All Forum Posts by: Jason Turgeon

When I decided to find a new real estate accounting software platform in the fall and finally untangle myself from the nightmare of Quickbooks, I had no idea it would take me this long or be this complicated. You can read the whole saga and a roundup of the many different accounting and property management platforms I looked at over at my original post. But if you just want to know what I picked, and why I think it's the best available real estate accounting platform, this post is for you.

To recap, I have a handful of units. Some of them are in an LLC, managed by a property manager. Others are in my name, managed by me. I live in a duplex and rent out one unit. And I also have a business as a real estate agent, so I wanted to be able to track that business in the same accounting software.

Originally I was also hoping to find a package that would do more of the property management basics for me, like running ads, screening tenants, collecting rent, collecting e-signatures, etc.

What I found after months of looking is that there is no one-size-fits-all platform out there. There are some packages that offer great property management, but are really lacking in the accounting side. Then there are others that are great at accounting, but that's all they do. And some are reasonable at both of these things, but can't handle owner-occupied units, or multiple ownership structures, or lack the flexibility to track a real-estate related side hustle. If you don't need some of these more esoteric features, you might end up with something different than what I chose. 

But in the end, I went with REIHub (https://www.reihub.net/). REIHub, like Orville Redenbacher,  does one thing, and they do it better than anyone. And that one thing is real estate accounting. 

Here is a list of all the stuff I love about REIHUb, and why I'm paying them $25/month even when there are plenty of other options that are cheaper, offer more features (on paper), or both:

Their bank account import is flawless, with none of the sync issues I had with Quickbooks or Stessa. They had no problem with my random small town banks. Their auto-categorization is also rock-solid. 

Their built-in chart of accounts is fantastic. 

They handle things like getting a refund to your credit card at home depot with ease. 

They allow you to have multiple portfolios, so I can track my Detroit properties under management separately from my others. 

They have a beta import feature for appfolio, so if your property manager uses that you can upload the PDF statements. My old PM did use that, which was great. My new one doesn't use appfolio, but hopefully they expand this to cover other property mangement statements. 

They have userbase articles on how to set up owner-occupied (aka house-hack) properties. The overall userbase and FAQ is excellent. 

Their approach to sub-portfolios is intuitive and flexible, and it was easy for me to tweak a "portfolio" to have it track my income and expenses from my real estate agent gig. In fact, they advised me on how to do it!

They have excellent reporting features. 

They have a mortgage amortization feature that actually works so you can split your monthly PITI payment into interest, equity, and escrow payments and generate accurate P&L statements.

They offer depreciation schedules for fixed assets.

And the software has a great overall UI.

But even more important than all of that, they have the best customer service of any piece of software (real estate or not), I've ever used. During the trial period, I had several questions about how to set up properties, categorize transactions, etc. I figured I would try out the "help" button that appears on every transaction when you go to "book" it (e.g., categorize it after it's imported from a bank account feed). That opens a little form that you fill out with a spot for you to ask a question. On the REIHub side, they get a link to the exact transaction and can see exactly what you're asking about in the context of all your bookkeeping. 

I wasn't expecting much from this help button, but it turned out that within a few hours I had detailed responses with step by step instructions telling me exactly how to do what I needed. In some cases, these were pretty detailed and involved some significant bookkeeping fixes. Later, I emailed them asking if they could improve how they match credit card payments and not only did they agree that it was a good suggestion...they implemented it THE SAME DAY that I emailed. I'm honestly still blown away by that.

What this means is that I no longer worry that I'm doing my bookkeeping wrong. I know that they can help me get the entries in the right places, categorized the right way, so that my books will be accurate. It's honestly better than paying hundreds of dollars a month to a bookkeeper and wondering if they are doing it right, since only a handful of my transactions are every in doubt. And it's cut down my time spent bookkeeping by a huge amount, since I'm no longer searching Quickbooks forums via google for obscure workarounds specific to real estate. 

For the first time in the 15 years I've owned property, I don't loathe bookkeeping, and I'm not worried that I've got my books done wrong. That's a pretty huge deal. And for that reason, I wholeheartedly recommend REIHub.

Now, it's not perfect. For one thing, they don't offer any of the other property management stuff that many of their competitors do. And that's a bummer, since they cost as much as many of those other services. But given that they are so much better at real estate accounting than anyone else, I think it's OK. In my case, I don't have enough units to need all the bells and whistles of a more robust system. And if I did, I think I'd be happy to pay a few dollars a month to another service just to handle that side of things. 

