Three units, two mortgages, seven traps . Meet the landlord whose books we are about to hand to four apps.

The lab has a second client. Until now it has had one, a landscaping company whose messy quarter went through whatever tool was on the bench. That worked because the tools were all trying to do the same job. Landlord software is trying to do a different one. A rental’s books have a mortgage payment that is three things in one line, a tax bill paid by someone else, and money that comes in without being income. The landscaper’s quarter would test the wrong things, so we built a landlord’s.

• 80

  Transactions per trial

• 7

  Planted traps

• 3

  Units across two properties

• 0

  Bank logins, ever

The client

Alder Row Properties LLC is one owner, self-managing, no property manager. Two properties, three units, in the town of Kestrel Falls.

The duplex at 1418–1420 Alder Row has two units. Unit A rents for $1,650 a month to D. Whitcomb, who pays by check, has been there since September 2025, and went month-to-month at the end of August. Unit B rents for $1,575 to M. Ortega, a new tenant from July 1 who pays by Zelle. The landlord pays the duplex’s water and sewer.

The house at 77 Kestrel Court rents for $2,400 a month. R. Feld paid by ACH and moved out August 31. The house sat empty for a week while a handyman, a locksmith and a cleaner came through, and J. Park moved in September 8, paying by Zelle, with a first month prorated to 23 of 30 days.

Both properties carry an escrowed mortgage. The duplex loan is with Northstar Mortgage Svc: $238,500 owing on July 1 at 6.125%, $1,912.55 on the first of the month, of which $426.20 goes to escrow. The house loan is with Cascade Home Loans: $176,200 at 5.875%, $1,486.20 on the fifth, of which $362.00 is escrow. Both servicers paid the county property tax out of escrow on September 15.

Money moves through two accounts, a rental checking account at Harbor Federal and a Harbor Federal business Visa. The period is July 1 to September 30, 2026, a full quarter so month-over-month reports mean something. Across it the checking account received $16,390.00 in rent, including one $75 late fee and Park’s prorated $1,840, and $4,200.00 in security deposits. It paid $10,196.25 to the two servicers.

Alder Row Properties LLC is entirely fictional. So are its properties, tenants, lenders, every vendor in its books, and the addresses. Any resemblance to a real business, person or place is coincidental.

Why half the size of the landscaper’s books

Cedarline Landscaping, the bookkeeping-category client, has 162 transactions in its quarter and five planted traps. Alder Row has 80, 45 through checking and 35 on the card, and seven traps. The volume is low on purpose. A three-unit landlord collects rent three times a month, pays two mortgages, two insurance premiums, a utility bill and a lawn service, and buys a few things at the hardware store. That is a small quarter, and padding it to look busier would have been the dishonest choice.

Three units is also a deliberate number. It sits exactly on the boundary of the smallest paid tiers we found in the September pricing scan: REI Hub’s entry plan covers “up to 3 units,” Landlord Studio’s paid tiers include three units and charge $1.20 a month for each one above, and Rentastic’s Core plan stops at two properties. Alder Row fits inside every entry tier with no room to spare. A fourth unit is a one-line change to the generator, and it would walk straight into the paywall.

The seven traps

Every trap is annotated in the master file, in a trap column, so scoring is a lookup rather than a judgment call. Property and unit are annotated on every line too, the ground truth for per-property reports.

Trap	Where it is	What it tests
Mortgage split	Two servicer debits a month, single lines: $1,912.55 (duplex) and $1,486.20 (house)	Principal, interest and escrow split out, or the whole payment expensed
Escrow-paid property tax	Sep 15 county tax on each mortgage statement ($2,140 and $1,760); never in the bank feed	Booking an expense that has no bank line, without double-counting
Security deposit lifecycle	$1,800 in on Jul 3 (Zelle); $1,550 refund out on Sep 4 (check 1107), $250 retained	Liability in, liability out, retained portion to income
Capital vs repair	Summit Air & Heat $3,480 (Aug 19, check) beside the same vendor’s $215 filter service (Jul 22, card)	Fixed-asset support; whether the tool nudges toward depreciation
Shared-expense allocation	Greenscape Lawn Svc $180 on the 10th, one card line covering both properties	Split by property so each Schedule E stays honest
Exact duplicate	Pro-Flow Plumbing $286.40 twice on Aug 7 (card), distinct bank IDs in the OFX	Import duplicate detection, same shape as the landscaper’s trap
Bank-feed gap	Checking feed stops Sep 8–21; the four missing lines ship as a separate statement	Reconciliation: does the tool surface the hole, and how painful is the backfill

Three of them need more than a row.

