whose services might come in handy for making your business run better.
BF: Hi, it’s Brian Fox. I am with ReboReports, and I’m here with Tyler Thompson of deductr. It’s a newer company, I know, can you tell us a little bit about deductr and what it is that you guys do for realtors?
TT: Absolutely. We developed deductr to help small and independent business owners maximize their tax deductions and to eliminate tax time stress. So we help them by automatically tracking their expenses, their mileage, and time. And the hope is that at the end of the year, they have single-click access to everything they need to be better prepared to meet with their tax pro, or to do their taxes on their own. We developed this because we know that real estate professionals didn’t get into the business to become a tax professional or a bookkeeper, and so we look to do kind of the heavy lifting for them in terms of tracking their expenses, their mileage, and their time. To still give them the benefit of being a small business owner.
BF: Very good. So this is web-based, I imagine?
TT: That’s right.
BF: So they would go online and be able to enter this information. Tell us a little about that, kind of how it works a little bit.
TT: Absolutely. Both web-based and mobile, so you can use your laptop, your tablet, your iPhone, your Android, really anything that you’re using, we’re there, and it’s available there. On the expense side, you’re able to link your credit card or your debit card to your system, so if I go and I pay for a client’s lunch or I’m buying office supplies, we automatically capture that information. Then we have the user go in and say whether it’s a business or personal expense, tell us why they incurred the expense. The one thing we can’t do automatically for them. And we have them drop it into a category to get credit for it. The mileage is really slick, actually they tap into the gps functionality in their phone. So they hit “start” when they’re driving to a listing appointment, whatever it may be. When they get there, they hit “stop,” they get credit for the mileage that way. So, again, we’re looking to make their lives easier, make things a little more efficient, a little more effective, and the tool’s great for that.
BF: Sounds really slick. I notice also you guys are part of the 2014 Reach Class of the National Association of Realtors, how’s that beneficial, and how’s that help?
TT: Absolutely. We always are interested in the real estate vertical, and being accepted into the Reach class was just a great way to enter real estate and get in front of realtors and real estate professionals. The Reach Class has been great, it’s really accelerated our objectives in real estate. Makes all the proper introductions to people and associations, brands, MLSs, whatever it may be. It’s been wonderful for us.
BF: That’s very good. Tyler, thank you very much.
