Propertyware Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping for property managers running Propertyware: owner statements that reconcile, management fees and maintenance markups posted correctly, and the management company's own books kept separately from the portfolio.
Propertyware was built for single-family and scattered-site rentals, and that shape changes the bookkeeping more than people expect. A multifamily manager has a few owners and a lot of doors. A scattered-site manager has a lot of owners and a few doors each, which means the reporting obligation multiplies: every owner wants a statement that agrees with the money that reached them, and every one of those statements is its own small set of books.
What the work looks like in Propertyware
Two sets of books, and they are not the same set
Propertyware holds the portfolio. Your management company has its own books, and its revenue is the management fees, the markups and the leasing fees that the portfolio generated. Those are two ledgers with one bank behind them, and the work is keeping both true at once. Where this goes wrong is a management company reading its own performance off portfolio reports, which describe money that mostly belongs to somebody else.
Owner statements that survive being checked
An owner statement is only worth issuing if the owner can tie it to their own bank. Income recorded per property, expenses against the property that incurred them, the management fee shown rather than netted away, and the draw matching what actually left the account on the date it left. When an owner queries a figure, the answer should be in the statement rather than in a reconstruction.
Management fees and maintenance markups
Both are revenue to you and a cost to the owner, and both are calculated inside Propertyware against rules somebody set up once. A fee rule that no longer matches the management agreement keeps posting anyway. Maintenance markup needs deciding as well: whether you are billing the owner a marked-up invoice as your own revenue or passing a vendor cost through, because those are different entries and only one of them is yours.
Deposits are not your money
Security deposits sit per property and per owner, and in most jurisdictions they are held rather than earned. Kept in an account of their own and reconciled on a schedule, they are a liability that always agrees with the bank. Blended into operating cash they become a number nobody can prove, which is the position no manager wants to be in when a tenancy ends.
The reconciliation that catches the rest
Propertyware runs its own bank reconciliation, and so do your books. Both are reconciling against the same statement, so a difference between them is information rather than noise: it is usually a transaction entered in one and not the other, a deposit applied to the wrong property, or an owner disbursement recorded on a different date than it cleared. Running the pair monthly rather than at year end is what keeps it a five-minute problem.
Questions about Propertyware
Do you work inside our Propertyware, or do you want exports?
Inside it, with our own login and whatever permission level you are comfortable granting. Exports are workable and they are slower, because the answer to most questions is one record away in the system and several steps away in a spreadsheet. Where a client would rather keep the system closed, we work from the reports it produces and say so up front.
We also keep books in QuickBooks. Which one is the real set?
Both, for different things, and the arrangement is normal rather than a duplication problem. Propertyware is the portfolio record: per-property income and expense, owner balances, deposits. The general ledger is the management company's own set of books and the one a return gets filed from. The job is making sure they reconcile to the same bank rather than choosing between them.
Is this available to US property managers?
Yes. Propertyware work is available in Canada and the United States, and most of what is on this page applies in both. What stays with your own preparer is US tax filing of any kind, federal, state or local, and US information returns including owner 1099s. We keep the books those get prepared from.
More questions answered on the FAQ page.
Where this fits
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