If you own rental property, your bookkeeping problem isn't really bookkeeping - it's allocation. Every roof repair, every property-tax bill, every mortgage interest payment has to land against a specific building, not get dumped into a generic 'Repairs' bucket. At tax time your CPA wants a clean Schedule E per property, with depreciation schedules that tie back to original basis, in-service date, and the correct MACRS recovery period. Most subscription accounting tools either ignore depreciation entirely or hand you a single lump number. FreshLedger Pro is built around a real double-entry general ledger with per-property classes, full MACRS depreciation (including 27.5-year residential and 39-year nonresidential real property), and a free Accountant Edition you hand to your CPA in January. You buy it once for $799 and run it on your own Windows machine - no per-property fees, no per-user fees, no annual subscription that creeps up every renewal.
Four capabilities matter most for landlords and small real estate investors, and FreshLedger Pro maps to each one directly. First, property-level P&L through classes. Every rental address gets its own class code. When you enter a $4,200 HVAC replacement, you tag it to '212 Maple St' and it flows into that property's income statement only. Run a P&L by class at year-end and you have the per-property numbers your CPA needs to fill out one Schedule E column per property. No spreadsheet reconciliation. Second, real MACRS depreciation. The fixed-asset module supports 5-year (appliances, carpet), 7-year (office furniture), 15-year (land improvements like fencing and parking lots), 27.5-year residential rental, and 39-year nonresidential real property. It applies the correct convention - half-year, mid-quarter, or mid-month for real property - based on in-service date. Section 179 elections and bonus depreciation are supported on qualifying assets. Third, expense categorization that mirrors Schedule E. Default chart-of-accounts templates include the categories the IRS actually asks for: advertising, auto and travel, cleaning and maintenance, commissions, insurance, legal and professional fees, management fees, mortgage interest paid to banks, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities, depreciation. You can post directly into accounts that line up with the form. Fourth, the free Accountant Edition. In January you export a portable company file and your CPA opens it in their own free copy of FreshLedger. They post adjusting journal entries - reclassify a capital improvement you mistakenly expensed, true up depreciation, book a 1031-exchange basis adjustment - and send the file back. No screen-share sessions, no read-only PDF exports, no paying for an extra seat. Fifth, 1099-NEC tracking for contractors. Tag your plumber, your property manager, your handyman as 1099 vendors and the year-end report tells you exactly who crossed the $600 threshold.
Workflow one: bringing a new rental into service. You close on a duplex for $310,000 on June 15. In FreshLedger you create the property as a class, then add two fixed assets: land at $62,000 (non-depreciable) and building at $248,000 on a 27.5-year residential schedule, in-service date 6/15, mid-month convention. The system calculates first-year depreciation automatically - for residential property placed in service in June, that's roughly 6.5 months of the first year's allowance. You also add the new $1,800 refrigerator and stove as a 5-year asset class and elect Section 179 if you want to expense it immediately, or take 60% bonus depreciation under current rules, or straight-line MACRS - your call. Workflow two: monthly close for a four-property portfolio. You download an OFX file from your bank, import it into FreshLedger, and code each transaction to a property class and a Schedule E expense category. Mortgage payments get split between interest (deductible) and principal (balance-sheet reduction) using a memorized split transaction. You reconcile the bank account against the statement. Then you run a P&L by class to see which properties are cash-flowing and which are bleeding. Workflow three: year-end handoff. In early January you run the depreciation report (shows current-year depreciation, accumulated depreciation, and remaining basis per asset), the P&L by class, the balance sheet, and a 1099-NEC vendor summary. You export the company file and email it to your CPA along with their free Accountant Edition download link. They post adjusting entries - maybe they reclassify that $8,000 'repair' you booked as a capital improvement requiring its own 27.5-year schedule - and return the file. You import their entries and your books match the return that gets filed.
Real estate has accounting rules that don't apply to other small businesses, and getting them wrong is expensive. Depreciation conventions: Residential rental real property uses straight-line over 27.5 years with the mid-month convention (IRS Pub 946, Table A-6). Nonresidential real property - your commercial strip center or office condo - uses 39 years, also mid-month. Personal property inside the rental (appliances, carpet) typically uses 5-year MACRS with half-year convention, unless more than 40% of personal property was placed in service in Q4, which triggers mid-quarter convention across the whole year's additions. Repair vs. capitalization: The IRS tangible property regulations (often called the 'repair regs') under §1.263(a)-3 distinguish deductible repairs from capitalized improvements (betterments, restorations, adaptations). A new roof is capitalized. Patching a roof is expensed. The de minimis safe harbor lets you expense items up to $2,500 per invoice with an accounting policy in place. Passive activity loss rules: Rental losses are generally passive under §469 and limited to $25,000 phased out between $100k-$150k AGI, unless you qualify as a real estate professional (750 hours, more than half your personal services). Schedule E vs. Schedule C: Long-term rentals go on Schedule E (no self-employment tax). Short-term rentals with substantial services can land on Schedule C with SE tax. FreshLedger doesn't file your return, but it produces the underlying numbers in a structure that maps cleanly to these forms and rules.
Run the math against a typical small-landlord subscription stack. The leading cloud accounting tool runs roughly $35-$100/month depending on tier, plus add-ons for fixed-asset depreciation that subscription tools often don't include natively. Call it $700-$1,200 per year, every year, indefinitely. Over five years that's $3,500 to $6,000. FreshLedger Pro is $799 one-time. If you run payroll - some investors put themselves on payroll through an S-corp holding the property-management LLC - the optional $99/year keeps the federal and state withholding tables current. Skip the payroll update in any year you don't run payroll. For an investor with three or four rentals who plans to keep them long-term, the break-even against a $50/month subscription is about 16 months. Everything after that is money you don't send to a software vendor.
FreshLedger Pro is not the right tool for everyone. It's Windows-only desktop software; Mac users run it in Parallels or a VM, and there's no native mobile app, so you can't photograph a receipt at Home Depot and have it auto-categorize. There are no automatic bank feeds - you download an OFX, QFX, QBO, or CSV file from your bank and import it, which takes two minutes per account per month but is not zero. The company file is single-user at a time, so if you and a property manager both need to be in the books simultaneously from different locations, this isn't it. And because it's a real double-entry general ledger, the first week has a learning curve compared to invoice-only apps. If those constraints are dealbreakers, buy something else.
One-time-purchase accounting software with built-in payroll, full depreciation handling, and a free Accountant Edition for your CPA.
Buy FreshLedger Pro — $799One-time purchase. No subscription. Free Accountant Edition included.