There are three separate layers and the reason the pricing confuses people is that some products straddle two of them.
The general ledger is the accounting system itself, where every dollar lands in a chart of accounts and produces a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. QuickBooks Online and Xero are general ledgers. Small business plans typically run in the tens of dollars a month, and the tier you need depends on whether you want class tracking for property level reporting, so confirm the current tiers and prices with the vendor before you commit.
The operations layer is rent collection, leases, tenant records and maintenance requests. Buildium, AppFolio and similar platforms live here and generally price per unit per month with a monthly minimum, which is why they get expensive under about twenty units. Stessa sits in a different spot again, closer to a tracker built for landlords, with a free tier and paid tiers.
The third layer is the person. A bookkeeper uses whichever general ledger you picked and produces reconciled monthly financials. Four properties in one entity is a small engagement, often quoted a few hundred a month, and the number moves with how many bank and card accounts you have rather than how many doors.
For four rentals, a general ledger plus a person is the common setup, and the operations platform only earns its fee once tenant handling is taking your time.
Your LP positions don't belong in any of this. A K-1 arrives once a year and goes to your tax preparer. What you should keep separately is a record of what you contributed to each deal and what distributions came back, because your basis in the position depends on that history and sponsors change administrators.
