The 10 Best Real Estate Accounting Software Solutions Compared for 2023

The best real estate accounting software should help track your income, expenses, and tax deductions and provide robust financial reporting. Depending on your needs, some users opt for software with reliable payroll, invoicing, or analytics features, while others look for seamless integration with other business software.

To help you find the best accounting software for real estate that suits your business, we’ve reviewed and compared the best options this year. Keep reading to find out what makes FreshBooks stand out from its competition and what the other providers have to offer.

The Best Software for Real Estate Accounting: Top 10

We’ve thoroughly compared the best software for real estate accounting based on their pricing, features, and compatibility, amongst others. While we found plenty of respectable accounting software providers, the following tools impressed us the most:

1. FreshBooks — Overall, the best real estate accounting tool in 2023, particularly for small businesses, largely due to how easy it makes billing and its incredible feature-to-price value.
2. Oracle NetSuite — Ideal for large real estate businesses because of its exceptional add-ons that help you manage every aspect of your company.
3. Zoho Accounting — A popular option that boasts property-specific accounting features and a superb free plan to test its interface and functionalities.
4. Xero — A leading solution that offers numerous integrations and client management options for a centralized view of your contact interactions.
5. Bonsai — All-in-one tool for real estate agents that helps you stay organized and get paid faster. The CRM and project tracking capabilities are the cherry on top.
6. Sage — A secure solution that boasts a solid, lengthy reputation for being among the best on the market. It simplifies workflows, offers easy data import, and streamlined data management.
7. QuickBooks — An incredibly popular tool that simplifies expense tracking and keeps expenses sorted in categories so you never miss a tax deduction.
8. Turbotax — The best option for managing your taxes. You can do your own taxes or hire experts to prepare, sign, and file your business taxes.
9. Melio — One of the best free solutions for all the necessities, including the means to streamline invoice payments, and it offers superb accounts payable features.
10. Xendoo — A premium solution that offers a dedicated real estate bookkeeping team for your back office that provides regular reports.

Can My Real Estate Business Use General Accounting Software?

One notable benefit of general accounting software is the custom record-keeping you’ll get with most reputable providers. This means you can configure it to track your financial transactions related to property acquisitions, operational expenses, and rental income.

Categorizing this information on a centralized platform is crucial for business health evaluations, reports, and analytics. For example, the best accounting software for real estate brokerage will provide detailed reports for profit and loss, cash flow, and balance sheets.

That means you’ll always have a clear idea of your efficiency, notice bottlenecks, and make better business decisions. In addition, most general accounting software providers offer tax filing solutions or advising.

From tax season reports and financial organization to budgeting and forecasting features, accounting software can assist in future financial planning for individual properties or your entire real estate portfolio.

What Features Should Realtors Look for in Accounting Software?

Choosing the right real estate accounting software can help you streamline your business and stay organized and compliant. While most providers offer different features and user experiences, you should ensure your future accounting software has the following:

• Expense Tracking — Look for accounting tools with robust expense-tracking capabilities that allow you to categorize and track different expenses in your business.
• Financial Reports — The software should offer a variety of customizable templates for generating income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and other essential reports.
• User-Friendly Interface — Small businesses should consider software with a modern look that isn’t overly complicated and doesn’t require onboarding assistance or training.
• Cloud-Based Accessibility — Online accounting software lets you access your financial and business data from anywhere, supporting collaboration and remote work.
• Invoicing — Accounting software with customizable invoicing can simplify how you charge for your services, rental payments, and property sales. Look for recurring invoices, itemized billing, and expense inclusion features.

The Best Accounting Software for Property Managers Reviewed

Now that you’ve seen our list and know what to look for in the best accounting software for real estate businesses, we’ll dive into the details of each tool. Here, you’ll learn what makes each one on our list unique, allowing you to pick the one that suits your business.

1. FreshBooks — Overall, the Best Real Estate Accounting Tool in 2023

FreshBooks provides an unmatched feature set for real estate accounting that saves you time and helps you get paid faster. A standout benefit of using FreshBooks is that it cuts down the time you spend in the office crunching numbers.

