Stessa for Managing Real Estate Data?
Rental Property Investor · Algona, IA · Member since 2015 · 43 posts · 33 votes
Has anyone tried using Stessa? It seems like they offer quite a bit for free but since they were just acquired I'm wondering if costs will increase. I plugged in my basic info and it generated a nice dashboard. I would love to hear feedback/thoughts from others. Thanks!
Regarding linking your bank account.
This is an optional step. You can read about their security from their website, but I can understand if you don't want to do this. It really only makes sense if you have a huge portfolio.
If your getting started, I recommend using the import feature.
Go to Transactions then click the Import link. This will open up an import box. Make sure you read the help link that explains how to import. https://support.stessa.com/articles/2671184-split-categorize-mortgage-payments
You can build an import file for each of your properties. Go to your banks website and download the transactions as a table that you open up into Excel. Clean up the data as below:
Then, re-save as a .csv format.
Do the same from your property managers website for your Rents and Expenses.
If you manage your propeties in Excel, your already a step ahead. Just reformat the data and save.
Once the import is complete, you will need to go through each transaction and verify that it is catagoried correctly.
I am still tweeking and playing around with Stessa, but more than likely I'm going to switch over from propertytracker.com.
The next item I'm going to be working on is recording my mortgage payments correctly. When they import from the bank, they come in as the full payment. Which is principle, interest and escrow. The proper way to record this is to then split that amount, using their split tool, into those respective categories. Otherwise the escrow amount is counted as an expense and then the bank pays Tax or Insurance out of escrow, that is an expense too. So it double dips. Splitting the transaction into categories solves this problem. https://support.stessa.com/articles/2671184-split-categorize-mortgage-payments
Also, make sure you get the ProForma right for each property. The actuals (left column) come in from your transactions, but the right column is manually inputed by you. (Proforma)
Hope this helps.
Anyone here using tenantcloud?
I find them very good and free for mid to small landlords, just enough features to keep you organized during the year and reports for taxes are on point.
@laudy
@Laudy Florentino Steesa and Cozy are two different products.
Cozy is a rent collection product enabling you to accept rent from tenants electronically.
Stessa is more of a tracking software so you can see how your portfolio is performing
I think the combination of Stessa & Tenant Could will work for me. Together they offer all of what is needed and can be achieved for free or very little cost.
I have two Duplexes that I use Cozy and Stessa to manage.
Cozy is great for collecting rent, running background checks, and handling maintenance requests.
Stessa is very similar to Mint.com, but geared towards Buy and Hold RE. Before Stessa I was using XLS, and this worked well, but for the level of detail I want, took a decent amount of time to manage each month.
Stessa helps automate all this. I linked it up to my Landlord Credit Card and Checking Account, and for the most part it works great. I see the charges come through, and categorize them as I do. Then at the end of the month, I do a "status" check self review to make sure everything is in order. Then, for Tax Season, it has a good export feature to export your Income Statement, Cashflow Report, Transactions, and receipts. (I really like the feature of adding receipts to transactions.
Overall, it's a great tool. However, it does have some issues. For example, I linked it to my Capital One account. I need to re-link my Capital One account each time for the transactions to download, which is a pain. I asked Stessa Support what bank they recommend (one that works well with Stessa), and they literally could not recommend one... so I'm not sure what to make of that.
I'm speculating, but I don't think I'd use it for more than say 7 properties. My goals is to continue to acquire properties (40 doors in the next 4 years), and I expect I'll ultimately need to upgrade to Quickbooks.
I started using Stessa a week ago and it spoiled me with automatic data entry during setup. I started experimenting with others for the last few days but none were as easy to use.
I tried buildium, setup was clunky and "dumb" compared to the stessa set up I experienced. I was excited to pay somebody for a better product. it doesn't seem to sync with credit cards accounts only a bank account. I gave up and canceled the $160 middle plan I chose.
I tried rentec, I could never get it to sync with my bank account and it didn't look like there are options for syncing credit cards. I saw work arounds posted instead of software solutions.
It's property entry was "dumb" like buildium so although I haven't barely tried rentec I don't have high hopes.
So far I like stessa. It's not a complete solution, it's only the accounting, income, and expense financing. But it syncs with all of my credit cards and all of my bank accounts and Auto categorizes my expense and income items.
It pulled my property tax information automatically along with all my property characteristics, square feet the number of bd/ba all automatically. I was impressed.
I also like the extra column (prorata) for expected expenses. Tessa tries to populate this column automatically where it can but doesn't fight you with manual changes.
Without a better solution I will need to pare stessa with other great services for the things it doesn't do.
I guess I've been spoiled with mint.com and personal capital finance. They are so smart and allow you to view your finance data in so many ways. and like Stessa, those programs do all the heavy lifting with categorizing expenses. Stessa feels smart like personal capital finance but a limited version on viewing your data but far advanced for keeping income and expenses allocated to properties and tax preparation. You're limited on how to view the data and your dashboard. They don't want anything to do with personal finances, so it can't be a complete replacement for my mint and personal capital finance.
Stessa looks like it will natively do all the heavy lifting for my taxes, it creates 1099s and allows you to make very types of reports.
It is the best solution for accounting, income, and expense management I've seen.
It's not perfect, the dashboard is boring after you've seen it the first 20 times. It's all the numbers that don't change very often.
The dashboard is missing the things I care most about.
Watching the rent recieved number rise is the funnest part of being a landlord.
A rent delinquency is high priority. I should be able see it and also drill down to see which unit from the dashboard.
I'd like to see my current monthly expenses as compared to last month at the same time and the total expected end of month expenses.
II really liked that stessa property setup automatically pulled data to populate the characteristics of the property. I liked how I could sync all of my expenses and income from all my accounts.
Please let me know if there's something I should try or try again.
Cozy is the other half of my rental management but it is transitioning to apartments so if there's a better or complete solution I'm still interested in changing.