AppFolio Property Manager vs Stessa Comparison

Quick and ease setup. Interface is designed for property managers - provides accounting and bookkeeping using the terms familiar to property managers and owners. Easy to track the expenses and capture everything for expense allocation and audits.

A few additional features requested: - historical view of the property instead of just point in time - enable leveraging for audits if needed - enable capturing receipt before the transaction comes through the CC to Stessa - store the image until matching available - integration w/ OWA from RentManager

This software is easy to use and comprehensively tracks everything related to our rental properties. I especially love that each property is tracked separately and together in various reports.

It would be nice if a Rent Roll report was available, by property and by portfolio.

I love the import feature. Great for tracking and maintaining a balance of accounts and ability to separate and class properties.

There really isn't anything I don't like. Maybe if I could create folders without adding a property.

This product is a free product that does just as much as most other real estate property management applications!

The user interface is not super appealing and the receipt scanner had some issues.

This is super easy to use and set up. The software walks you through property set up one question at a time. You don’t have to know a lot about accounting or accounting software, but it is evident the software is setting up a structure for you to monitor and track the transactions of your real estate investment(s) and be able to pull financial reports at the end of the year for your accountant. I use it once a month. It takes me less than 5 minutes to enter the transactions and I’m done!

There are no options for assigning HOA fees in the “money going out” category. I lump them under the Management fees section. It would be nice to be able to categorize HOA fees in their own world.

I love how all our property and tenant data is located in one place for all the team to see. It keeps track of our money in and out and lets us know what we are spending on each property. Helps us as armature's understand real estate a lot better since we can always see the numbers

I wish the reporting could be customizable and the only reason I say this is because I would like more simple reports.

I simply love Stessa. It's intuitive, easy to use and it helps me manage my property financials without issues. Highly recommended for anyone with rental properties.

Inability to find instant solution for my question

Stessa offers the most intuitive, purpose-built rental property financial software that I’ve come across. Far too many colleagues of mine are still either using overly complicated general accounting software, or worse, tracking everything manually in Excel. Stessa not only allows me to automate the majority of my bookkeeping, but the real time reporting functionality allows me to monitor the performance of my assets and catch anamolys much quicker. While other property management software may offer expense tracking or basic accounting features, Stessa’s exclusive focus on the financial aspect of rental property ownership allows them to offer a far more robust feature set and innovate at a faster clip.

As a single-entry accounting system, it comes with all the drawbacks associated with that method of accounting (no cross-checking, greater potential for error, no tracking of real accounts, etc.). This was an intentional design decision, however, as this software is geared to be more user friendly for the average rental owner. While it lacks the sophistication of a double-entry system, Stessa has come up with innovative ways to simulate certain aspects of a double-entry system through features like a derived Balance Sheet report using user provided asset values and debt information.

I have used QuickBooks for years but got tired of the barrage of come-ons and sticky marketing techniques they use on customers. It seemed every time I opened the program, there would be new hoops to jump through if I wanted to do any actual work. Stessa is designed from the ground up for rental property owners. You enter income and expense items, that's it. All items fall under one of the carefully...

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This is not a property management platform in the sense that you can schedule maintenance and track hours. However, you can capture and import invoices so your records are all in one place.

This is just a really well thought out application that allows you to track every and all expenses for the property. It can assign tags to all expenses to track them for each unit.

I really wish they would offer lease management in a way where you can create and edit the leases on the app and tenants can esign the leases.

Stessa software is the easiest program to manage my rental properties I love that once I set up a property profile and connect my bank account that manages that specific property, Stessa automatically uploads my transactions and sends me a notice to review transactions. Then monthly I get an update about whether I had positive cash flow. I love this program and can easily move between seeing all of my properties collectively or individually if I need to drill down even deeper. This program is a no brainer for anyone owning or managing multiple properties.

This was a little confusing setting up the initial property details, but once I got used to where things were in the program and how to add the information it was alot more friendly for me.

I like how Stessa connects to my property management company, and to my banks. It's great to see my portfolio snapshot. The tax package is also very useful and saves me a lot of time during the tax return prep.

Nothing really I dislike. But it would be useful to have a functionality that allows to split the multi-family units into their own units for reporting purposes. Admitted, it's my fault to have started with one property for a multi-unit one.

They automatically import financial transactions from data sources you link. They provide the ability to track by property and category. The reporting at the end of year (for tax purposes) is simple and thorough. I can't believe it's free.

They are adding more functionality to improve the reporting. Right now, I get a good summary but, in the future, would like to get some recommendations such as: a) this is the best mortgage to pay off b) you should consider getting a home warranty for this property. I'm sure that will come as they develop. I'd love to see Stessa integrate with other rental management companies like Avail, TenantCloud, Cozy, etc.