They DO offer their accounting services as a value add to some of the property management software offerings out there, which is an interesting take. Unfortunately, these services mark up REIHub so much that it quickly becomes prohibitive to use them. It's better to pay two separate bills, even though it means having two separate accounts to manage. This is one area they could really improve on, but for now it's manageable. For instance, my 8 units plus real estate sales accounting (technically a 9th "unit") costs me $25/month through REIHub, but to get the same service resold to me by TurboTenant would cost $55/month. That's a pretty steep premium. If I ever want to use TurboTenant, it would be better to just keep the two services separate. I'd like to see that price delta drop, and if it does I might consider joining one of the other platforms.

REIHub's pricing also has a couple of flaws. I have 9 "units" now, so I'm at $25/month, and can have one more unit under this plan. But if I add one more duplex, that bumps me up to $45/month, which allows me to have 20 units. And after 20, it bumps up again to $80/month for unlimited units. Almost all their competitors simply charge a $1/month/ per unit fee as you grow your portfolio, and I think that approach, still capped at $80/month, would be much better than these big steps. It's worth noting that TurboTenant's resale pricing is $85/month for unlimited, so for only a $5 premium (vs the $30 I would pay now), it might be worth trying it out as an integrated package. 

Another area they could improve on is receipt capture. One thing QuickBooks did well was to snap a picture of a receipt, scan it with OCR, and then allow me to book the transaction later with most of the info automatically pulled out from the receipt. This is something that Landlord Studio does, too, and it's something I really miss. The process of receipt capturing in REIHub is fairly cumbersome. Take a photo, then manually enter all the data about your transaction right then. So if you're at Home Depot or the gas station, better be prepared to do some thumb typing while people wait in line behind you. As it is, I've gone back to just keeping paper receipts in a file folder and electronic receipts in a gmail folder. This is better in some ways, as I have the backups in the event of an audit and don't have to rely on my software vendor to still exist in 7 years. 

One final quibble is that they don't have the wonderful universal search feature of quickbooks, where I could just start typing and quickly find matching transactions. They do have filters, but it's clunky and time consuming compared to QBO's search. 

But in spite of the handful of drawbacks, the software is so good at its core functionality - bookkeeping and accounting for real estate - that there's simply no reason to use anything else. 

A follow up to my earlier post about Renter Insight. After I signed up, then canceled, my free trial, I got an email from the owner of the company asking if I wanted any help or a demo. That's a nice touch by itself. A lot of these products feel like they're being created by committe or by contractors who aren't fully invested, but this is a case where that's obviously not true.

I sent him a link to my review and he gave me the following reply. Unfortunately, Bigger Pockets doesn't allow for post edits after 15 minutes so I can't revise my review but I have no problem adding this additional info. I think this confirms my original statement that it's a strong product and that with some improvements it could be one of the strongest in the class - but only if they really nail the accounting. I don't think the upgrades will be enough to woo me from REIHub, but if someone is reading this in a few months or a year they might want to give Renter Insight a good look. If the features implemented below are done well, it would make this among the most comprehensive offerings available, especially at its price point. 

Here's what he had to say:

"Your free trail was not showing you all aspects of our listing products and accounting features since you didn’t activate your payments application and go through our KYC (know your customer). Until we verify you are a legitimate company, we do not expose you to all functionality due to fraud.

We pride ourselves in being the most comprehensive and affordable solution and are adding new products and features monthly.

Accounting: You are correct, we currently do not have an auto bank import (this is coming in the next few months), but you can manage expenses, upload receipts, manage bills, print checks, complete journal entries and complete account reconciliation. 

We have complete financial reports that you can segment by all, or individual properties and soon will be able to sort by property owner. Reports include, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Statement of Cashflows, Rent Roll and more.

You can easily set up as many User Rolls you want and assign which properties a user can see. This is important to set up a property owner, give them access to only their properties and limit their access to financial reports. This is just one-use case."

Another brief mention of a company called RentRedi (https://rentredi.com/). Like TurboTenant, they are a property management package that offers REIHub accounting as an add-on, with the REIHub service being marked up by $14-19 over REIHub depending on your package. 

The pricing for this one is a little odd, at $29/month or $144/year. Apparently they really, really want to push you into the full year package. 

They offer all the usual property management features, with some notable partnerships like accepting cash for rent at ATMs with something called Chime, and some sort of "premium maintenance" offering where you can sign up to get a handyman service. Some of these might be more useful than others. If you like REIHub for accounting and want to try an integrated property management service, this one is a bit more affordable at some levels than TurboTenant so it might be worth investigating. 

I'll do a brief mention here of a product called Innago (https://innago.com/). They have many of the same features as other products I've reviewed here, but there are two main flaws that would steer me away from recommending them or even trying them out.

First, they are an entirely free service. If you've read this far, you know that I am highly skeptical of any free software. Not only are they planning to provide this service by selling you products, there's also the very real likelihood that they'll end up like Stessa and have to come around and start charging in the future when the original business plan doesn't work out.

Second, they base their accounting around Quickbooks integration. Quickbooks is terrible at real estate accounting, that's why I started this whole series. Enough said.