It does this with its expense sorting and client management features. Besides reducing your admin hours, FreshBooks will save you from bank trips by providing numerous payment options for your clients, giving you more time for your real estate business.

For example, you can set up recurring invoices to your regular clients, and FreshBooks will automatically send them. In addition, you can set up late payment fees or reminders for clients, so you won’t have to manually chase payments, making it the best accounting software for rental properties.

Whether you deal with rental properties, sales, or both, sending customizable estimates to your clients can go a long way to securing them. FreshBooks helps you set clear expectations with numerous pre-made templates that are easy to understand to improve your communications with clients.

Besides improving your clients’ experience and providing exceptional billing options, FreshBooks helps you keep track of all transactions and billable hours. You’ll even be able to provide clients with a payment confirmation email in minutes when prompted.

Thanks to its centralized nature, the FreshBooks dashboard unifies all data, from client information to bank statements, and creates in-depth reports. These can help you keep track of income and expenses, prepare for tax season, and think of cost-saving alternatives.

Features

• Time Entry Details — FreshBooks helps you track the hours you’ve put into each client, project, or call, simplifying invoicing and giving you a clear insight into your team’s performance.
• Accounts Aging — This feature ensures you’re always aware of tenants who are late with their payments. That allows you to follow up with them as needed at the right time.
• Invoice Details — It allows you to access invoice reports showing if and when your client has paid, search by customer, and see if they’re past due in just one report.

Pricing

FreshBooks offers four plans for micro-to-small-sized businesses. While its advanced features could suit larger businesses, FreshBooks can get expensive if you add more team members, but nevertheless, it’s cheaper than most of its competition.

Thanks to its 30-day free trial, you can try FreshBooks risk-free today and improve your real estate business’s financial management.

2. Oracle NetSuite — Ideal for Large Real Estate Businesses

Oracle NetSuite offers comprehensive real estate accounting solutions with tailored features for each company. One of its main advantages over its competition is that it provides a full suite of business-oriented add-ons.

For example, it offers one of the best CRM apps real estate companies can use to manage numerous tenants, launch email marketing campaigns, and more.

It also provides excellent fixed assets management features that make financial reporting more timely and accurate by automating fixed-asset depreciation and lease accounting.

Oracle NetSuite lets you manage the entire asset lifecycle, from acquisition to retirement, without time-consuming manual processes like duplicate data entry or spreadsheet-filling.

For real estate companies involved in leasing, Oracle NetSuite offers rent and lease management functionalities to streamline processes like lease agreement tracking, rental income management, and security deposit handling.

In addition, your team will receive automated reminders for rent collection and lease renewals, improving your cash flow. Plus, Oracle NetSuite’s financial management features allow real estate companies to maintain an accurate, up-to-date record of their financial data.

It lets you automatically import bank or credit card data for reconciliation and matching, reducing the risk of manual data entry errors and ensuring the company’s financial records remain in sync with bank and credit card transactions.

In addition, it enhances the accuracy, efficiency, and compliance of tax filing for real estate companies. Preparing financial statements for tax season is much easier when you have accurate financial data, expense deductions, and transaction tracking on a single platform, making Oracle NetSuite one of the best choices for tax filing.

Features

• Asset Tracking — Oracle NetSuite helps you develop an accurate listing of your depreciating and non-depreciating fixed assets. It also helps you maintain detailed records over the entire asset lifecycle.
• Payment Processing — It provides comprehensive support for credit cards and other non-check payment options through integration with payment gateways that suit your clients.
• Cash Management — The provider offers advanced tools to optimize cash flows, manage liquidity, and monitor bank accounts, allowing your finance teams to be more strategic with access to a complete view of the company’s cash flow.

Pricing

Oracle NetSuite prices its services based on your business’s unique needs. Your annual license consists of its core platform, optional modules, and the number of users.

In addition, there’s a one-time implementation fee for the initial setup. Contact Oracle NetSuite’s sales team today to get a quote for your real estate business and start using its feature-rich services.

