Property accounting software claims to do something general accounting does not, and three tests establish whether a particular product actually does. All three can be run in a trial in under an hour and all three are things a general ledger will fail. This page is the three, for somebody deciding whether to move off general accounting software.
Test one: held money
Record a tenant deposit and see where it lands. It should be a liability, visibly separate from income and ideally tied to a separate bank account, and it should be releasable against a tenancy at the end. If the product books it as income or as an undifferentiated balance, it is a general ledger with property labels.
Test two: the property dimension
Enter an expense and ask for the profit and loss of one property. Every transaction should carry a property, and the report should be one click rather than a filtered export. This is the test general accounting most often fails in a way that looks like a success: it can produce the report if somebody set up the chart of accounts perfectly, and nobody ever does.
Test three: the owner statement
Produce a statement for an owner showing rent collected, itemised deductions with descriptions, the management fee and the net payment with its date. This is the output a managing operation is judged on, and a product that cannot generate it directly means someone assembles it monthly in a spreadsheet, which is where the time goes.
When general accounting is honestly enough
A landlord with a few properties, no owners to report to, and separate bank accounts for deposits can run perfectly well on general accounting with a disciplined chart of accounts. The discipline is the cost, and it is a real one. The moment somebody else relies on your statements, the third test becomes the deciding one.
Questions people ask about property accounting software
Can I run both?
Many operations do: a property system for the record and accounting software for the books, with a clean export between them. The export is the thing to test before committing.
What is the most common mistake?
Booking gross rent collected for an owner as your own income. It inflates both sides of your accounts and misstates what the business actually earned.
Does Lettza do accounting?
No. It keeps the record of the let that the accounting is done from: what was charged, what arrived, what is outstanding, per property and per tenancy.