Susie & Beth

Below we have detailed the key steps to maintaining bookkeeping best practice for landlords. As you grow your business, be sure to open separate accounts for each rental property that you own. By doing so, your income and expenses will be kept separate on a per-property basis. By avoiding commingling, your life will be much easier when it comes time to reconcile, prepare profit and loss statements, and file taxes. In addition, keeping your financial data unique to each property will allow you to identify any particular properties or units that are eating into your rental income. Accounting software for rental properties captures day-to-day income and expenses while enabling users to run insightful reports to help them scale their business.

MRI Software has been in business since 1971, a testament to its reliability and expertise in providing a variety of services to clients across different industries. Because of the many features and the option to add additional tools, commercial users would be able to optimize MRI Software as well as their rental property bookkeeping partner relationships. Rent Manager also has additional customizable features for each user, including online payment portals, marketing and leasing, operations, maintenance, and advanced reporting. It integrates with close to 100 other programs like Avidxchange, Beanworks, Safeguard, and ZeGo by PayLease.

Decide How to Record Income and Expenses:

With good bookkeeping, an investor can better identify opportunities to increase rental income, reduce expenses without affecting property value, and better track owner’s equity. Bookkeeping software is useful for capturing income and expenses into the daily ledger, and it can run some basic reports for you like an income statement and balance sheet. However, accounting software can open up your business to integrating marketing, publishing to multiple listing sites with a single click, and running more advanced reports to inform your growth strategy.

However, Stessa’s unique features and user-friendly design, tailored to individual landlords and real estate investors regardless of portfolio size, helps it stand out from the rest. However, Xero doesn’t have purpose-built property management or real estate investment features. Landlords might pay for several functions they don’t need and miss out on more specific features that a specialized platform like Stessa provides.

Real Estate Bookkeeping Methods

All personal documentation must be disposed of in accordance with FTC rules. If you manage a property (or more), collect rent and pay taxes, Hammock is for you. Our reports are designed specifically for landlords, including our advanced tax reports.

Plus, its state-of-the-art security measures help ensure your data is protected, so you have peace of mind. It has a range of features designed to streamline property management tasks. Landlord Studio’s capabilities are more focused on day-to-day bookkeeping. While its basic features can be beneficial, it may be of less value to landlords or investors who want broader asset management and portfolio optimization. While it has a range of tools, including online rent payment, vacancy posting, and maintenance requests, AppFolio may end up being a lot more muscle  than the typical rental property owner needs.

Real Estate Bookkeeping Tips for Investors

Since landlords often have many other tasks to oversee throughout each month, it is essential to utilize all the tools, tips, and tricks available. Saving time on bookkeeping practices allows landlords to shift their focus towards growing the business, improving their properties, and ensuring their tenants are satisfied to encourage tenant retention. Instead, it would be more beneficial to open separate personal and business accounts to keep all transactions separate. To access their earnings, landlords need only pay themselves from the business account when they are ready. From automatic income and expense tracking to comprehensive performance metrics, Stessa works to give you the necessary tools to manage your properties efficiently.