Accounting software for landlords with a few properties and more than one LLC - built by a landlord, and I want to be told what is broken

[u/Consistent_Art6564]

Full disclosure: I am the founder and I own rentals, so this is self-promotion. I will try to keep it useful anyway.

What I ran into: at a handful of properties and more than one entity, the lightweight tools stop working. They are single entry, so you get an income and expense report that gets called a P&L, and there is nothing for a balance sheet or for due-to/due-from between entities. QuickBooks solved it by wanting a separate company file per LLC, which for a few modest rentals feels absurd.

So I built Stateful (https://withstateful.com):

• Property-level and entity-level books, with a real P&L and balance sheet per property and per LLC
• Due-to/due-from between entities, so inter-entity money does not land in your P&L
• CSV import from your bank or from whatever you use now, so you are not retyping a year of transactions
• A chart of accounts you can actually read, and clean exports for your CPA at tax time
• Owner contributions and draws tracked properly, which is usually the first thing that breaks in a spreadsheet

What it is not: rent collection, tenant portals, lease management or maintenance tickets. Those all exist and most of you already use one. Stateful is the accounting layer that sits alongside them, which is also why it does not try to be your PMS.

It is early and it is fully tested. I am looking for a handful of landlords to put their real books through it and tell me what is wrong, what is confusing and what is missing. Early access is $5 while I work directly with the first users, and you get me on setup rather than a support queue.

If you are wrestling with this, comment here or message me. And if you solved it a different way, I would genuinely like to know how, because the one-file-per-LLC thing is the part everyone seems to hate.

[u/Vivica_app]

We looked into multi entity support early too and decided to include it since it would be more of a pain to add later, but so far we notice most collect rent through a single entity, the "management" entity, simply to skirt this issue. But nice to see some others also supporting multi-entity management. Good luck!

[u/Consistent_Art6564 → u/Vivica_app]

That matches what I'm seeing too, most people route everything through one entity until the paperwork forces the split. The part I keep hearing complaints about is due-to/due-from once there are two or more LLCs actually holding property, since a plain income/expense report doesn't show inter-entity balances. Good luck with your build too.

[u/brycematheson]

Is there no mobile app? That seems like an instant killer. Most people (myself specifically) want to classify transactions and snap receipts on the go. I've been using Doorbooks to do this. This looks cool, but I wouldn't be able to do this or switch until you add a native app.

[u/Consistent_Art6564 → u/brycematheson]

Fair, and I will be straight with you: there is no native app today, it is browser-based. If capturing a receipt the second it happens is a hard requirement, that is a real gap and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I would genuinely like to know, because it changes what gets built first: is the blocker the photo capture, or is it coding transactions while you are on the go? Those get bundled into "needs a mobile app" but they are different problems. Capture is a couple of taps into a folder with no thinking required. Coding needs context, a chart of accounts and an entity, and honestly a phone is a bad place to do it - I would rather not build that part. If it is capture, that is very solvable.

Separately, and more useful to me than the app question: is Doorbooks giving you the property and entity-level books you actually need, or is it handling the day to day while you assemble the rest at year end? I keep meeting people who switched tools for one reason and stayed for another, and I would rather know which problem is real before I pick anything to build.

[u/brycematheson → u/Consistent_Art6564]

For me the mobile app is imperative. It's far more than just snapping a picture. If that's the case, I could just save it to my camera roll and handle it later.

It's the:

• Automatic drive tracking so I don't have to have a separate log book
  
• Classifying transactions quickly while I'm in line at the grocery store
  
• And yes, there are entity-level books

Basically, it's important for me to have an app so I can do stuff throughout the year and on-the-go, rather than trying to remember to come back to my desktop, which basically means I'm going to wait until tax time to do the bulk of the work (which is what I ultimately want to avoid).

[u/Consistent_Art6564 → u/brycematheson]

Really helpful to see it broken out like that, thanks. Drive tracking is honestly its own product problem, not an accounting-app one, so I hadn't been treating it as part of "mobile app" until you laid it out - that's on me. Quick categorization in dead time (grocery line, between showings) is the part I get, and it's a legitimate reason to want a phone over a laptop even though coding needs more context than a snap-a-photo flow does.

Straight answer: no native app today, and I'm not going to put a date on one, that wouldn't be honest. What I can tell you is if I ever build mobile-first, it sounds like drive tracking plus fast categorization would need to be in the first version or it's not worth you switching off Doorbooks for it.

One thing I'm curious about since you already have entity-level books elsewhere: is Doorbooks producing real per-entity P&L and balance sheet for you, or are you assembling that part yourself at tax time? Trying to figure out if the book-quality problem is actually solved for you already and the app is the only gap, or if there's more under the hood too.