Rental Books is bookkeeping software built from the ground up for the rental business. Buy it once and it’s yours. No monthly fee. No SaaS subscription. No per-unit charges. And if your portfolio includes active rehabs or flips, it handles your job costing and cost-basis tracking in the exact same set of books.
Here's what a typical operator with about 100 units pays today for the separate tools it takes just to keep books and run rentals — every month, forever, with prices that go up every year.
| What you're renting now | Per month |
|---|---|
| Property management software (Buildium Growth) | $192 |
| Accounting (QuickBooks Online Plus) | $140 |
| Contact / follow-up software (Act!) | $78 |
| Maintenance coordination (Property Meld) | $160 |
| Self-showing service (ShowMojo) | $143 |
| E-signature (DocuSign) | $60 |
| Work orders, loan calculators, extras | $45 |
| Total | $818/mo — $49,080 over 5 years |
Rental Books replaces the bookkeeping heart of that stack for one payment of $595 — founding owners pay $395. That's less than one month of the old stack.
The bookkeeping choices landlords actually weigh — compared on the things that decide what your books cost you over the years, not on feature checklists.
| Rental Books | QuickBooks Online | Stessa | REI Hub | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Pay once — $395 founding / $595. Own it forever. | Monthly subscription, per company | Free core plan; Manage & Pro are monthly subscriptions | Monthly subscription, priced by how many units you have |
| Built for | The rental business — houses to farmland, plus rehabs & flips, in one set of books | Every kind of business | Rentals & investors | Rentals & investors |
| Where your books live | On your computer | Their cloud | Their cloud | Their cloud |
| What growth costs | Nothing extra — unlimited entities, properties & units included | Each company needs its own subscription | Advanced reporting & tools sit in the paid tiers | Your price steps up as your unit count grows |
| If you stop paying | There is nothing to stop paying. Your software works forever. | Read-only for 1 year — then your books are gone unless you resubscribe | Your data stays, but the paid features switch off | Your paid plan's features & bank-feed automation switch off |
Competitor details checked October 2026 against each company's own published pricing and help pages, and they change over time. QuickBooks, Stessa, and REI Hub are trademarks of their owners; Rental Books is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
QuickBooks was built for every kind of business, so it was never built for yours. Two highlights operators feel on day one:
Money moves between your own entities all the time — loans, transfers, shared expenses. Rental Books handles them as real intercompany transactions that land in both sets of books. In QuickBooks, every company is its own silo with its own subscription, and you end up mirroring entries by hand and hoping they match.
Open as many separate books as you want at the same time — one entity here, another beside it — and work across all of them in a single sitting. No closing one company to open the next, and no extra subscription for each set of books.
Watch a real operator's books — a real rent roll, real owner statement, real year-end — running in Rental Books. No actors, no accounting degree required to follow along.
QuickBooks doesn't know what a security deposit is. It has never heard of an owner statement. Rental Books was built from the ground up around how rental money actually moves.
Every unit, every tenant: paid, late, partial, balance due. Open the program and you know exactly where the month stands.
Every charge, payment, late fee, and credit on one clean ledger per tenant — the answer to every "I already paid that" conversation.
Your deposits, your method. Track them as a liability — held separate and provable — or record them as income when you receive them. Set it up the way you and your CPA run it.
Each property's true numbers on their own — no hacking generic accounting "classes" together and hoping it's right.
Rent in, expenses out, mortgage and management accounted for, net to owner. The statement your owners actually want to read.
Schedule E by property, 1099 totals for owners and vendors — hand your accountant a pack they'll thank you for.
Import statements (CSV / OFX / QFX) from your bank and reconcile in minutes. Bring your history over from QuickBooks, too.
A real double-entry general ledger your CPA will respect — with bills, invoices, and accounts payable and receivable included — delivered through a landlord interface that never asks you to think in debits and credits. A complete set of books, not a rent tracker.
Scheduled encrypted backup built in, and you can export everything, any time, in standard formats. No hostage situations, ever.
Most rental software only understands houses and apartments. Rental Books was built by an operator who has run all of it:
Rental Books speaks rental, not accounting. The rental chart of accounts is already built in — you never design one, and you never translate your business into debit-and-credit riddles.
