The Best Rental Property Accounting Tools for Landlords

As such, many landlords have turned to this platform to manage their rentals. Quickbooks can easily allow you to receive and track rent payments, pay contractors and property managers, and track fees and track property maintenance. Beyond the fact that it’s free, Stessa also offers a number of innovative solutions for landlords who want a tool that moves beyond simple accounting inputs and outputs. For instance, Stessa recently added real-time receipt scanning with automatic tax-ready real estate categorization to the Stessa mobile apps for iOS and Android. We reviewed 12 accounting software programs for rental properties before deciding on the seven best for these different categories. Lower costs and minimum fee requirements fared better than more expensive programs.

The best accounting software for landlords includes the ability to break out income and expense types as well as produce reports that give you a picture of your portfolio’s financial health. Whether you’re looking for an easy way to track rental property income and expenses or a complete suite of tools to manage a large portfolio of properties, there are various options to explore. With Avail, you can use the same platform to manage your rentals and rental property accounting to keep everything in one place. Property Matrix offers a complete set of accounting tools that can make the bookkeeping process easier for landlords with large portfolios. You can manage income and expenses with their tracking tool, analyze the performance of your rentals, and more. Leverage Xero’s powerful financial reporting to optimize and plan ahead. Bookkeeping software helps keep track of income and expenses through a daily ledger, while accounting software offers more capabilities to users.

Small Business Accounting Preferences

And take advantage of matching rules and payment templates to accurately track income and expenses. The software is available on mobile devices so you can open the app and enter things like income and expenses as you go. Common property management expense categories are already set up with the IRS categories in mind, or you can easily customize your own expense categories. Rentec DirectDesigned to address the needs of DIY landlords as well as property management companies, Rentec Direct includes all the tools necessary to manage and rent your properties. This is one of the use cases not covered by traditional accounting softwares that Guesty does address. Many accounting software solutions are missing trust accounting, an integral part of the accounting process for any property management company. Guesty is trust accounting-compatible, automated, and simple to use with.

Cook, Lake, and DuPage counties fall among those in Illinois where it’s cheaper to rent than buy, making the Chicago area a great market right now. Doorloop offers three plans — the Starter plan for $49/month, the Pro for $79/month, and Premium for $109/month.

What Is the Best Accounting App for a Rental Property

Chris comes from a family of real estate investors, and remembers well his childhood of helping to prepare apartments between renters. He has particular insight into the issues around short-term rentals as he manages those for himself and for other owners. Landlords can connect their Rentec Direct accounts with operating accounts to track and record business transactions from their bank. As a result, this maintains the integrity of accounting ledgers and saves time by automating data entry and reconciliation. Some of the products also allow landlords to sync the bank account transactions with their systems. This makes reconciliation with bank statements and recorded checks a thing of the past. If the software allows it, you can categorize these expenses and assign them to individual properties or units.

It’s helpful to make a list of these functions before you start your search to ensure that your chosen software has those features. FinancesOnline is available for free for all business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Also, while being popular among SMEs, the product is also used by large enterprises. It also integrates with other third-party solutions like BQE Core, Bill.com, and Microsoft software tools. Moreover, you can access the solution via its mobile applications for iOS, Android, and Windows devices.

If you currently or plan to work with a CPA or tax preparer, it can be helpful to seek their advice on which accounting software they prefer. Most tax and accounting professionals will be familiar with general accounting tools like Quickbooks or Quicken. If your CPA works with other landlords, they may have unique insights into specific platforms and any downsides or benefits. Other key features include an activity dashboard, bank reconciliation, collaboration tools, contact database, batch processing, financial analysis, and supplier management. Moreover, you can access all these features via its mobile applications for iOS and Android devices. Zoho Books is a comprehensive accounting solution specially designed for growing businesses. Like other products from the software provider, Zoho Books is easy to use, coming with high out-of-the-box usability.

Integrate Landlord Studio with Xero

If you’ve decided to rent out your property as a side hustle to earn extra cash, FreshBooks can help you manage your rental business and collect your hard-earned rent payments. Organize and track your business expenses automatically each time you make a repair or upgrade at your rental property. https://personal-accounting.org/ Offer flexible payment options to your tenants so you collect rent faster — you can even accept recurring payments so tenants can pay automatically every month. FreshBooks makes it easier to handle the financial side of running a rental business so you can get back to your day job.

