Owner Statement on Appfolio

[David M.]

Hi, all.

I hired a PM for my portfolio (10 SFH) and the portfolio inside a family trust (50+ SFH). I really enjoy the PM - he's responsive, has a good team of handymen and a couple full-time rehab teams on staff (necessary given the state of the properties we inherited in the trust), and keeps me in the loop on what's going on with the properties. However...I'm really struggling with their accounting. I came from Buildium, on which I did my own accounting, and I can't tell if the lack of clarity on these owner statements that are posted to the owner portal is a result of me being used to the ledgers looking different, their accounting practice being sloppy, or Appfolio's presentation of the ledgers on this report.

So a couple of questions:

1) How does your PM handle bills that exceed the monthly rent? Ours doesn't require that we leave a balance in escrow for each property, and instead charges against the rent on another property in the portfolio on the ledger. This has led to the charge occasionally being double-booked - once against the original property that had the repair, and again against the rent on the second. That is...frustrating. Is there a way to collect all of the amounts that exceed that month's rent into one itemized report and pay it via an owner contribution?

2) Is there a more useful report than the owner statement I can request from the PM on Appfolio? I'm flying blind here because I don't have/can't get access to the reporting functions of Appfolio, and I don't think the accounting team with this PM has done much research/investigation into the features of Appfolio. I have experience with Buildium, a business degree (with several accounting classes), and work with data/admin pages of corporate websites for my day job. I would kill for a demo account w/ dummy data just to see what it looks like back there to give them specific requests, but I can't find it anywhere.