Rent in. Bills out. What's left. Screens are labeled the way you already talk about your properties — because an operator wrote them, not an accounting department.
Properties, units, tenants, deposits, and owner accounts exist the moment you start. In generic software, you spend your first weekend building all of that yourself.
Underneath the plain language sits a real general ledger and reports your accountant will respect. Easy for you day-to-day, correct at tax time.
Software used to be something you bought. Rental Books works the way it should — here's the whole deal, in plain terms: you pay once, and it's yours.
One payment for one license — unlimited entities, properties, and units, with 5 seats included. Need more computers? Add seats anytime, one-time. No per-unit fees, ever. The software is yours, permanently.
Every update and improvement for a full year comes with your purchase. After that, your software keeps working — nothing shuts off, nothing is held back.
New major versions and year-end forms packs are offered down the road. Buy them if you want them. Skip them if you don't. Renting never comes back.
Fair question — and the honest answer teaches you something every software company knows, but almost none will explain: an online version can never be a one-time purchase, because it never stops costing the company money.
When software is online, your books don't live on your computer. They live on the company's servers — and every single month, for as long as your account exists, the company pays real bills to keep them there:
Servers and electricity, around the clock · Storage for your data and its backups · Security, monitoring, and constant patching · The database and systems your account runs on · The staff who keep all of it alive
Those bills arrive every month whether you log in or not — and they never end. Your account costs them money forever.
Do the math the way the company has to: if keeping your account online costs even $5 a month, and you paid $395 once, then partway through year seven the company has spent everything you ever paid them — and starts losing money on you every month after that, for as long as you keep using it.
No company can run that way. So every online product ends up at the same place: a monthly fee, forever, or the servers eventually get shut off — and when they do, your books go with them. That's not a threat in the fine print. It's just how the bills work.
Rental Books runs on your computer. Your electricity, your hard drive, your backups — which means it costs us nothing per month to keep your copy alive. That's the only reason an honest one-time price is even possible. We sell it, you own it, and neither of us is on a meter.
We will offer an online version eventually — some operators genuinely want their books on every device. When it comes, it will have a monthly subscription, and we'll tell you that plainly, because now you know why it has to. Two things will never change: the owned version stays yours either way, and going online will always be a choice — never a forced move, never a hostage situation.
"I got into this business to rent real estate to others. I despise renting my bookkeeping software from anyone."
— Founder of Rental Books
The founder of Rental Books has spent 30+ years buying, building, and managing nearly every kind of rental there is — houses, apartment complexes, storage units, mobile home parks, industrial, office, commercial, farmland, rent-to-own, and owner-financed properties — plus fix and flips, land development, and commercial and residential construction, and he has bought & sold notes & mortgages. He learned everything from the ground up — building, buying, selling, and managing every aspect of the real estate investment world.
Rental Books is the software he built to run that operation — the books he wished he could buy, after decades of renting bookkeeping software that was never designed for rentals in the first place. It isn't a startup's guess about your business. It's a real estate investor's tool, offered to other real estate investors.
No tiers to decode, no per-unit or per-entity math, no renewal invoice next year. The first 25 owners get the founding price.
Running a bigger operation or want your data moved for you? Ask about white-glove setup and migration — one-time services, quoted up front.
Rental Books starts with the books, done right. These are in the works — they're not for sale yet. Each module is being built to replace a tool operators currently rent by the month.
The follow-up system — renewals, expiries, and nothing falling through the cracks — for tenants, owners, and vendors. Built to replace Act! by Sage — the $78-a-month line in the stack above.
Detailed note tracking and amortization schedules for owner-financed sales and contract-for-deed deals — balances, payments, interest, and payoffs, kept right alongside the books. Built to replace TValue by TimeValue Software — which starts at $60 per user, per year, forever.
Work orders, estimates, owner approvals, time & materials billing — the maintenance side of the business, billed properly. Built to replace Property Meld — the $160-a-month line in the stack above.
