How It Works
What is FlipMargin?
FlipMargin is a real-time profit tracking app for real estate investors — flippers, landlords, BRRRR investors, and wholesalers. It replaces spreadsheets and shoeboxes of receipts with one live dashboard that shows exactly what a project is costing you, and exactly what it's making you, the moment a new expense comes in.
How it works
Add a project
Pick Flip, Rental, BRRRR, or Wholesale.
Capture expenses
Snap a receipt — AI reads the total.
Auto-categorize
Every cost sorts itself, no data entry.
Track your margin
Profit, costs, and cash update live.
Manage the job
Contractors, tasks, and timelines.
Report & sync
Export a PDF, synced everywhere.
Built for how investors actually work
Every deal is different, and FlipMargin doesn't force a single spreadsheet template onto all of them. A flip's margin, a rental's cash flow, and a BRRRR's refinance math are calculated differently under the hood — FlipMargin knows which one applies to the project you're looking at.
Key features at a glance
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Strategies | Flip, Rental, BRRRR, and Wholesale, each with its own profit model |
| Expense capture | AI camera reads receipts automatically, or add entries by hand |
| Categorization | Material, Labor, Permit, Other & Contractor — sorted automatically |
| Contractors | Quotes and draws tracked per contact, so payouts are never a guess |
| Budget & margin | Live current profit, total costs, and cash remaining |
| Tasks | Time-weighted progress, calendar view, overdue detection |
| Photos & docs | Categorized image and PDF storage per project |
| Comps & ARV | Market-based after-repair-value estimates |
| Reports | Full PDF export, formatted per strategy |
| Sync | Real-time across mobile and the web dashboard |
The Dashboard
Every project opens to the same home screen: the numbers that matter, first.
The dashboard is deliberately built around four figures, because these are the four things an investor checks first on any deal:
- Current Profit — sale price (or projected value) minus purchase price and every cost logged so far
- Total Costs — every expense across all categories, updated the instant a new one is added
- Budget — how much of your planned spend has been used, so overruns are visible before they happen
- Cash Remaining — what's actually left to spend, given what's already gone out the door
Below those, an expense summary breaks spending down by category, and a recent activity feed shows the latest logged costs — so you can confirm at a glance that today's receipt landed where it should have.
Creating a Project
A project is the container for one deal — one address, one budget, one set of numbers.
To start, enter the property address and purchase price, then choose a strategy. That choice determines which profit calculation, which report format, and which fields you'll see throughout the rest of the project.
What you can track per project
- Purchase price and closing costs
- A category-level budget you set at the start
- Every expense, contractor payment, task, contact, and document tied to that specific deal
Projects don't share data with each other by default — an expense logged under "123 Main St" never shows up under "456 Oak Ave." This keeps multi-project investors from ever mixing up which invoice belongs to which house.
Strategies Explained
FlipMargin supports four investing strategies, each with a profit model built for how that deal actually makes money.
Flip Buy, renovate, sell
Profit is sale price minus purchase price, renovation costs, and holding costs. This is the most time-sensitive strategy — margin can erode fast if costs run over, which is why live budget tracking matters most here.
Rental Buy and hold
Tracks ongoing cash flow instead of a one-time sale: rental income against mortgage, expenses, and upkeep, so you can see monthly performance rather than a single exit number.
BRRRR Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat
Combines a rehab budget (like a flip) with a post-refinance cash-on-cash return (like a rental) — the two halves of a BRRRR deal that most spreadsheets track in separate tabs, unified in one project.
Wholesale Contract and assign
For deals where you never take ownership — tracks contract price, assignment fee, and marketing costs, without the renovation or holding-cost fields a flip would need.
Logging Expenses
Every dollar spent on a project falls into one of four expense types.
| Type | Covers |
|---|---|
| Material | Supplies, fixtures, appliances, anything purchased outright |
| Labor | Work paid directly, outside the contractor quote/draw system |
| Permit | Inspection fees, permitting, and municipal costs |
| Other | Anything that doesn't fit the above |
Add an expense by hand — enter the amount, category, and a note — or let the AI camera read it from a photo. Either way, it lands on the dashboard immediately and rolls into total costs, budget usage, and current profit without any extra step.
AI Camera Capture
The fastest way to log an expense: take a photo of the receipt.