3. Zoho Accounting — Property-Specific Accounting Features

Zoho Accounting offers the best rental property accounting software for small-to-midsize businesses dealing with multiple properties. It allows you to create property-specific sub-accounts that let you keep separate financial and tenant records for each property.

That means you’ll have access to property-specific income and expense statements, balance sheets, and other financial reports that give you insights into the financial health of each property.

This approach to real estate accounting ensures transparency toward property owners and investors and is particularly beneficial during tax season. It streamlines calculating property-related taxes, credits, and deductions, making tax filing accurate and efficient.

That is especially valuable as real estate transactions often involve intricate tax implications that require a different approach for each type of property. In addition, Zoho Accounting also lets you access company-wide reports.

With this, you’ll get an automated generation of income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow reports. These reports can aid you in strategic planning and decision-making, which results in growth and stable business health.

Zoho Accounting is also one of the few reputable providers that offer a comprehensive free forever plan. Although unsuitable for growing businesses, it lets you manage clients, create recurring invoices, and import bank statements.

That means you can test most of its features for free, making Zoho Accounting the best property management accounting software for first-time users. Although Zoho integrates with limited third-party software, the provider offers native Zoho integrations too.

Among other solutions, you’ll find that it offers one of the best project management tools, which can help you with budgeting, planning, and risk management.

Features 

• Integrated Business Tools — Zoho offers over fifty business tools to help you manage and run every aspect of your business.
• Customer Portal — This invaluable feature lets your clients update their personal information, sends notifications when they interact with your invoices, and helps them easily make payments.
• Document Scanning — Match your physical documents with online transactions with a single scan. In addition, you can use its auto-scan feature to convert documents into invoices, expenses, bills, sales orders, or purchase orders.

Pricing

Zoho Accounting offers numerous plans that suit anyone, from solopreneurs to SMBs. While it limits the number of users for each plan, it offers some of the cheapest additional user spots at just $2.50/user/month.

In addition, you’ll find some of its best features, such as the customer portal and multi-lingual invoicing, on every plan it offers. You can start using Zoho Accounting free of charge today, thanks to its comprehensive free forever plan.

4. Xero — Numerous Integrations

Xero is an exceptional cloud-based accounting solution that helps real estate professionals track client interactions and stay on top of their finances.

It lets you add, edit, and store contact details, notes, and documents for any of your business contacts, a considerable upgrade from the traditional Excel spreadsheets. One standout benefit of using Xero is its third-party integration capability.

It lets you connect to over 1,000 popular business apps to build flexible workflows and tailor your experience with its platform to your needs. That means you won’t have to manually re-type data into different systems, making the transition to its platform a breeze.

While most of its competition offers dedicated apps for Android and iPhone, few can match Xero’s quality. You’ll find all its advanced features on the smartphone clients, which allows you to run your real estate business on the go.

From invoicing to income and expense tracking, Xero delivers an unmatched service for professionals with busy schedules. Another area Xero excels at is reports and analytics.

Xero provides overall or property-specific reports and allows you to compare different areas of your business to help you make better decisions. In addition, these reports are interactive and enable you to dive into the details and measure specific KPIs.

However, it truly shines with its analytics features, mainly the Xero Analytics Plus that comes with its most expensive plan. This uses machine learning and AI-powered predictions to help you make cash flow decisions and project finances for up to 90 days in the future.

Features

• Business Snapshot — Take a business snapshot at any time to identify and compare trends for different timeframes or track metrics like income and expenses at a glance.
• Customer Reports — Xero will show how long each customer takes to pay, if they have any unpaid and overdue invoices, or if they’re waiting for an invoice.
• File Storage — It provides a cloud document manager that lets you upload bills, receipts, purchase orders, or other documents to attach to invoices or contacts.

Pricing

Xero offers three pricing plans, with the cheapest plan suiting solopreneurs, while its more expensive plans fit agencies and SMBs. You can try Xero risk-free today, thanks to its generous 30-day free trial.

While you won’t find as many advanced features as our top providers, like FreshBooks or Oracle NetSuite, Xero lets you integrate its software with over 1,000 third-party apps to tackle payroll, receipt scanning, and similar tasks.