Let prospects show themselves your vacant units — safely, with codes and cameras — and get your evenings back. Built to replace ShowMojo — the $143-a-month line in the stack above.
An entire rent-management lease signing system — leases and documents prepared, signed, and stored right in the system, with a built-in PDF studio for signing leases. Built to replace DocuSign — the $60-a-month line in the stack above.
Tenants pay rent online, and the payment lands in the books automatically — no retyping, no separate ledger. Built to replace renting a property-management platform like Buildium — the $192-a-month line in the stack above — just to let tenants pay.
Future offerings will also be offered in online versions, for operators who want their tools on every device. Going online will always be a choice, never a forced move — and the owned versions stay owned.
Books for syndicated deals — track investor money coming in, the properties the group owns together, and distributions going back out, all in the same owned set of books.
Inspections, move-ins, and move-outs — condition reports and checklists tied to each unit, from the day a tenant gets the keys to the day they hand them back.
Track what you own beyond the buildings — appliances, vehicles, and equipment — with photos of your units, appliances, and vehicles that you can add and update any time.
Act!, TValue, Property Meld, ShowMojo, DocuSign, and Buildium are products and trademarks of their respective owners; Rental Books is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. Competitor prices checked October 2026 and change over time.
Want first word when each module opens?
The questions every operator asks before switching.
Really. You pay once and own the software. There is no subscription and no per-entity, per-property, or per-unit fee. Your license includes 5 seats. The only things that ever cost extra are additional seats and upgrades you choose to buy later — both one-time, never a subscription — and skipping them changes nothing about the software you already own.
Nothing dramatic — that's the point. Your software keeps working exactly as it does today. Later, new major versions or year-end forms packs may be offered. Buy them if they're worth it to you; don't, if they're not.
Yes — it was designed for operators, not accountants. The rental chart of accounts is built in, screens use rental words, and the flow follows the rent cycle you already know. Your CPA gets proper reports at year-end; you get software you can run on a Tuesday.
As many as you have — across as many entities as you have. One license covers unlimited entities, properties, and units. A duplex under one LLC, or three hundred doors spread across ten LLCs — same price.
No — Rental Books doesn't force one method on you. If you hold deposits the traditional way, they're tracked as a liability: separate, refundable, and provable, and an amount only becomes income when you keep and apply it. If you and your CPA record deposits as income when you receive them, set it up that way instead — refunds reverse back out, and amounts you later apply aren't counted as income a second time. Trust-account rules vary by state, so the method is your call (with your CPA's); the software supports the way you actually operate.
Your license includes 5 seats — you can install and activate Rental Books on up to 5 computers. Replacing a computer? Deactivate the old one yourself and move the seat over. Need a sixth? Additional seats are available for a one-time purchase — not a subscription — and they're yours permanently, just like the software.
Each separate set of books you keep — an LLC, a partnership, a sole proprietorship, a trust, or you personally. If you run three LLCs and hold a few properties in your own name, that's four entities, and one license covers all of them, with no per-entity fee.
Yes. Import tools bring your QuickBooks data in by CSV, so you're not retyping years of history. If you'd rather it be done for you, white-glove migration is available as a one-time service.
Houses, apartments, storage units, mobile home parks, office and commercial, industrial, farmland, rent-to-own, and owner-financed properties. It was built by an operator who has run all of them, and the books handle mixed portfolios in one place.
Because an online version lives on our servers, and servers bill us every month for as long as your account exists — a one-time price for that would eventually bankrupt the product and take your books down with it. The full, plain-English explanation is in "Why isn't there an online version?" above. Short version: online will come eventually, it will carry a monthly subscription (honestly, because it has to), and the owned version you buy today stays yours regardless.
No — this is the deepest reason to own software. Rental Books is yours, it doesn't check in with a server to keep working, and you can export all of your data at any time in standard formats. Your books outlive any company, including ours.
Rental Books runs on your own computer, where your data stays under your control. Setup is a normal install — and founding owners can book a setup session if they'd like a hand.
Join the first 25 founding owners at $395 — before the price goes to $595 for good.
Get Rental Books — $395 one-time90-day guarantee · 12 months of updates included · No subscription, ever