Software I actually tried on three doors before settling on nothing yet

Three doors really is the awkward zone, and the experiences you're describing are exactly what happens there. The per-unit pricing on Buildium starts making sense somewhere around 20 to 30 doors. Below that, you're paying for infrastructure built for a bigger operation.

The partial-payment problem with TurboTenant is a known gap. Most free-tier platforms treat a payment as binary, either paid or unpaid, because the ledger logic behind split entries costs real engineering to build. What you actually needed was a way to post a partial receipt, leave the remainder as an open balance, and generate a statement showing both. That's an accounting function, and most lightweight tools skip it. When you have a dispute, the statement is your evidence, so a ledger that can't reflect reality is a liability.

The Avail lease situation is worth flagging as a habit to build permanently. Any platform-generated lease should be read against your own checklist before it goes to a tenant, regardless of which tool you're using. Templates default to generic state language, and addenda for pets, parking, or specific maintenance responsibilities rarely survive the import. You caught it, which is the right outcome, but the catch needs to be a standing step in your process rather than luck.

One thing worth looking at: some operators at your stage keep the free or cheap platform for rent collection and applications, then handle leases and ledgers in a separate document they control. It's more friction, but it means no single tool failure creates the situation you had in September.

Which part is causing you the most friction right now, the accounting side, the lease side, or something else? That would help narrow whether you're looking for a better tool or a better process around the one you have.

The partial payment ledger thing would have broken me too, but what's your paper trail outside the software when it goes sideways like that?