5. Bonsai — All-in-One Solution for Real Estate Agents

Bonsai helps you in each area of your real estate business, from client and project management to accounting. It offers fantastic templates for invoices, contracts, and estimates, which can help you appear professional and save time on contacting your clients.

You can customize its legally vetted contract or agreement templates to suit your business and sign them using an electronic signature with your clients, speeding up and simplifying the formalities of onboarding a new client.

Beyond this, it allows you to send timely reminder emails and receive notifications when your clients view and sign the documents. Plus, you can sync your calendar, giving your clients a clear view of your free time and allowing them to book you when available.

These features make Bonsai the best accounting software for real estate agents and property managers looking for an all-in-one tool. In fact, you’ll find organizing solutions that easily match some of the best task management tools and help you track every billable hour.

Bonsai also provides versatile real estate bookkeeping features, including tax reminders, income reports, and expense tracking. While its income and expense tracking features are similar to the competition, it stands out with its tax estimates.

Bonsai will continuously deliver tax estimates and due dates, complemented by quarterly and annual tax reminders and reports. It’ll automatically account for your monthly profit, business expenses, and deductions in one place, ensuring your business is healthy and keeping you prepared for tax season.

Features

• Booking Page — Customize and share your booking page with clients, allowing them to book or reschedule with a single click. You can also set up upfront consultation payments, improving your cash flow.
• Form Builder — Build forms from scratch or use pre-made templates and customize fields to start survey or questionnaire campaigns for your clients.
• Automatic Budgeting — Bonsai helps you optimize your income by splitting it into different sub-accounts for taxes, bills, and savings.

Pricing

Bonsai focuses on self-employed professionals and real estate agents, providing a user-friendly platform that helps you manage your clients and workload. Its starting price is $17/month, and the cheapest plan includes most features you need as a solo worker.

However, you’ll need to opt for one of its more expensive plans to remove its branding from the documents you create using the platform. You can start managing your business and finances with Bonsai risk-free today, thanks to its 7-day free trial.

6. Sage — A Secure Solution

Sage offers deep customization and a secure cloud-connected platform that helps you stay on top of your contacts, finances, and assets. While it offers numerous business tools and packages, we’ll review its Sage 100 solution, as it’s best for real estate businesses.

Thanks to its exceptional customization options, Sage lets you transform its platform to suit your needs and preferences. You can add new industry-specific fields, import data from other tools within a day, and start automating processes.

That means you can sort your data by clients, properties, income, or other factors and generate in-depth reports that give you clear insight into your business and enhance your decision-making.

While its interface may feel outdated and have a slight learning curve, Sage’s massive resource hub includes webinars, a guides library, and instructor-led courses.

One immediate benefit of mastering its data-sorting capabilities and managing all your business processes in one place is the prevention of data silos, which plague large businesses with numerous branches or employees.

Sage also stands out as one of the most secure accounting solutions on the market. It provides automatic cloud backups for your business data, continuous updates, and a secure cloud infrastructure that makes it near-impossible for unauthorized parties to breach.

In addition, you’ll have access to user-based permissions, multi-factor authentication, and advanced encryption protocols. As a complete accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Sage 100 can help you deal with more than data.

It provides exceptional fixed assets-tracking tools, accounts payable and receivable reports, bank reconciliation, and more.

Features

• Budgeting and Forecasting — The software offers budgeting tools for creating, tracking, and managing budgets across different departments or projects.
• Modules — Sage operates as a modular solution, meaning you can always add extra business tools to your financial management platform.
• Audit Trails — The provider includes audit trail features that track changes made to financial data, ensuring compliance and accountability.

Pricing

While Sage offers three plans for its Sage 100 ERP solution, Essentials, Advanced, and Complete, it doesn’t disclose its monthly pricing. To start using this advanced data and financial management solution, you can request a quote from Sage’s sales team.

7. QuickBooks — Simplifies Expense Tracking

QuickBooks is the best accounting software for real estate expense tracking, as it allows you to create custom rules to categorize expenses and helps you import and sync its platform to your bank account, credit cards, PayPal, and Square, amongst others.

