Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Landlord accounting software is a must-have if you're a real estate investor. The need for such software grows with the more properties you own, or the larger these properties are, but even if you have just a modest investment property, having landlord accounting software at your beck and call is an important advantage to have. Here's what you need to know about what this software can do for you.
Often going by many names such as rental property management or investment property accounting software, landlord accounting software is a suite of tools that is designed to help landlords of all shapes and sizes manage all aspects of their rental properties. These software programs help keep track of which units in your property are occupied, information on tenants and they are up to date with their rental payments, and other important issues.
There are a number of different types of landlord accounting software packages out there to choose from. This can range from major industry players like Buildium and AppFolio, which can charge several hundred dollars a month to access their software, to smaller, open source and even free-to-use programs like RentTracker and Cozy that might not have the same depth of features but will be much more affordable. Depending on your needs and budget as a real estate investment property owner, there's likely an ideal platform out there waiting for you.
Landlord accounting software is designed to make it as easy as possible to manage a property of any size and scope. While the features of these programs will vary depending on what type of investment property they're designed for -- landlord accounting software geared towards commercial office management won't have the same features as one for a hotel or motor lodge, for example -- these programs will manage every aspect of a tenancy from beginning to end.
Many of these software programs help you draft listings for vacant units and manage online rental applications to help keep your rental property as occupied and profitable as you can. These same management programs likewise help you keep your newly-vacated units organized when it comes to getting them cleaned, repaired, or renovated in time to welcome a new tenant. Meanwhile, the ability to record rent collected and keep track of maintenance requests are also common capabilites of landlord accounting software.
If you're the owner of an investment property, you know how important it is to remain organized. Whether you're the landlord of a single-occupancy apartment, a two-unit office building, a strip mall, or an apartment complex, you need to keep all the information about your tenants and their needs at hand.
You can do this yourself through the use of custom-made spreadsheets, but this takes both time and effort you may not have. Using landlord accounting software takes the lion's share of this organizational work off your shoulders so you can do what's really important: seeing to the needs of your tenants and ensuring that your investment property runs at a profit.
After reading this and I am little worried that the author doesn't know what accounting software is?
Appfolio and buildium - yes.
Renttracker and Cozi? - No. Both sell credit reports and background checks. I see payments are included, but that's it. That isn't accounting. Both have a lot to do before I would ever use the word accounting.
No asset tracking, no depreciation tracking, no cash balances, no bank reconciliation, not even an income statement or balance sheet.
More realistic options would be:
Quickbooks, Xero, TenantCloud - All are reasonably priced around $10/mnth
I'm a small time landlord and Cozy has been perfect for me. I mainly use it for the online rent collection but the other features have been very useful too. They keep adding features like maintenance tracking and document management so it's becoming more like a true PM software but not nearly as complicated. Perfect for us small investors.
Our accountant loves quickbooks as he can pull a report for cost segregation and depreciation and he can make quick changes as needed. Right now it works great for us, we can track all tenant details for property management and do landlord accounting. Gita Faust showed me how to use feature to connect the tenant to the property automatically. I recommend it all investors it is so easy to use enterprise version.