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.
Rental Books is bookkeeping software, so compare it honestly against the bookkeeping it replaces: QuickBooks Online Plus, the tier growing landlords land on. No bundles, no padding — just the books.
| QuickBooks Online Plus | Rental Books | |
|---|---|---|
| The price | $140 a month — per company, so every separate entity needs its own subscription | $395 once — founding price (regular $595). Unlimited entities included. |
| After 1 year | $1,680 paid — and the meter is still running | $395 paid — done |
| After 5 years | $8,400 paid — and the meter is still running | $395 paid — done |
| 3 entities, 5 years | $25,200 — three subscriptions, one per set of books | $395 — every entity, property, and unit under one license |
| Price increases | Plus rose from $115 to $140 a month in August 2026 — your rent went up, again | Your copy never reprices. You already own it. |
Rental Books pays for itself in under three months of QuickBooks Online Plus. After that, your bookkeeping costs $0 a month — for as long as you run rentals.
Don't take our word for the $140 — see it on Intuit's own pricing page. One heads-up: that page usually leads with a 50%-off introductory price for the first 3 months. $140 a month is the standard Plus rate you pay after the intro ends. Prices checked October 2026. QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online, and Intuit are trademarks of Intuit Inc.; Rental Books is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit.
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 for $595, own your books 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 mobile home parks to storage units, 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 | Your copy is yours, on your computer — nobody can switch it off. | 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 — and late fees are calculated automatically when rent is late, so there is no side spreadsheet or math by hand. 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. Managing your own, managing for others, or both — every property gets a statement an owner actually wants to read, even when that owner is you.
Profit and loss, balance sheet, general ledger — the reports your CPA needs for your taxes, all in one year-end pack. Hand your accountant a pack they'll thank you for. Your CPA gets a free copy, too, so they can open your books and work in them — no seat taken, no charge.
Import statements 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 just a rent tracker.
Scheduled 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 a real estate investor 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. And you don't have to figure it out alone — Rental Books walks you through setting up every part of it, step by step.
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 — $49 each, 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. Updates and new year-end forms packs are then available for $99 per year if you want them.
New major versions and year-end forms packs come through the optional $99-per-year update plan — new features and improvements as we add them, the current year's tax forms, and fixes when your computer operating system changes something. Buy in 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. (A server is just a computer sitting in a warehouse somewhere, switched on day and night and connected to the internet.) 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 the rental business to make money, not to rent my bookkeeping software for the rest of my life. I despise having my books held hostage. With the other companies, even after you retire, you have to keep paying just to look at books you already built."
— Founder of Rental Books
The founder of Rental Books has spent 30+ years buying, building, and managing nearly every kind of real estate there is — houses, apartment complexes, storage units, mobile home parks, industrial, office, commercial, farmland, rent-to-own, and owner-financed properties — plus fixes and flips, land development, commercial and residential construction, and buying and selling notes and 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.
After the first year: updates and new year-end forms packs are available for $99 per year if you want them. The software you already own continues to work either way — nothing is held back and nothing shuts off.
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 — $78 a month.
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.
Work orders, estimates, owner approvals, time & materials billing — the maintenance side of the business, billed properly. Built to replace Property Meld — $160 a month.
Also on the roadmap, further out:
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.
Rental Books is built by a real estate investor, not a committee — but no one thinks of everything. If there's a feature or a whole module you wish it had, tell us. If enough owners ask for the same thing, it goes on the roadmap. And if we build your idea, we'll tell you first.
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 — $49 each, one-time — and, after your first year, the optional update plan at $99 per year if you want it. Neither is required, and skipping them changes nothing about the software you already own.
Nothing — that's the point. Your software keeps working exactly as it does today. Later, updates and new year-end forms packs are available for $99 per year if you want them. 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. Working in one office? Put the books on your local network and your team can be in them at the same time. Replacing a computer? Deactivate the old one yourself and move the seat over. Need a sixth? Additional seats are $49 each, one-time — not a subscription — and they're yours permanently, just like the software.
Each separate set of books you keep — an LLC, a corporation, 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, 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 Windows computer right now, where your data stays under your control — and a Mac version is coming soon. 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