That allows you to separately review your marketing costs, property-related expenses, and maintenance fees, providing insights into the profitability of each property.

As one of the most popular accounting tools used by professional accountants in the US, opting for QuickBooks means you’re almost guaranteed to find affordable accounting services from well-versed professionals.

That means you can effortlessly share your financial reports with your accountant for a professional evaluation of your financial health. You can share various reports with QuickBooks, including balance sheets, cash flow statements, and income statements.

These reports can aid in decision-making by helping you identify bottlenecks and setting up goals for your business. Unlike most of its competition, QuickBooks also offers a free guided setup for its first-time customers.

With the help of one of its experts, you’ll learn how to connect your bank accounts and credit cards, automate repetitive tasks, and start managing your finances. It also offers some of the best real estate accounting apps that don’t lack advanced features, making it an excellent pick for accounting on the go.

In addition, each plan supports receipt capture, including its cheapest plan. Receipt capture lets you snap photos to add receipts to your QuickBooks account on the go, reducing your admin hours. For more, we recommend reading our full QuickBooks Review.

Features

• Online Payments — Accepts payments instantly online by setting up payment options directly through invoicing.
• Project Profitability — Track labor costs, payroll, and other expenses to predict project profitability using dashboards and reports.
• Workflow Automation — Set reminders for transactions like payments, deposits, or invoices with a due date. Schedule follow-up emails for customers when their payment goes through and route invoices through pre-set approval flows.

Pricing

QuickBooks offers four subscription tiers that suit anyone from solopreneurs to SMBs. Although its cheaper plans can’t match the similarly-priced plans from our top providers, its Plus and Advanced plans provide a feature-rich real estate accounting solution.

You can try QuickBooks risk-free today, thanks to its 30-day free trial.

8. Turbotax — Do Your Taxes or Hire Experts

Turbotax isn’t necessarily the best accounting software for property managers, but it’s by far the best if you’re looking for a tax filing solution, as it excels at filing your taxes on time and navigating the tax complexities of the real estate industry.

Turbotax can guide you through claiming depreciation on your rental property, reporting rental income and expenses, and reporting capital gains or losses from selling properties.

In addition, it’ll identify tax credits and deductions relevant to the real estate business, such as home office costs, mileage deductions, and online marketing expenses.

That ensures you take advantage of the available tax benefits while accurately reporting your business-related expenses, resolving one of the toughest challenges for solopreneurs in this industry.

Turbotax might not fully replace dedicated accounting software, but it offers some of the best tax filing services, including a step-by-step guide on how to file your taxes. Additionally, you can pay for an expert evaluation of your tax filing or a full accounting service, ensuring your compliance.

Features

• Guaranteed Accuracy — Turbotax guarantees 100% tax filing accuracy and offers to pay IRS penalties in case of errors.
• Expert Guidance — Its experts will provide step-by-step guidance to ensure you file in all the correct forms.
• Final Review — You can hire a Turbotax expert to help fix any mistakes and explain your taxes, giving you a final review before you file.

Pricing

Turbotax is primarily an accounting app for personal tax filing, and its basic features are free to use. That means you can start navigating its interface and in-app features without committing to a subscription.

However, you’ll need to invest at least $10.75/month for its cheapest plan to start preparing for the tax season. Try Turbotax free of charge today, and test its interface before committing to a subscription.

9. Melio — Streamline Invoice Payments

Melio lets you set up various payment options for your clients and send them directly via invoices. It then processes payments made via the built-in “Pay Now” button and deposits them directly to your bank account.

Besides making payments easy for your clients, Melio ensures payment protection. You can rest easy knowing you won’t have to deal with bounced checks, chargebacks, forgery, and ACH returns.

In addition, neither you nor your clients pay any fees on ACH transfers, and you get to pick who covers the 2.9% fee on credit card payments.

While helping you get paid securely and quickly is Melio’s standout feature, it also helps you pay your business bills using bank transfers for free or by card, even where credit cards aren’t accepted.

Besides custom invoicing, Melio helps you get paid quicker by simply sending a payment link to your clients. You can attach this link to your emails or other communication platforms you use with your clients, and they can use it to make a one-click payment.

