In the old days, rental accounting software consisted of a pencil, calculator, and a ledger that you carried with you as you followed up on phone calls or visited tenants. Notepad papers, agreements filed away in cabinets, work orders and phone messages could tend to make it difficult to keep things straight, especially if you were managing multiple buildings, units and tenants.
This situation left Roger Johnson literally pulling out his hair. “My family doctor was deeply disturbed,” says Johnson. “My impending baldness didn’t seem to follow traditional patterns. I did not have a receding hairline, and my family on my mother’s side (which is where the gene is passed on that produces male baldness) had no history of young men going bald. I wasn’t taking any toxic drugs, didn’t have cancer and wasn’t undergoing radiation treatments or anything like that. I was literally pulling out my hair in frustration, and didn’t even realize it.”
As Johnson attempted to manage 300 apartment units in four different complexes without the benefit of rental accounting software, he sometimes found himself in such a fit of rage that he unwittingly pulled out clumps of hair. Friends became concerned. Tenants began to fear him. “Here I was,” he says, “twenty-five years old, and walking around with a grimace on my face and my hair looking as though I had just survived an attack with explosives.”
Finally, technology caught up with him as valuable rental accounting software came to his rescue. “I bought a decently priced rental accounting software product that offered a lot of really user-friendly applications,” he says. “Easy to use, I could separate ledgers, post updates automatically to any account, make payments to vendors from home, monitor rental payments and unit histories with absolute ease, automatically charge late fees and send reminders, create reports and agreements, and just basically keep accurate track of all my tenants, complexes, buildings, and apartments! It took the stress level out of my life almost instantly! I no longer had to sift through paperwork and spend a lot of time looking for pertinent information on specific issues. It was all right there on my screen, literally at my fingertips. The benefits for me are almost too numerous to mention.”