The mortgage payment is three things

Every month the checking feed shows ACH - NORTHSTAR MORTGAGE SVC for $1,912.55 and ACH - CASCADE HOME LOANS for $1,486.20, one line each. The servicer statements, shipped as CSV and PDF, say what each line actually was. The duplex’s July 1 payment was $269.01 of principal, $1,217.34 of interest and $426.20 into escrow. The house’s July 5 payment was $261.55 principal, $862.65 interest, $362.00 escrow.

This is a trap because principal is not an expense. It is the landlord paying down a debt, and a ledger that books the whole $1,912.55 as “mortgage expense” overstates the quarter’s costs by the principal paid. Interest is a cost. The escrow contribution is neither; it is cash moved into an account the servicer holds. The checklist scores whether each servicer debit gets split three ways or expensed whole, and the session notes record how: a split tool, a loan template, an amortisation schedule, or the statement figures typed in by hand.

The tax bill that never touches the bank

On September 15 both servicers paid Kestrel County its property tax out of escrow: $2,140.00 for the duplex and $1,760.00 for the house, $3,900.00 in total. Neither amount appears in the bank feed, because the landlord’s bank never saw it. The only record is a line on each servicer statement.

This is the trap we expect to separate the tools most. Property tax is a real cost of the quarter, and a tool that only knows what the bank feed knows cannot book it. A tool that lets you record it against the escrow balance can. And a tool that lets you add it as an ordinary expense, after expensing the full mortgage payment including the escrow contribution, has counted the tax money twice. The per-property report at the end of the checklist comes back to this line.

The deposit that comes back short

Security deposits are the landlord’s version of the refunded deposit in Cedarline’s books, with an extra turn. Ortega’s $1,800 arrives by Zelle on July 3, two days after the first rent. It is not income; it is money the landlord is holding and may have to give back. Feld’s $1,800, held since before the quarter began, goes back on September 4 as check 1107 for $1,550.00, with $250 kept for a damaged interior door. Park’s $2,400 arrives September 8, inside the feed gap described below.

Three movements, and none is a plain expense or a plain receipt. The $1,800 in should raise a liability. The $1,550 out should reduce one. The $250 difference is the only part that touches the income statement. A separate item scores whether the two deposits already held when the quarter opened, Whitcomb’s $1,650 and Feld’s $1,800, can be entered as opening liabilities at all.

The other four, briefly

The $3,480 check to SUMMIT AIR & HEAT on August 19 sits beside the same vendor’s $215 filter service from July 22. One is a condenser and one is maintenance, the kind of pair where a landlord might capitalise the first and expense the second. We score whether the tool has a place for an asset and whether it nudges either way. This is a tools test, not tax advice; what is deductible, and when, is a question for a tax professional.

GREENSCAPE LAWN SVC charges $180 to the card on the tenth of every month, one line covering both properties. A tool that cannot split a line by property puts all $540 on one of them, and both per-property reports are wrong by that amount.

PRO-FLOW PLUMBING for $286.40 appears twice on August 7, both on the card, and in the OFX file the two lines carry different transaction IDs, because that is how a real bank posts a real duplicate. Cedarline’s books carry the same trap, a $342.17 hardware purchase posted twice, so this is the one item that compares across both categories.

And the checking feed stops on September 8 and resumes on September 22. Four lines fall in the hole: Park’s $2,400 deposit and $1,840 rent on the 8th, a $96.40 city utility bill on the 12th and a $58.30 phone bill on the 16th. They ship separately, as the paper statement a landlord would pull to backfill, and the trap is whether the tool notices the hole before you do.

The quarter also carries softer probes, noted in reviews but not scored: Whitcomb’s August rent arriving on the 9th as one $1,725 deposit, $1,650 of rent plus a $75 late fee; Park’s $1,840 first month, which a rent roll might show as a $560 shortfall forever; a $48.20 water reimbursement; an $86.40 OLIVE GARDEN 4410 charge on the business card; a $3,500 owner contribution the day before the HVAC check; and a $385 annual umbrella premium.