Features

• Approval Workflow — If you’re working with a team or have a dedicated accountant, this lets you set up their roles and review and approve payments before they go through.
• Easy Bill Capture — Melio’s AI-powered bill reader will automatically extract relevant information from a bill you upload to its platform.
• Seamless Integration — Since Melio isn’t a complete accounting tool, it seamlessly integrates with tools like QuickBooks for a two-way sync between your bill pay and accounting.

Pricing

Melio is free to use and has transparent fees based on your transactions. That makes it an exceptional standalone payments solution or a helpful addition to full-featured accounting software.

You can try Melio free today and start providing better ways for your clients to pay for your services.

10. Xendoo — Dedicated Real Estate Bookkeeping Team

Xendoo offers real estate companies a tailored solution for effective financial management and provides expert advice. It’s suitable for businesses across various sectors, including the real estate industry, because it can address industry-specific needs.

That’s because its professionals understand the nuances of property transactions, tax implications, expenses, and rental income, incurring compliant financial management and accurate reports.

Although hiring a team of professionals to do your accounting can be expensive, you’ll receive unparalleled financial statements, including property-specific and business-wide analysis.

That means you’ll make better business decisions and quickly notice any bottlenecks. Xendoo’s bookkeeping experts deliver monthly reports and updates, including profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and revenue trend graphs.

Unlike most of its competition, Xendoo also helps you catch up on your accounting tasks, bringing your financials up to date even if you’re behind a few months or even years.

Features

• Multi-Entity Accounting — Xendoo is perfect for realtors with multiple properties, allowing you to monitor the performance of each asset or the entirety of your business.
• Collaboration Tools — Its platform supports team member collaboration, allowing multiple users to access and work on financial data simultaneously.
• Data Security — Xendoo prioritizes data security, employing encryption and other security measures to protect sensitive financial and company information from third-party actors.

Pricing

Xendoo is the most expensive pick on our list, regardless of the scope of your needs. However, its team of experts will perform all back-office tasks for you, which results in exceptional time savings and justifies its price points.

It’s also worth noting that Xendoo offers no free trial or plan, but it has a 30-day money-back guarantee that allows you to try its services risk-free today.

The Best Property Management Accounting Software Solutions Compared

Here’s a quick head-to-head comparison of the best accounting software for brokerage, rental property management, and real estate agents:

How to Choose the Best Accounting Software for Your Realtor Company

Choosing the best accounting software for real estate investors, brokers, or agents can significantly impact your financial management. However, there are dozens of options to pick from.

Plus, besides the ones on our list, not many of them provide the features needed to take control of your finances. Here are some crucial factors to consider while choosing an accounting tool for your business:

Integrations

The best accounting software for property management should offer numerous integrations to other business tools, including linking with the best cloud HR software, payroll, CRM, and payment gateways.

Integrating your other tools with your accounting software reduces manual data entry, minimizes errors, and provides a more holistic view of your business processes.

Compatibility

That makes bookkeeping for real estate agents more accessible and enhances team collaboration, reducing duplicate data entries and promoting remote work.

Support for Multiple Entities

If you’re looking for the best landlord accounting software, ensure it supports complex accounting scenarios and provides individual and consolidated financial reporting.

That makes it easier for landlords and rental agencies to monitor the performance of each asset, allowing you to make better business decisions.

Customer Support

Also, ensure your future accounting software has a responsive customer support team that provides knowledgeable answers. Look for providers with multiple customer support channels, including phone, email, live chat, or an online knowledge base.

FreshBooks | The Best Real Estate Accounting Software Solution in 2023

After an extensive evaluation and comparison of the leading real estate accounting services, we’re confident that FreshBooks offers the best tools for real estate professionals. It offers four versatile pricing plans that suit anyone, from solopreneurs to SMBs.

In addition, it provides an intuitive platform that integrates with other popular business solutions and goes beyond traditional accounting with features like time-tracking, collaboration tools, and project management.

Thanks to its lengthy 30-day free trial, first-time customers like you can try its services risk-free today to start improving the way you manage your financials.

Property Accounting Software FAQs