Making Real Estate Accounting Easy. Small business accounting software for real estate is a cloud-based solutions that helps all owners, investors, landlords and property managers to produce, report and analyze the information you need to make smart business decisions.
Small Business Accounting Software Real Estate assists in the accounting of your small business with ease. This is a professional small business accounting software for real estate. It helps to manage rental income and expenses, loans and leases, property manager management and much more.
QuickBooks Online: Best Overall Real Estate Accounting Software
Overall Score: 4.18 OUT OF 5
- Outstanding general bookkeeping features
- Track income and expenses by class and location with the Plus or Advanced plans
- Integrates with QuickBooks Payments to schedule automatic monthly e-payments
- Great mobile app with mileage tracking and receipt capture
- No customer service telephone number
- No integrated property management features
- Expensive for self-employed and independent agents
QuickBooks Online Pricing
- Simple Start: $25 per month for one user
- Essentials: $50 per month for three users
- Plus: $80 per month for five users
- Advanced: $180 per month for 25 users
New subscribers have a choice of a 30-day free trial with no credit card or 50% off for three monthsRead QuickBooks Online Review
QuickBooks Online Standout Features
- Location tracking: QuickBooks Online lets you create and track the locations of your real estate properties. You can even add sublocations for units in the same location. What’s even better is that you can generate a profit and loss (P&L) report by location in the Reports section of QuickBooks Online. In this report, you’ll see revenues, expenses, and net income per sublocation, the total for each location, and the total for all locations.
- External accountant access: QuickBooks Online has a feature for letting external accountants manage your books. You can invite up to two accountants in addition to the users included in your plan.
- Recurring invoices: Instead of sending invoices manually to tenants, you can save precious time with recurring invoices. This QuickBooks Online feature releases you from the burden of manually sending invoices. Instead, QuickBooks Online will send them for you on a monthly basis.
If you’d like help choosing which QuickBooks Online plan best suits your needs, read our QuickBooks Online comparison article to see a detailed comparison of all QuickBooks Online plans, including QuickBooks Self-employed.
Our Expert Opinion
QuickBooks Online is full-featured accounting software that’s relatively easy to use, considering its powerful features and reports. It can be adapted to real estate companies easily by using the class and location tracking feature. You can define classes for each of your real estate segments and then locations for each property. Most of its vast array of reports can be customized to include only the classes and locations you choose. For instance, you could look at the profitability of a particular building by running a report showing only those units, or locations, within the building.
If you want to keep accounting data stored locally on your hard drive, QuickBooks Desktop might be your best choice instead of QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks will handle your bookkeeping easily, but it’s not designed to help with other aspects of your real estate business like managing leases, maintenance requests, rental applications, and showings. Buildium is our choice if you need real property management in addition to accounting.
Buildium: Best for Property Management Features
Overall Score: 3.63 OUT OF 5
- Outstanding property management features
- Separate profit and loss by property
- Allocate common area expenses to properties automatically
- Inexpensive for companies with 20 units or less
- Mobile app doesn’t include accounting functions
- Lacks common accounting features like mileage tracking and receipt capture
- Not very easy to use
Buildium Pricing
- Essential: Monthly from $50 for 20 units or less to $235 for 150 units
- Growth: Monthly from $160 for 50 units or less to $5,400 for 5,000 units.
- Premium: Annual from $4,968 for 150 units or less to $159,000 for 5,000 units
If you have more than 5,000 units, custom pricing applies. Try out Buildium’s features by signing up for a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. The trial includes preloaded test data to see how Buildium works.
Buildium Standout Features
- Tenant evaluation: Buildium can help you screen tenants during the application process. This evaluation feature includes credit screening, criminal records, and eviction information. It also lets you customize credit score requirements.
- Specialized accounting functions: Buildium has all the necessary accounting functions you’ll need for real property management. It also features recurring invoices and automatic expense allocation, such as trash removal, among tenants.
- Marketing tools: Buildium can help you create listings that can be posted on managers’ websites, to Craigslist or to the entire Zillow network.
Our Expert Opinion
Buildium is property management software with an accounting component. It manages rental listings, tenant screenings, and online payments. It also provides both a resident portal and owner portal to create and track communications. The accounting features allow you to collect rent, manage bills, and classify transactions transferred from your bank account. There’s also a feature for more experienced accountants to record general journal entries. Buildium provides basic financial statements, including a balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows, plus many reports for analyzing your activity by property.
