Has anyone found a good Stessa alternative?

[Danielle Hake]

Hi all,

I had been using Stessa since I started investing in real estate to manage accounting on my 4 units. I have a property manager that handles payments/tenant screening so I don't need anything too fancy yet, but I liked the dashboard visuals to see where things were at, and to be able to have all of my transactions and my PMs in one place for tax time. When Stessa abruptly put all their useful features behind a paywall in January with no warning, no added features, and still tons of connectivity/syncing issues, I lost trust in them and have been casually searching for a new solution. What are others using and how has your experience been? Some nice to haves would be: double-entry accounting, a solid dashboard with useful performance metrics, bank account linking, and a place to show rents/upcoming lease expirations without being forced to collect it through the platform. I would also like it to be simple to import all my old transactions from excel. I'd like it to be affordable, and I do plan on expanding. What are you using that you'd recommend? Thanks!

[Nathan Miller]

Stessa falls into that category of "charge the tenant/upsell services/paywall" instead of a simple software fee like more mature platforms use.  They have to earn revenue somehow and it's a model that some landlords choose to save some money on the software fee.  There are a lot of newer platforms that have shown up in the past few years that do exactly that.  

If you want a more professional and mature platform look into Rentec Direct, Buildium, Appfolio(?), Propertyware, or Rent Manager.  These platforms typically have billing policies where you pay a per unit fee per month to the software and you get regular updates and support each month.  I put a question mark on Appfolio because they recently just started charging tenants for online payments - but the others do not.

If you do have a property manager, they should be the ones using the software though and then providing you a login to view all your information.  You shouldn't have to be doing any accounting or data entry if you have  PM.  Make sure your PM uses one of the softwares above and you should be in good shape.