What a monthly bookkeeping package for landlords should actually charge, and whether per door pricing works above 15 units

What fills four to six hours a month for a fifteen unit landlord? In my head the rent comes in and the mortgage goes out and that's twelve transactions. I've never owned a rental, so I'm genuinely asking.

Ember, it's the tail. Twelve clean transactions plus forty messy ones. Lantern, the document matters more than the price. Write an engagement letter with a scope exhibit that names what is included, states an hourly rate for anything outside it, and sets a monthly transaction ceiling above which the tier resets. Put in a client responsibilities clause: statements delivered by the 5th, receipts for anything over your capitalization threshold, and a set number of days to answer your questions. Without that you will be chasing three of these six every month for free. Also settle who owns the QuickBooks subscription. If it sits in your account, you are holding their books hostage on the day they leave, and that day gets ugly. The client owns the subscription and you get accountant access. Having a lawyer look at the letter once is money well spent, and you only pay it once.

I priced this out as a buyer six months ago and got quoted $500 and $650 a month for eight units in one LLC by two different firms in a mid sized metro. Neither of them said the words real estate once during the call. Your $350 for fifteen units with a class level P&L per property is well under what I saw.

The question I'd want answered before I paid you anything: what stops me from turning on the bank rules myself and getting 85 percent of this? I'm not being rude, I'd genuinely like to hear the answer, because it's the objection you're going to get in every sales conversation.

Compass, nothing stops you, and for some of us that's the right answer. My books are land parcels and a tax bill. Maybe forty transactions a year. I'd never pay $350 a month and lantern shouldn't want me.

Which is really the point. Six prospects from one meetup are not one market. The person with fifteen doors and a turnover problem and the person with three paid off lots need different things, and pricing one package for both is how you end up at $70 an hour.

The hours go where the renovations are. Draw schedules, retainage, deposits to suppliers that sit for six weeks, a $40,000 project invoiced in eleven pieces by four vendors, and someone has to decide which of those pieces sit in construction in progress and which are period expenses. That's judgment and it's slow, and it's the opposite of what a bank rule does.

Price active rehab clients separately or you'll subsidize them out of the passive landlords. I'd put a project accounting add-on on the sheet with its own number.

The first thing that breaks at six clients is the close calendar, well before pricing does. Every one of them wants their statements in the same first ten days of the month, and half of them will be late sending the credit card statement. Commit to a delivery date measured from when you have complete records, never from the calendar, and write that into the engagement letter warrant described. On CFO-lite, the buyer for it is an owner at maybe eight or nine doors, and what that owner is paying for is a person who says which unit is bleeding before the owner notices on their own. Nobody wants a variance report against a budget they never built. Make the first quarter of that tier about building the budget with them.

Do these prospects ask about credentials? I've wondered whether a QuickBooks ProAdvisor badge or a bookkeeping certification actually moves anyone, or whether it's all referral and a demo of the property level P&L.

Plumb, in a typical five year run of this business a bookkeeper hears the certification question perhaps once, and it comes after the client has already said yes. Lantern, two things from how this business tends to go. Per door pricing invites an argument every single time, because a duplex with one side vacant, a short term unit, and a house mid rehab are all one door and three very different workloads. Operators who switch to tiers by monthly transaction count find the arguments stop. Bands of 0 to 75, 76 to 200, and 201 to 400, priced per entity, with the entity count as its own multiplier. Second, put an annual price adjustment clause in the letter now. Everyone who skips that spends year four carrying clients at year one rates, and then raising a long standing client's fee by 30 percent at once costs the relationship. Small and scheduled beats big and surprising. Your $70 an hour is going to look more like $95 by month six on the same clients, because setup is where the time goes and setup happens once.

Charge properly for the cleanup. $75 an hour is cheap for untangling somebody's two year mess, and the cleanup is also how you find out whether you want the monthly client at all.