When first started this series, the owner of the firm messaged me here on Bigger Pockets and asked if I'd do a review. I'm a little embarrassed that it took me this long, since he seems like a genuinely nice guy, and it's good to review products from Bigger Pockets members. Plus, the product itself is 17 years old, which is eons in the software field, so it's nice to not be using a startup.

Unfortunately I signed up for the free trial and then didn't take notes, and now that I am getting around to the review the features are mostly shut off for me since I canceled several months ago to avoid paying. But I'll note that they use the same technology that QuickBooks uses for their bank account sync, so they probably have some of the same issues I had with my smaller banks and oddball credit union lenders. If you're using a bigger bank, then this is probably fine. But if you, like me, use local banks to get better terms, you might find yourself wishing you had a service that used Plaid for its bank account integration.

Other than that, it looks like a pretty robust offering, but at a higher price point than many of us need. The basic package is $45/month for property owners, and another $10/month for property managers, each of which gets you 10 properties. After that, it's more or less $1/unit/month, except that they come in $10 increments. So this is definitely targeted at larger operators. But it's got a decent feature set if you're in that category, including all the usual property management stuff plus integrations with dropbox esignatures and form fillers, ACH payments to vendors, and a few other nice touches. If you have graduated from the smaller scale stuff and are ready to scale, I would definitely put this one on your list to check out. 

I don't think this would work as well for people like me who are owner-occupants and want to track side businesses and have other property managers sending them receipts, but I could be wrong. But I also don't think I'm the target market for this, so it's not a knock on them.

Next up is Renter Insight (https://www.renterinsight.com/). 

This one is interesting. It has a ton of features at a great price. I suspect some people here will really like what it has to offer, and I don't want to sell it short. I liked what I saw enough that I signed up for the free trial. But unfortunately, it doesn't have what I need. 

It offers a lot of the same services as others, but at a reasonable price. $25/month for 20 units, 33% off if you pay annually, and $1 month (monthly) or 75c/month (annually) for each unit over 20. It handles marketing, listing, screening, payments, maintenance requests, and tenant communications, and appears to do all that quite well. It also offers accounting and even mentions e-signatures. Could this be the holy grail I've been searching for? 

Unfortunately, no. The biggest issue is that although it offers accounting, it has no bank account import at all. Nada, zero, zilch. So you'll have to manually enter everything. There's no receipt management, no depreciation of assets, not even any specific reports for taxes. It's a real shame, because this otherwise looks great. 

Besides the lack of imports, it doesn't seem to handle portfolios well. It does allow me to tag different owners (my LLC vs properties in my own name, for instance), but I couldn't figure out how to run reports specific to each, nor could I figure out how I might use this to track my realtor side-hustle, deal with my owner-occupied duplex, etc.

But in spite of the sadness around the accounting, there's something about this package that I really liked. Maybe it's that it is clearly a mature product. Maybe it's the more friendly pricing than many of the competitors. I canceled my free trial, but if your needs are different than mine, you might want to consider giving it a shot. Hopefully they will improve their accounting. With proper bank account imports, portfolio level management, reporting, etc., this could be the one to beat. 

Next up is LandlordStudio (https://www.landlordstudio.com/). This is another one I looked at but didn't try out.

To be honest, this one nearly won me over, and probably deserves an honorable mention. There's a limited service free tier for up to 3 properties, and if your tenants pay by ACH they'll let you add more properties for free. Or if you want the full featured version, it starts out at $12/month for 3 properties and each additional one is $1/month. For people with fewer than a dozen doors, this isn't bad. As you get bigger, there might be better deals out there.

This seems to have most of the commonly used features. Market the property, screen tenants, collect rent, handle maintenance requests, and do accounting. And on the accounting side, this is one of the only services that has a proper receipt-scanning feature that will pull out relevant details and properly fill them in on a new transaction, rather than have you sitting there at the gas pump manually entering data from the receipt with your thumbs. That's a really great feature and is one of the only things I miss from Quickbooks. It uses Plaid for bank account import, which is great. And it has a really robust knowledge base and FAQ.

Unfortunately, it's missing some key features for me, and some features that might matter to others. It doesn't appear to offer any kind of leasing or e-signature options. That's not a big deal to me, but it will be to many people. More important, it doesn't offer the ability to break your properties down into portolios, so my LLC properties will be mixed in with my personally owned properties, and I don't have a way to create a separate portfolio for my real estate agent side hustle.

To make matters worse, their accounting "by itself does not track assets, depreciation of specific assets, or generate a balance sheet. If you're looking for more advanced accounting functionality, please consider using our Xero accounting software integration." That's straight from their FAQs. Well, the last thing I want is to integrate with Xero or anything else. For me that's an immediate dealbreaker.

