Should You Use FreeAgent for Rental Property Accounting?

Property Management Accounting

Having an effective and efficient tool for your property management accounting is essential if you’re going to run a profitable buy to let business. Not only will a good income and expense tracking tool save you a huge amount of time, but it will allow you to gain nuanced insights into your portfolio’s performance.

When choosing a property management accounting solution for your residential lets you want to make sure that the tool has everything that you need and that they’re support team are ready and willing to help you grow and achieve your financial goals. For example, a solution like Landlord Studio offers a practical and easy way to track income and expenses on the go or via your desktop computer. There are also property management specific features like rental listings, automated reminders, and the ability to send receipts and invoices.

In this article, we take a look at the pros and cons of using FreeAgent for rental property accounting as well as explore potential alternatives.

About FreeAgent For Rentals

FreeAgent is an accounting software for small businesses. It allows you to set up clients and projects, track income and expenses, and automate invoicing.

The system itself has a nice UI and is pretty straightforward to use. When it comes to managing your rental properties, you will want to set up each of your properties as a project which will allow you to track your income and expenses for each property separately.

Freeagent features

Whilst FreeAgent doesn’t have many of the property management software features that you might be looking for, it does have the essential accounting features that you’ll need to do basic income and expense tracking and accounting for your properties. A few of the features include:

• Bank feed integration

Bank feed integration allows you to link your bank account and import your transactions so that you can view and reconcile from inside the software.

• Expense tracker and app

Expense tracker with an app so that you can input expenses on the go and digitize receipts.

• Invoicing

Invoicing allows us to set up and send invoices from the software as well as create recurring invoices.

Pros and Cons of using FreeAgent for Properties

Pros

It’s easy to use.

FreeAgent is a popular accounting software for small businesses and as such offers all the essential features you will need to manage your accounts.

Automation

As with industry-specific software like Landlord Studio, there is a focus on using automation to minimise the time requirements for landlords. For example, set up recurring invoices, and automatically pull transactions into the software via their bank feed integration.

Cons

You can’t easily manage and track your tenants and occupancies

There is more to managing properties than just counting pennies. You’ll need to track leases, find new tenants, set up regular property inspections, manage tenant communications, and more.

Help documents aimed at small businesses

As the software is designed for small businesses most of their help documents are aimed at this segment of their users. This means if you’ve got a specific question about how to use FreeAgent for your buy to lets you’ll have to dig deeper or work it out for yourself.

Alternatives To Using FreeAgent For Your Rental Accounting

Before deciding on whether FreeAgent is the right solution for your needs it’s well worth exploring other options.

As we’ve already mentioned the software does not incorporate property management features. It is solely an accounting platform. It may be valuable to test out industry-specific software that offers time-saving property management features alongside essential accounting features. The right software should help you scale your business and achieve your financial goals faster.

Essential features that any solution you look at should have include:

• income and expense tracking,
• bank feed integration,
• invoicing,
• receipts,
• smart scan receipts,
• and an app for on-the-go property management.

Additional property management features to look out for include:

• the ability to manage tenants’ communications,
• create rental listings,
• set important reminders,
• track your leases,
• rental listings,
• document storage.

Landlord Studio is a solution designed for landlords by landlords and is used by thousands of landlords to manage over 30,000 buy-to-let properties.

All of Landlord Studio’s features are designed based on user feedback to help landlords improve the efficiency and workflow of their property management.

Landlord Studio provides you with regulated account information services as an agent of Plaid Financial Ltd., an authorised payment institution regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (Firm Registration Number: 804718) for the provision of payment services, including account information services.