There are pros and cons to using management software for your bookkeeping. If used correctly, it can eliminate the need to enter the same information in multiple systems. However, bookkeeping tends to be more difficult when it’s not the software’s focal point. It’s not always easy to understand how―or if―a particular entry in the management software affects your financial statements. We prefer QuickBooks Online if bookkeeping is the main reason for getting real estate accounting software.
Quicken: Best for Individuals Owning a Few Rental Units
Overall Score: 3.54 OUT OF 5
- Very affordable
- Track P&L by property
- Manage lease terms, rental rates, security deposits, and maintenance
- Track personal finances, retirement accounts, and self-employed income
- Doesn’t track assets and liabilities so it can’t print a balance sheet
- Cannot include more than one user
- Software must be installed on your computer
PricingQuicken Pricing
- Starter: $35.99 per year for Windows and Mac
- Deluxe: $51.99 per year for Windows and Mac
- Premier: $77.99 per year for Windows and Mac
- Home & Business: $103.99 per year for Windows only
Quicken Standout Features
- Necessary accounting functions: Quicken features all the necessary accounting functions to help you manage your real estate transactions. It has invoicing templates, estimates, receivable and payable tracking, and a tax deduction finder.
- Market value tracker: Quicken can also give you quick insights on the current market value of your property portfolio that can be classified by type, sector, or the integrated Morningstar’s Portfolio X-ray tool.
- Tenant management: Quicken can help you manage your tenants in one software program, keeping track of their accounts and managing their payments easily.
- Online document storage: Quicken also has cloud storage for saving receipts and other business documents. We like this because you can keep copies of lease contracts in the cloud.
Definition: The Portfolio X-ray tool is a special analytical tool of Morningstar, a financial services company. This tool evaluates your asset allocation and sector weightings along with diversification and uncovers potential weaknesses in your portfolio.
Our Expert Opinion
Quicken is designed predominantly to manage personal finances, but the Home & Business edition is very capable of managing a few rental houses owned by an individual. It has some great features typically found in more expensive bookkeeping software, such as a mobile app with receipt capture, receiving online payments, managing unpaid bills, and tracking income and expenses by rental unit. It also has basic property management features like a property dashboard, rental agreements, and a report of income and loss formatted as the Schedule E required on your individual income tax return.
Quicken isn’t a double-entry bookkeeping system and isn’t appropriate for a corporation, partnership, or limited liability company (LLC) because it doesn’t track assets and liabilities. While the mobile app will sync with your desktop computer via the cloud, the software itself isn’t cloud-based and must be installed on your computer. For a full-fledged accounting program that includes tracking income and expenses, we recommend choosing QuickBooks Online.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is an intuitive program that can be incorporated into real estate, offering tools for real estate income generation, customer lists, property tracking, and more. The interface makes it easy to manage expenses, revenue streams, banking, cash flows, invoices, taxes and receipts. Each of these can be applied in all real estate categories. Add a number of custom fields in FreshBooks for property tracking and easily manage, sort, and store critical information such as floor plans, property descriptions, lease dates, due dates, current rent, appraisal value, and maintenance. FreshBooks can be easily complemented by other accounting and budgeting software to sync with credit cards, investments and bank accounts among others.
Wave
Wave is free accounting software that offers all the crucial features for your accounting needs. It provides unlimited bank and credit card synchronization, expense tracking and management, billing, report generation, receipt scanning, invoicing, and a guest collaborators option in one free account. It is ideal for freelancers or service-based small businesses that do not need inventory tracking or payroll generation.
Key Features:
- Complete accounting service, receipt scanning, and invoicing.
- Add multiple businesses in one account
- Mobile app feature
- Unlimited free users in one account
Conclusion
Affordable real estate accounting software HomeOffice.com provides affordable web-based small business accounting solutions for real estate and property management companies, as well as for other small businesses that do not require a full-featured integrated solution to meet their accounting needs. With us, you get top-of-the-line programs and services at affordable prices so you can stay on top of your business all the time. We also provide free templates and forms to help save your time and effort on writing the business documents manually.