(chiming music)
- [Brian] Hey guys, Brian Davis here,
I'm gonna do quick video
overview and review of how Stessa works
for managing your rental property financials
and accounting data.
So when you first log in,
you'll see a dashboard that gives you
a quick high level overview
of how your portfolio looks,
how it's performing, so portfolio value,
return on investment, your occupancy rates,
income, mortgage debt, number of properties and units,
you can see a visual of your monthly cashflow,
where your properties lie on a map,
we can compare different properties
and their performance.
So a nice high level overview
of what your portfolio looks like in that moment.
Now it can drill down a little further here,
into the different properties and portfolios.
So for properties you can see of course,
occupancy, acquisition price, market value,
loan balance, equity, number of units for each
and of course you can edit all of this.
You can go and add another property here
to your portfolio.
We'll just do a quick example for how this looks.
So we'll do 2106 Bank St in Baltimore,
and it will pull up some of the public record data
for that property.
So not only information from your
local government's public records,
but also information from Zillow,
things like square footage and baths,
and photos and the Zestimate,
you Zillow's estimate of the property's value.
So it will pull all of that up for you
and then when you click this button
it will ask you to add a little
bit more information manually
and approve some of the things,
or verify some of the things
that it pulled for you automatically.
Now going back here to the properties page,
you can add multiple portfolios to your account,
so for example if you are a landlord
and have a few properties in this one LLC over here
and then you have, you know, three or four
more properties in this other LLC over here
you can use different portfolios
to keep your LLC property data separate,
and that makes it a little easier for your accounting,
especially come tax time,
or if you are a property manager
and have multiple clients,
you can have separate portfolios for each client.
Again helps keep this a little bit easier
for keeping your financials separate.
Now moving on to leases and tenants,
this is where you can add tenancy information
for example the tenant's name,
rent amount that they're paying,
security deposit, when they moved in,
when their current lease term expires,
if the market rent is different than
what they are currently paying,
then that might be interesting
to know as well and have here.
So you can also have your documents
for each property on here as well,
and let's jump down here to the document section,
and explain how this works real quick.
So you can upload any document for any property,
things like lease agreements,
move in move out condition checklists,
addenda, disclosures, home inspection reports,
appraisals from when you first buy a property,
your mortgage documentation, important stuff right,
insurance policies.
So all of this kind of documentation
you wanna be able to keep for each property,
without necessarily having it saved
only on your hard drive,
which of course can crash,
as most of us have experienced at one time or another,
and without having to have a hard copy
somewhere and store it in an enormous file cabinet.
So it's a great way to keep this document booth
stored offsite securely and to have it
organized for each property.
Now the real meat and potatoes here for Stessa service
is it's financial transaction data.
So you can enter income and expenses,
so for example you can see I have
a rent payment recorded here,
and I have connected a partners mortgage account
to this just for sake of example,
so you can see the mortgage payments paid here
and listed to Chase.
Now let's jump down here
and just show exactly what this looks like.
So one of the places where Stessa excels,
is importing your financial data
automatically from your financial accounts.
Now financial accounts could mean
your mortgage account, so you can see
I have this mortgage account connected here
to one of these properties.
You can also connect bank accounts
for your operating checking accounts
for each property.
So for example, let's say that you use Bank of America
for your operating checking accounts,
for your properties and LLCs,
all you have to do is log in once
to your Bank of America account through Stessa
and it will link the account to your property,
you can assign it to a specific property,
and have it import data from then on,
so things like when rents are deposited
or you're writing a thousand dollar check
for a maintenance or repair expense,
that all gets imported automatically
added to your transactions data.
Now sometimes you need to go in
and manually clean up some of that transaction data,
so you can see on here
you know sometimes it will ask you
to choose the category if it doesn't know
automatically what the category it.
You can also choose the property that it's for.
So yeah one quick gripe here
is that when I first added one property to the account,
and then I added one mortgage account,
it did not automatically assign the two,
I had to go in and manually assign them myself,
and then even after assigning them
it did not retroactively go back
and assign the different transactions to that property,
which would've been nice if it'd done that,
but you know, it's a small quibble.
Transactions from that point forward
do get automatically assigned to the right property,
and you can do things, it's easy to just
select the property and clean up this data,
and when you wanna go in and make sure
that your data's ready to be exported.
Which is exactly one of the things
that Stessa does where it excels,
is it's reports.
So income statements, cashflow statements,
expense statements and best of all
this tax package statement that makes it
really easy for you to go in,
whether you are a DIY tax preparer for yourself,
or whether you have an accountant
who prepares your taxes for you,
tax package makes it easy to just
plug the numbers right in
to the line items on your tax return.
So one area where Stessa truly does shine here.
Now they also have a few extra resources here for tax time,
things like overview of tax deductions
for rental properties,
tax checklists for rental properties,
you know guides for rental property taxes,
so you get the idea here,
you know this is very much a useful resource
for accounting and taxes.
Now Stessa is free, which is awesome.
The price is certainly right.
Now it's not a property management software, right,
it's not like your Appfolio or Buildium
that does everything for you,
including tracking your accounting and income and expenses,
but it does do one thing and it does it well,
and it does it free.
Now where Stessa makes their money
is actually through affiliate partners,
things like mortgage lenders,
insurance providers, so they will recommend
some of these additional third party services
periodically for you and that's
how they make their money,
is from these affiliate referral fees.
But what I like about this is
of course that they have a great product here that's free,
but I also like the fact that they're not
trying to ram certain non-necessary expenses
down your throat,
they are partnered with services
that you're going to need anyway,
as a landlord, right, you need property insurance
for your rental properties no matter what,
so Stessa will provide you with one option
or several options, and if you don't like those
you can of course use someone else,
but they're not trying to push unnecessary
third party partners on you.
So one other quibble here,
it would be nice if they offered
online rent collection to keep this
all in house in one place,
so then not only are they tracking
the rents that come in but they're also
processing those payments for you,
be nice but again, you know,
Stessa is not in that business,
they're in the accounting and financial tracking business,
so all in all it's a great service,
it's free so let us know what you think,
give it a shot, you know take it out for a spin,
and get back to us here at REtipster
and let us know what your experiences are
and how you feel about it
so I hope you enjoyed this quick overview of Stessa service.