Standing at the register or handing a contractor a check, open the camera in FlipMargin and snap the receipt or invoice. The AI reads the total, vendor, and date directly off the image — there's nothing to type.
Why this matters
The gap between "money spent" and "money logged" is where most cost tracking falls apart — receipts pile up in a glovebox and get entered, if at all, weeks later from memory. Capturing at the point of purchase closes that gap completely, so the dashboard is never more than a few seconds behind reality.
Auto-Categorization
Once an expense is captured, FlipMargin sorts it into the right category on its own.
Instead of picking a category from a dropdown every time, captured expenses are classified automatically — a Home Depot receipt lands under Material, a permitting fee under Permit, and so on. Your category breakdown builds itself as the project goes, instead of requiring a cleanup pass at the end of the month.
If something is filed incorrectly, correcting it once is enough — the app applies that correction going forward for similar expenses.
Budget & Live Margin
Set a budget once. Watch it — and your margin — update with every expense.
When you create a project, set a target budget, either overall or by category. As expenses come in, FlipMargin compares actual spend to that budget in real time and surfaces the gap before it becomes a problem, rather than after.
What updates live
- Current Profit — recalculated the instant a new cost or sale figure is entered
- Budget Used — percentage of your planned spend consumed so far, by category
- Cash Remaining — what's actually left to spend against the budget
This is the core promise of FlipMargin: you should never have to reconstruct where a deal stands from memory or a stack of receipts. The number on screen is the number that's true right now.
Contacts
Every contractor, hired employee, and other project contact, kept in one place.
Contacts are organized by category — Contractors, Hired Employees, and Others — and every contact connects directly to their quotes, draws, and payment history. Instead of digging through text threads to remember what you agreed to pay someone, it's attached to their profile.
Contractor Quotes & Draws
Labor rarely gets paid in one lump sum. FlipMargin tracks it the way it actually happens.
For any contractor or hired employee, log a quote before work begins — the agreed total for the job. As work progresses, record draws: partial payments released against that quote.
What this gives you
- How much of each quote has been paid out, and how much remains
- A full payment history per contact, not scattered across separate expense entries
- The same tracking for licensed contractors and hired employees, filtered by contact category
At any point, you know exactly who's been paid, how much, and for what — without reconstructing it from bank transfers or text messages.
Tasks & Progress
Track the renovation timeline alongside the money.
Build a task list for the project with a start and end date for each item. FlipMargin tracks:
- Progress per task, as a percentage
- Overall project progress, weighted by how long each task takes relative to the whole timeline
- A calendar view spanning the full renovation, so overlapping work is visible at a glance
- Overdue detection, flagging tasks that have slipped past their end date automatically
Time and money are connected on every flip — a schedule slipping usually means holding costs rising — so tasks live in the same project as expenses, not a separate to-do app.
Photos & Documents
Before/afters, inspection reports, permits, contracts — attached to the project they belong to.
Upload photos and PDFs directly to a project and sort them by category. Instead of documentation scattered across your phone's camera roll or a folder named "misc," everything relevant to a deal lives with that deal — easy to find months later when you need it for taxes, a lender, or a dispute.
Property Lookup & ARV
Ground your exit number in real market data before you commit to a deal.
FlipMargin pulls live market data — a property's estimated value (ARV), rent estimate, assessed value, property tax, and last sale price — straight from RentCast, so the projected sale price feeding into your profit calculation is grounded in real data, not a guess.
Reports & Export
Turn any project into a complete financial record, on demand.
Generate a full PDF report covering every expense, the category breakdown, and the project's final margin — formatted specifically for the strategy you're using, since a Flip report and a BRRRR report don't need the same numbers.
Where this gets used
- Your own records, closed out cleanly per project
- Handing off to an accountant at tax time
- A lender pitch on your next deal, backed by real performance on the last one
Cloud Sync
Every project, synced in real time between your devices.
Create an account and your data syncs automatically — log an expense on your phone at the job site, and it's already there when you open the web dashboard on your laptop that evening. Sync runs on every write, so there's no manual "backup" step to remember.
Mobile App & Web Dashboard
Capture on the go. Review at your desk.
The FlipMargin mobile app is where expenses get captured — the camera, the job site, the quick log between contractor calls. The web dashboard is built for the desk: reviewing numbers across every project, reading reports, and getting the wider view a phone screen doesn't give you room for.
Both are the same data, kept in sync — pick up whichever fits the moment.