Still, I can see how for some people out there this might not be a big deal, and the rest of the feature set is pretty robust. This might be the best available option for many people reading this thread.

It's been a while since I added anything to this overly-long roundup. I'm still trying to clear out a few tabs I've now had open for 6 months and wanted to complete this project.

One of those open tabs has been TurboTenant (https://www.turbotenant.com/). I didn't try it out, but at first glance it seems pretty good. It has a free-forever tier, which is nice. Then it has two equally priced tiers at about $100/year, each of which offers a few features. Or get all the features rolled into one for $129/year, with no cap on the number of units. One feature that seems to be missing is any kind of maintenance request/ticket tracking.

Unfortunately, these prices don't include full accounting. So while you can do all the property management stuff, including marketing, screening, leasing and esignatures, and accepting ACH payments with no fees to your tenants (in the paid versions), accounting is a pay-per-unit add-on. They use the excellent app REIHub for accounting, which is great, but the pricing is abysmal. It's way cheaper to pay REIHub directly and not have it integrated. But then you are managing two different systems.

As it stands, it's hard to recommend TurboTenant, since the pricing with the accounting features gets so steep, so fast, and you also don't get the property management features of competitors. For the price, you can probably do better. If they can get the price including accounting down and add more features, that might change in the future.

@Paul Raymond Wood yes, for now I have settled on REIHub. It's generally very good, with some areas where they could improve. I've been meaning to come back around and finish off these reviews, but now it's tax season so I have been spending my limited free time actually doing bookkeeping. 

For the landlord with property manager scenario, it works pretty well but only imports transactions from appfolio's monthly PDF. It happens that my PM uses appfolio so this works for me, but if your PM is on any of the many other platforms you'd have to figure out how to do manual downloads and uploads of your transactions, which is a bit of a drawback. But I haven't found any other accounting software that offers imports from other platforms, so it's sort of a moot point. 

I'd say to give it a shot and see if you like it. I will say that their customer service is exceptional, so if you are trying it out and find something confusing, just send them a note and they'll get right back to you. 

Besides my hatred of quickbooks, another of my motivations for my ill-fated and short-lived switch to Stessa was to get access to their high-interest checking accounts. I figured I could make a few thousand dollars a year in interest and simplify my accounting. Sadly, it didn't work out, but there are some other products out there offering a similar idea.

One of them is a relatively new product called Tellus (https://www.tellusapp.com/). The product, as you can tell from the URL, is an app-only property management/cash management/lending app. It was intriguing enough for me to try out, but definitely not right for me to keep using.

Tellus is free, and offers eye-popping returns on your cash. But be careful! They do offer FDIC insured accounts, but they only offer the advertised rates on the first $2500 of your money with them. This sort of ruins the appeal if you have more funds you want to safely earn interest on.

Fear not! They also have a "boost" account, where they promise rates of at least 6% and as high as 8%. They really, really, really want you to put money in this boost account. This is the place where they make their money. I have more than one property that isn't earning me 8%, so this seems pretty attractive on the surface. But of course, there is no free lunch. The "boost" account is NOT FDIC insured. They are taking your money and using it to buy real estate with. It's "secured by balance sheet," which if you dig far enough into the questions leads to this statement: "Tellus earns its money by providing wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans. Tellus wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans are typically 6-18 month loans. We hold these wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans on our balance sheet, and they generate a predictable stream of income for us. Our property management ecosystem provides both a distribution pipeline for these wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans and proprietary data that help us predict cash flow and home values so we can better manage the risk of our loan portfolio."

This being a real estate investment website, you might be totally OK with lending some Bay Area startup your cash and letting them make whatever kind of loan they want with it. But I am not. If I am going to make non-FDIC insured investments, I want a whole lot more info about the types of investments and the people making those investments than Tellus gives out. But this is a personal choice, and I'm not going to tell you not to try it out. Just go in with your eyes wide open.

They claim the money in boost accounts is "100% liquid" and pays interest daily, which strikes me as vaguely within the realm of a Ponzi scheme. There's no way you can be 100% liquid and ALSO be invested in 6-18 wholesale business-purpose residential real estate loans. It's simply not possible. Which means that the possibility of a bank run or other catastrophe is there, and there's no FDIC to bail you out, dear investor. Again, go in with your eyes wide open.

Without the carrot of earning lots of money on my free cash to entice me, the property management aspects of the app were just OK. It's not that it's poorly done. It's that I really don't want to manage my properties, and especially to do all my accounting, via an app. With no desktop version, it wasn't good enough to keep me on as a user. But I believe that, on paper, this app does actually do most of the stuff I said I wanted in a property management product.

All that said, if you are comfortable using an app for everything, and/or if you have a pot of money you wouldn't mind rolling the dice on to earn 6-8% interest, by all means give it a shot. I don't think this is a bad product, necessarily. It's just not for me.