Taxes & insurance escrow accounting ... and Stessa

[Kent F.]

I'd love to hear others' approach to accounting for property taxes and insurance. I have about two years experience managing my two triplexes with separate loans for each property. Currently my T&I are escrowed with the lenders and the lenders pay those bills directly on my behalf. I use Stessa for accounting and analytics. The process Stessa recommends for separating out T&I from the monthly mortgage payment is cumbersome. I'm thinking about contacting the lenders to close the escrow accounts and pay the bills myself. I like Stessa's analytics tools but the monthly numbers are a bit useless when it doesn't account for property taxes every month, and then the giant property tax bills get paid in December and the performance numbers for the past year are drastically shifted. Same issue but to a lesser degree with my annual insurance payments that happen other times of the year. 

How do you all handle your taxes and insurance?

If you're a person who doesn't use lender escrow for T&I, do you open your own separate account to put money into each month or do you just let that money accumulate in your main rental business account and pay from there?