Built a bookkeeper that does Schedule E by property — looking for landlords to break
Founder post, disclosure up front: I'm one of the people building this. Mods, if it's the wrong spot, point me to the right one.
I'm an accountant — I've spent years on the receiving end of STR books every February, turning clients' Airbnb payouts, cleaning fees, and Home Depot runs into something filable. Usually that's QuickBooks bent into shape with property classes, since it was never built for per-property real estate. Once a client's past 2–3 doors, the bank feed is just one undifferentiated blob. Or sometimes it is an unwieldy spreadsheet.
So we built Perch to simplify that part of the job — for the operators and the people who do the books for them:
- Connects bank feeds + booking data (Airbnb/VRBO via your PMS, Stessa CSVs) in one place
- Categorizes transactions and learns your portfolio as it goes
- Per-property P&L and trial balance — see which door actually makes money
- Generates Schedule E and Form 8825, mapped correctly per property
- Pushes the tax data straight to your accountant, so tax season is a handoff, not a fire drill
Bank connections run through Plaid (read-only, same as Stessa) — it reads transactions but can't move money, and your login goes to Plaid, never us.
It's early and rough in places, which is exactly why I'm here. If you have 2+ properties and messy books? Go to getperch.ai and start — connect a real or sanitized set of books and tell me where it can improve. I want the unfiltered opinions : what's broken, what's confusing, whether it saves you time, what would be useful to you.
And if you're an accountant or bookkeeper handling STR clients — I especially want to hear from you. Give it a try too.