The dashboard allows me to quickly see my equity, cashflow, vacancy, debt, expenses etc for all my portfolios. Great software! I also am excited to have my accounting integrated all in one place.

Things that I know the Stessa developers are working on: Android App, Email Receipt functionality and other features. I think this product will just get better and better!

The ease of income and expense tracking allows you to take control of your business. By linking accounts or adding transactions as you go, Stessa does the rest - generating all the reports you'll ever need, making tax time a walk in the park.

It would be nice to allow another user, like a partner or manager, to login with their own credentials and have limited(or full) accessibility to the your data.

This app is amazing. It’s the first platform that has allowed me to manage our entire portfolio directly from my phone if I want to. I can track all expenses and directly import from the bank, and assign to each property and even a specific unit.

I wish the transaction importing would occur in real time directly, versus having to log in and refresh the transactions.

First of all, it's free to use, and by inputting all your property data it gives you a number of different metrics and can sync transactions with your back account. I can also invite other investors and partners to view certain properties, which makes my reporting requirements a lot more seamless.

Only con for me is that I can't get the mobile app in Canada.

The auto import from my connected accounts including bank and credit card accounts. It also is the biggest help with my taxes that I could ever dream of. Every year I just print out the tax report for each property and my tax guy barely has to ask me any questions.

To be totally honest there is nothing I don't like. I will say I haven't tried their mobile app in over a year because it used to be pretty weak but I hear it's been updated and very nice now.

Love the ability to track all of my transactions associated with each property in my portfolio. They also have some great little features like splitting a transaction into the appropriate categories, such as mortgage payments being split into the principal, interest, and escrow, etc. New reporting packages are a great addition.

Would love to see the ability to copy transactions or have an autofill function (like google search) for common transactions. Could also use some tweaking for comparing long-term vs short-term rental properties on the main dashboards.

This is a incredibly easy to use software to manage your property rentals. The expense categories break down into subcategories so you know exactly where your money is going and why. Everything you need to know or keep track of is at your fingertips in a simple, yet effective format.

Thus far, I have no cons. Everything about this software has exceeded expectation.

1. Having everything update directly from the source saves me alot of time. I previously spent countless hours updating spreadsheets. Now I have time to drill down on property managers, analyze expenses and make decisions. 2. Can provide key performance indicators used to provide a high-level overview of the state of the business

1. Investors are not starting from scratch. Need a way to input previous year's earnings. 2. This is more gear to cash-flow. Would like to show the effects of flippers.

I am relatively new to using this tool and I appreciate the visibility that this tool offers me for my rental property(s) to look at different performance metrics. It kind of reminds me a hybrid of Mint and Personal Capital for Rental Properties. I see the potential of this tool platform and look forward to seeing where it goes!

I like how this tool allows for me to export different financial reports for different time periods, I just wish that it would give me all of the details of the summary data in the spreadsheet? Also, the data exported is appears to be just text data? If I want to modify any of the tables, I can't because there are no formulas?

There is nothing to install as it is in the cloud. Setup the first few properties was a easy and quick. Back filling data was relatively easy and they could pull data from my bank even with two factor authentication, and could get the data from my property managers software which is little more than a zip file with receipts and PDF owner report.

I found that I have some duplicate items from different data sources that I set aside in a "For Audit" bucket (like a company entity). So while this gets ignored by the real company buckets it is included in the 'all companies reports".

Ease of use: It works the way it should. Automation: Once set up, the transactions of the download from owner each owner portal (when you own several properties), and bank accounts. User experience is similar to mint.com. Visibility: it creates a consolidated dashboard for the portfolio, and derivative clean graphs, giving perspective and showing trends. Amazing Customer support: hats-off to the reps, who have answered 10+ "hard questions". I only ask "hard questions" since the FAQ is also excellent. - Insightful newsletter.

No Cons per se. Just two humble recommendations. Users of Stessa would benefit tremendously if it: - it offered a function for marketing the property (i.e. find tenants or buyers). Stessa being a repository of information (location, yr built, sq footage, pictures), a few clicks should allow spreading​ the good news throughout the specialized sites (Craigslist Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, local websites...) - kept historical records of the tenant roll. Currently, it only offers a picture at the present time.

Look, it's free, we get that. And it has added value to our business. But their inability to resolve a seemingly simple issue after 5 months is inexcusable.

For a software company, they are surprisingly not agile. Two examples:- For every nearly transaction that comes through, we have to attribute it to the property/tenant in spite of the amounts and ledgers being exactly the same every month. It appears the only AI they use is a checkbox that ties a bank account to a property. That's great for loans, but it should be able to handle rents too. - We can...

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