Property Management Software confusion

[Garrett Mathis]

Hello, 

I just finished The Self-Managing Landlord by Grace and Amelia. In the tech stack section they break down options for property management, bookkeeping, and project management. I'm currently on the fence as to which to go with, but I'm also confused by the overlap I see with each option. 

Each software I look into claims to have all three attributes (property, bookkeeping, project). If that is the case, why is there the need to get three different services (e.g., Tenant Cloud, Monday.com, and QuickBooks)?

I currently have QuickBooks, but I'm not sure if it is possible to incorporate maintenance requests/ticketing, late payment notices, and other landlord specific tools. I'm on the fence with RentRedi, Stessa, and Tenant Cloud. I have read every forum I could find reviewing of each of these and most are fairly dated so it'd be great to have recent experiences with them considering how software changes/hopefully improves with time and development. I'm also very much considering a BP Pro membership in order to go with either RentRedi or Stessa. 

For context I currently have three multi-family apartments with a total of 20 units. We track most things manually, but use Apartments.com for the units currently occupied (adding more units in our portfolio will incur the Apartments.com premium cost, so I want to explore my options if software is no longer free). 

Thanks, 

Garrett

[Simon W.]

I've been in the real estate accounting field for almost 20 years, and in my experience, it's helpful to think of the software you use in two distinct levels:

1. Property Management (PM) Software: This handles the property-level operations.
2. Dedicated Accounting Software (like QuickBooks): This is used for corporate-level accounting.

Not all PM platforms come with robust accounting modules. For instance, while AppFolio is quite strong overall, its bank reconciliation module has some limitations. However, there are often workarounds to utilize PM software for tracking corporate-level financials, and AppFolio has introduced features to support this.

Regarding services like Monday.com, these are more suited for project tracking and team communication. While PM platforms do include modules for tracking work orders and other tasks, they often lack the comprehensive team communication capabilities found in dedicated project management tools.