Search for property management software with three units to your name and you will land on a listicle of thirteen tools, written by the company that ranked itself first, padded with platforms that want a 50-door client and quote pricing per unit per month. The comparison grids weigh owner statements, trust accounting, and team permissions. You have a duplex and a condo. Very little of this was written for you, and the people writing it know that.
The way out is to stop comparing tools and start comparing jobs. Software for a small portfolio does three distinct jobs that vendors bundle into one subscription: keeping the books and getting you to tax time, collecting the rent, and filling vacancies. The first job runs every month forever. The second is optional more often than the marketing admits. The third is episodic, a few weeks every couple of years per unit. Most bad software decisions at this scale come from paying year-round prices for the episodic job.
Three jobs, not one product
Before any vendor names, here is what each job contains:
- Books and taxes. A ledger sorted into Schedule E categories, a depreciation schedule, security deposit accounting, the split of each mortgage payment into deductible interest and non-deductible principal, and receipts attached to the transactions they explain. This job runs twelve months a year and its output is your tax return.
- Rent collection. Tenants paying through the software: ACH transfers, autopay, late fees applied on schedule, reminders sent to the tenant. A monthly cadence, and the job small landlords most often overestimate needing.
- Leasing. Listing syndication, applications, screening, signatures. Alive during a vacancy, asleep the rest of the year.
A manager with 200 doors needs all three running in one system. At two to ten units, the bundle itself is the thing to be skeptical of, because the bundled price is set by the jobs you use least.
Job one is the job you cannot skip
Whatever you decide about collection and leasing, a Schedule E with your name on it is due next spring, so evaluate this job first and hardest. The tool should do five things:
- Categorize to Schedule E from day one, so February is an export instead of an archaeology project. The line-by-line Schedule E guide shows what those categories are.
- Compute depreciation instead of remembering it. Residential buildings depreciate over 27.5 years on the building basis, and the deduction is large: roughly $9,100 a year on a $250,000 basis. Run your own numbers in the depreciation calculator. A tool that holds the schedule beats a note that says “ask the CPA.”
- Treat deposits as liabilities. A deposit is not income when it arrives, and move-out requires itemized deductions with evidence, not a guess.
- Split the mortgage payment. Only the interest is deductible. Principal and escrow are cash out the door but not expenses, and books that miss this overstate costs all year.
- Attach documents to records. The water heater receipt should live on the water heater transaction, not in a photo roll.
Around those five sits a monthly rhythm. I close my own books on the 5th of each month, and the routine is a 10-minute close when the categories have been right all year. A tool that does this job well earns its fee in March alone.
Jobs two and three: collection and leasing
Collection is the job vendors lead with, because payments are where the money is, for them. Be honest about the size of your problem: with one to four tenants, recording rent takes minutes a month. The real question is whether you want tenants paying through software at all. Autopay genuinely helps with a chronically late payer, ACH transfers float for two to five business days before they land, and free collection is being paid for somewhere, usually by the banking relationship underneath it. Plenty of small landlords run bank transfers plus a clean ledger and lose nothing; the collection guide walks through the options.
Leasing is even easier to right-size. The big listing marketplaces syndicate a vacancy for free or close to it, screening reports are paid by the applicant nearly everywhere, and a unit that turns every two or three years needs this machinery for about two weeks per turn. Subscribing year-round to a leasing engine you use two weeks out of a hundred is the most common form of small-landlord software waste.
When a spreadsheet is still enough
At one or two units with stable tenants, a spreadsheet with Schedule E categories does job one acceptably, and it is the only genuinely free option in this market. Start from the free spreadsheet template rather than a blank grid, keep the categories aligned to the form, and reconcile monthly. What a spreadsheet will never do is volunteer information: it will not flag the lease ending in 40 days, work the deposit math at move-out, build the depreciation schedule, or keep the receipt next to the expense. Mine dropped exactly those kinds of things, which is what sent me shopping for software in the first place. The spreadsheet vs software breakeven is its own page, but the short version: the spreadsheet stays free right up until it misses something expensive.
Read the business model before the feature list
Pricing in this market comes in three shapes, and each shape tells you who the real customer is.
- Free, funded by banking. Stessa and Baselane are the big names here. Stessa's core bookkeeping is genuinely free; the company makes its money on its banking product and its paid tiers, so the free product is built to walk you toward both. Baselane is free and built around its own bank accounts, with rent collection landing in them. Neither is a trick. It is a trade: free software in exchange for becoming a banking customer. Take it if you wanted the account anyway. Skip it if you want your operating money at your own bank and books that are not a funnel.
- Per-unit with a minimum. The manager-grade platforms charge per unit per month, commonly with monthly minimums in the $25 to $55 range. The minimum is the tell: at $2.50 per unit with a $50 floor, your fourplex pays the 20-door price for a product built and supported for a customer you are not.
- Flat monthly. One price regardless of unit count, paid by you. The incentive is the cleanest of the three: the software has to be worth the fee on its own, because there is no banking margin or per-door upsell behind it.
Vendor pricing and free tiers change often. Treat the numbers above as shapes, and verify against the vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
Where the tool I built fits, and where it does not
This page is the comparison I wanted when my spreadsheet started dropping things, so here is the disclosure. I built rents.ai, and it competes only on job one plus the record-keeping side of job two: a ledger mapped to Schedule E line order, the 27.5-year depreciation schedule computed automatically, each deposit tracked through itemized deductions to its return, mortgage payments split into interest, principal, and escrow, and documents attached to properties, tenants, and transactions. The price is flat monthly with unlimited properties and units, and no bank account attached, because there is no banking business underneath. The limits matter as much as the features: it does not collect rent (you record payments yourself), it does not screen tenants, it does not post listings, and there are no bank feeds, so transactions arrive by hand or by CSV. If collection or leasing is your actual bottleneck, buy a tool built for that job and keep your books wherever they are treated as the main event.
The decision, in four questions
- Can a spreadsheet still hold your portfolio? One or two units, stable tenants, and the discipline to reconcile monthly: keep it and spend nothing.
- Is collecting rent your real pain? The banking-funded free tools do that job well, with the banking trade made explicit above.
- Is tax season your real pain? Weigh tools on Schedule E mapping, depreciation, and deposit accounting, and ignore the leasing features entirely.
- Are you being priced per unit? Walk away until your door count makes the minimum irrelevant.
Software is also the smallest piece of running rentals well. The routines, checklists, and dates around it do more of the work, and the complete self-management system for 1-10 units covers that whole machine. Pick the tool last. Buy the job, not the bundle.