All Forum Posts by: Jason Solley

Quote from @Dylan Peters:

We manage a portfolio of rentals across 6 states and are looking for the best way to track accounting, run investment return reports, replace quickbooks. Looking at Stessa, Buildium and Appfolio.

Any advice from anyone?

I'm in two states and have decided to stick with Buildium Essentials for tenant interface, marketing, and leasing. We will continue to depend on QuickBooks for accounting, budgeting, and bill payments. For the money, ~$150/month, we have not seen a better system. Buildium has offered to build a bridge between Buildium and Quickbooks, so that will probably be the next step for us.  

Thanks for the responses. We ended up sticking with the Buildium/Quickbooks duo to handle our tracking and reporting. It works, just not as cleanly as we would like. Buildium does offer the ability to interface with Quickbooks through API and offers custom buildouts. However, I knew this wasn’t something that I was able to pursue at this time. The only thing I can do know is grow the company some more to get the cash flow to fund a better system!

I see a lot of recommendations for Buildium and overall it performs very well. Do you know of anyone using an expense capture app such as Receipt Bank or Expensify with it? Or better yet a Buildium consultant that maybe could streamline my inefficiencies.

Thanks for the recommendations on the apps. Those seem to be the names that keep reoccurring at this level of software.

We have 15 rentals and have been using Buildium for 8 years for tenant communications, collecting rent, and leasing. Quickbooks was our original accounting software but left it to use Tiller with Google Sheets and are outgrowing it and now need trust accounting with better reporting.

Our gripes with Buildium Essentials. We do not like how you enter expenses through the bank feeds. We have a lot of expenses since we buy our properties distressed and put a lot of sweat equity in them. Entering 100 expenses at the end of the month is very time consuming compared to Quickbooks or Tiller spreadsheet, plus you cannot do this through the mobile app. My other gripe is the mobile app. It is so limited and seems like you have to login to the full site for most tasks especially when leasing and trying to get to Tenant Turner to see appointments on our iPhones.

We are considering changing platforms and my current software spend with Tenant Turner is roughly $100/month or $6.67/unit. This is just a baseline and understand the value of good software but do not see us having 50 units in 5 years since we only self-manage. 

If we could choose the ideal software, it would have 90% funcitionality from a mobile app in some limited fashion. Expense tracking is high on the priority list with the ability to capture receipts at the time of purchase with a receipt scanner. We also do not want to loose Tenant Turner (best app ever for leasing). From what we see, we know that it is going to take at least another $100/month but understand it could take more to get what we want so don't limit suggestions due to cost.

If anyone is looking at getting Buildium, it's great software, I just don't think it works well for us. I am more than happy to speak with anyone looking at the software and have recommended it to several people. If you have an office and just do property management, I think it is wonderful software. For someone who does this part time working off your cell phone with a high volume of receipts and partners on some investments, I think there are better option. Stay tuned to this post to see the recommendations.

Thanks, Jason