Smovin can securely consult the transactions on your bank account thanks to a mandate. This mandate does not permit the initiation of transactions from your account, only the right to see. Reduce the administrative tasks of tracking payments and contracts. The lease lasts Rent expense: AccountingTools at least three-quarters of the asset’s useful life. Useful life in this context is measured by accounting standards, not how long you actually use something. If you pay to lease something from a vendor and then return it when you’re done, you have an operating lease.

How We Chose the Best Accounting Software for Rental Properties

User reviews are very complimentary on Capterra and Software Advice. Another major advantage of Rentec Direct is that there is a free package with the basic features available for up to 10 properties. More advanced packages cost $35 to $40 per month, with the pricing based on the number of units you’re managing.

• Some of the tools used at Nexus Property Management Franchises help with efficiency and organization in all of these areas.
• We thus looked at the quantity and quality of reports that landlords can run from their property management software.
• Access all your metrics directly from the landlord dashboard, or download Excel or PDF reports to print or share with partners, lenders, CPAs, etc.
• Also, these are accessible through its mobile applications for both iOS and Android devices.
• Hence, small businesses can configure Rossum to fit their particular requirements.

Rental income is the money a business earns in an accounting period from leasing real estate or another type of asset. The general ledger is an accounting record that is organized by account, such as cash or rent income. The type of account under which you would classify rental income in the general ledger depends on when your small business collects rent from your tenant. If you’re confused about rent received and which type of account it belongs in, these examples should help clarify.

Are there alternatives to using QuickBooks for rental properties?

At the end of the day, companies just want the debits, credits, and footnotes. Rent expense is an account that lists the cost of occupying rental property during a reporting period. This expense is one of the larger expenses reported by most organizations, after the cost of goods sold and compensation expense.

Accounting software for rental properties is intended to help landlords keep track of important income and expenses that impact their profits and performance. They are also designed to make filling out your tax forms easier, especially if you have more than one rental property.

Sort through all of your financial reports by name, reporting period, account, and rental property. Any income and expenses logged in the platform can also be exported into a spreadsheet to share with tax professionals to prepare for your tax forms.

You can filter for active, complete, in transit, or incomplete transactions as well. Notable accounting software solutions on the market include Quickbooks, Xero and Sage – Guesty syncs with all of these and more. Documentation – Under the new lease accounting standard, documentation is important. LeaseCrunch captures the data inputs for lease term and classification and can export that information for auditor review. Users don’t have to worry about where they kept certain records; it’s all in one place, making the audit process simpler, too. Using the lease data, the software calculates the footnote disclosures required under the new lease standard. The footnote disclosure includes finance lease expense , operating lease expense, weighted-average remaining lease term, weighted-average discount rate, and maturity analysis.

Improving Capital Budgeting Decisions Using Finance and Accounting Tools

Education Free education topics for property managers, landlords, and tenants. Appfolio does have accounting features, such as deposits, online payments, automated late fees, and more. Stessa will track income, expenses, and provide investors with dozens of critical investing metrics and tax-ready documentation. Users can customize the features they use, making it suitable for any experience level. However, enterprise-level landlords and their accountants will benefit more than small and medium-sized landlords due to the robust accounting software. Besides the accounting features, Buildium also offers a lot of advanced features with easy-to-understand tutorials.

These systems aggregate data to help forecast the revenue a capital investment can generate and understand all of the costs. There’s no crystal ball for capital budgeting, but there are numerous sophisticated systems that ease the process. Create an account or log in to start managing rental property accounting with Avail for free. If you’re looking to analyze the performance of your investment portfolio, you can do so with its customizable dashboard showing important financial data, such as total expenses and revenue. Although there are no required setup fees, monthly fees can range from $280 for small landlords to $1,500 for landlords with more than 1,000 units. You report depreciation as well as interest on the lease principal.

What Is Accounting Software for Rental Properties?

Buildium automatically reconciles bank statements and every recorded check and deposit. The Guesty solution has proven to be very time efficient and saves management many hours every month on accounting. Bulk Import – For companies that have a large volume of one type of lease, like a vehicle or a forklift, Lease Crunch’s capabilities include bulk import. From there, the software performs all necessary calculations and handles the footnote disclosures.

Key features include auto receipts scanning, spending visibility, credit card import, multi-stage workflow, mileage tracking, approval simplification, and expenditure controls. DocuPhase is a flexible document-based automation solution for organization of any size and type.

Simplified vacation rentalaccounting with Lodgify

We liked programs with moderate fees and low monthly unit costs, offering superior value for their large suite of features. Rentec Direct comes with features that include general ledger accounting and financial reporting with QuickBooks synchronization. This streamlines the whole tenant rent payment process to one step that takes around 30 seconds.