You'll want to have invoices, work provided, costs incurred, vendor names (contractor names), etc.

However, I took that afternoon to review the invoices and since then I haven’t heard back from her after trying to contact her after our first initial conversation. 

* Are all my invoices uploaded to my owner portal?

I have a couple of tenants that will request their rent invoices a month or two in advance, kind of annoying since the accounting becomes a little more difficult, but I'd rather that than not getting rent on time!

It is nice to be able to deduct expensive labor, but you can invoice yourself via your mgt co if you have one.  

They say to record rent I must first create Invoices, then Receive Payments.

That's the role of a bookkeeper.If you hand even the World's Best CPA a bunch of spreadsheets and a box of receipts and invoices, they'll probably be able to help you, but only after billing you hours of additional time just to make sense of your mess.

They also have a work order workflow which I think will be a big help, and you can have vendors submit their invoices into Appfolio directly which is potentially a big time savings.They're both easy to use, both seem very powerful.

Yes I’m actually having a contractor write up an invoice of everything that he noticed about the property and I’m going to be submitting it with my cancellation.

Tracking tenant inquiries, rental documents, invoicing for rents, etc.