What this lab does differently

No bank is ever connected, and no bank account is ever opened. Landlord apps assume a live bank feed far more than ledgers do, and two of the four we are testing, Stessa and Baselane, are banks before they are bookkeeping apps. A fictional landlord has no bank to connect, and we would not connect one if it did. So every tool gets Alder Row’s quarter by file, and whether it accepts a file at all, without demanding a bank login first, is item 2 on the checklist. If a tool’s bookkeeping cannot be reached without opening its banking product, that scores zero and becomes the headline, not a reason to open one.

The files are in the formats the tools’ own pages ask for. The September scan found that only Stessa and REI Hub describe a self-serve statement upload with a template, that REI Hub’s page prefers OFX, and that Landlord Studio’s only documented import is an expense spreadsheet. So both feeds ship three ways: a generic three-column CSV for any column mapper, the Stessa template order with expenses negative, and OFX. The checking OFX file states the bank’s true September 30 balance, $8,824.38, which is $4,085.30 more than its own lines add up to. That is the feed gap exactly as a real bank would report it. The two servicer statements come as CSV and as PDF rendered from the same data, with a rent roll and a properties file alongside.

The data is deterministic. One script generates every file from the same transaction list, and the CSV and OFX outputs are byte-identical on every run. The file you download is the file we imported.

The checklist

Sixteen items, each scored 0, 1 or 2, for a maximum of 32. It is the same scale as the other checklists on this site and a different checklist, so an Alder Row score compares only with other Alder Row scores. Four sections.

Import and setup, 8 points. Properties, units and leases set up without support docs. Each feed imported by file with dates, signs and descriptors intact and no bank login demanded. Both mortgages set up with escrow and an opening balance, and the two pre-period deposits entered as liabilities.

The traps, 12 points. One item each for the duplicate, the mortgage split, the escrow tax, the deposit lifecycle, the capital-versus-repair pair and the lawn allocation. The feed gap is scored under output, because it only shows at reconciliation.

Everyday work, 6 points. Rent matching, including the late-fee deposit and the prorated first month. The personal charge excluded or booked to owner’s draw without fighting the interface. Bank rules on the routine lines.

Output, 6 points. A per-property Schedule E report that carries the escrow-paid tax and half the lawn service on each side. A per-property profit and loss and a deposits-held figure, with the September gap surfacing at reconciliation. And the accountant access model: invite, role, read-only, and what the seat costs.

Every score needs a screenshot or a written observation, and the checklist is filled during the session, not afterward. We also log what does not score but matters: time from signup to both feeds imported, where the tool pushed a bank connection, anything gated behind its own banking or rent-collection product (named, and reported as untested rather than guessed at), and the checkout price against the page price.

Run it yourself

The whole set is on the methodology page from today: the master file with the trap annotations, both feeds in all three formats, the gap statement, the two servicer statements, the rent roll and the properties file. Import it into the free tier of any landlord app and see what the mortgage line turns into, where the $1,800 deposit lands, and whether anything mentions September 8. If your result disagrees with a review of ours, we want to know.

What comes next

Stessa and Baselane went first, on their free tiers and without opening either vendor’s banking product: Stessa scored 22/32 and Baselane 16/32, and the review carries the full sixteen-row card for each. REI Hub and Landlord Studio follow in November on their fourteen-day trials, with the same card, then the four together get a category piece. The September reading of all twelve vendors’ pricing pages stands as the pricing context until the trials replace it with checkout screenshots, and every price is dated on the pricing tracker.

Nothing in this article says how any tool behaves, because we do not yet know. That is the point of publishing the books first.

Alder Row Properties LLC and everything in its books are invented. We have no affiliate relationship with Stessa, Baselane, REI Hub or Landlord Studio, or with any other landlord tool named here, as of publication. If we join any program after a review is written, the review will say so. This is a tools test, not tax, legal or investment advice; which of these costs is deductible, and how, is a question for a tax professional.

Update, October 26, 2026: we have since joined Baselane’s affiliate program, after the Stessa vs Baselane review was published; that review carries the full disclosure. Nothing in this article links to Baselane, and the books above were frozen before any trial began. We still have no arrangement with Stessa, REI Hub or Landlord Studio.