Specialized Bookkeeping for Property Managers
Your trust accounts stay compliant. Your owner statements are clean. Your books are ready for your CPA — or a state auditor — at any moment. We deliver that outcome by working directly inside your property management software, every single business day.
Between tenant payments, owner disbursements, management fees, and maintenance billing — the numbers drift. When books are only touched at month-end, small mistakes become expensive audit findings.
When books are only balanced once a month, a misposted payment on day three compounds silently for weeks. Daily reconciliation catches the same mistake before your owners ever see it.
A security deposit posted to the wrong property. A management fee applied twice. These are quiet mistakes — until a state audit makes them expensive. Trust violations carry fines of $1,000 to $25,000 per infraction, and in severe cases, license suspension. Daily monitoring catches these before they compound.
Management fees, work order charges, vendor bills staged for approval — these need consistent, daily attention. When you're also managing leases and maintenance, billing gets deprioritized.
Trust fund accounting, per-owner ledger separation, management fee structures, work order billing — a general bookkeeper doesn't know the specific rules of your industry. We work in it every day.
We log into your property management software — currently AppFolio and Buildium, with additional platforms launching soon — and work directly inside your accounting ledgers. No data exports, no parallel software, no reconciling between two separate systems. Your books stay where they belong — in your system.
Most outsourced bookkeeping firms reconcile monthly or deliver results within 5–10 business days. We monitor daily — because a variance caught on day two costs nothing to fix, and the same variance caught on day thirty costs a client relationship.
We receive user-level access to your PMS accounting functions. Disbursement, payment, and bank transfer capabilities stay with you exclusively — we don't need them and we don't request them.
Your bank transactions are matched to your PMS entries and tenant records daily. Any discrepancy is flagged immediately, investigated, and documented before it compounds.
Management fees are created on schedule. Vendor bills are entered, categorized, and staged for approval. Work order charges are billed to the correct properties. When you sit down to process payables, everything is organized and ready for your single sign-off.
Reconciled reports, per-owner statements, a complete variance log, and supporting documentation — formatted for your CPA or any regulatory review.
What is a three-way reconciliation?
Your bank records what money moved. Your PMS records what should have moved. Your tenant ledgers record what each tenant owes or paid. All three must agree — and without daily attention, they drift. We make sure they match, every day.
Meridian's systems are built by a property management bookkeeper who currently maintains audit-ready compliance across 23 bank accounts and a 200+ unit portfolio — including full 592 prep, 1099 filings, investor reports, and distribution analysis — in under four hours. Every process we deliver was designed to meet institutional standards, then simplified until a trained operator can execute it with the same precision, every day.
Every service we deliver produces a single outcome: books your CPA can file from, your owners can trust, and your state auditor can review — without surprises, every month. Everything below happens inside your existing property management software. No new tools to learn or pay for.
Every bank transaction is matched to its corresponding PMS entry and tenant record daily. Discrepancies are flagged immediately with a documented resolution — no unexplained variances carried forward.
Management fee invoices are created, posted, and reconciled against your management agreements on schedule. Fees are consistently applied and correctly categorized — every month, without reminders from you.
Vendor invoices and maintenance bills are entered, categorized, and organized for your review. When you're ready to process payments, everything is staged and waiting — you approve, you pay.
If your company has an internal maintenance team, we handle billing work order charges from your company to the properties you manage — ensuring internal services are invoiced, tracked, and reconciled correctly.
Each property owner's ledger is maintained separately, with income and expenses correctly allocated. Multi-owner portfolios with shared expenses are tracked with the same precision as single-owner accounts.
Per-owner financial statements, portfolio-level reports, and a complete variance log — delivered at month-end, formatted for your CPA and ready for any owner review or regulatory audit.
Not yet on a dedicated property management platform — or already using one but starting from a disorganized baseline? We handle the migration: chart of accounts setup, historical data import, fee structure configuration, and opening balance reconciliation. Once your setup is complete and verified, you move directly into the monthly retainer. This is a scoped one-time project — the fastest way to start with audit-ready books from day one.
The most important boundary in how Meridian Books operates: we build, reconcile, and stage everything. Every payment, disbursement, and bank transfer is reviewed and executed by you. This is written into every engagement agreement we sign.
All vendor invoices, management fees, and payables are prepared and organized by us. Execution of every payment stays with you. We never initiate a bank transfer or owner disbursement.
Our engagement agreement specifies exactly which accounting functions we perform and explicitly excludes disbursement and payment access. No ambiguity about what we do and don't do.
A mutual confidentiality agreement is signed before we receive any account access. Your tenant data, owner financials, and business relationships are protected from the first conversation.
Every discrepancy found during reconciliation is logged with a timestamp, root cause, and resolution note. Your books carry a complete, searchable audit trail at all times — not just at year-end.
Your manager handles no more than 15 portfolios. This isn't just a workload limit — it's a quality standard. Your manager knows your properties, your owners, and your billing patterns.
We do bookkeeping and reconciliation for property managers. We don't do tax preparation, payroll, or CPA services. Specialization is what makes us reliable at this specific work.
You've moved past spreadsheets, but you're not a 500-unit operation with a dedicated accounting department. You're managing properties, owner relationships, maintenance, and leasing — bookkeeping is the piece that keeps slipping.
A manager with 20 units across four owners has more going on than a 50-unit manager with a single investor. We assess fit based on the number of owners, entities, and billing structures — not just doors. The Foundation tier is built for managers who are growing into complexity, not just managers with fewer units.
Every tier guarantees audit-ready trust compliance, a dedicated manager who knows your portfolio, and a signed NDA. The difference between tiers is portfolio complexity — not unit count.
Single owner or a growing portfolio adding its first additional owner. Straightforward billing and ledger structure.
Two to five owners, multiple properties, regular owner statements. Where most growing portfolios land.
Multi-entity structure, complex fee arrangements, or custom reporting requirements.
All engagements begin with a $399 diagnostic review — a complete assessment of your current records with a written findings report, delivered before you commit to anything. A one-time onboarding fee applies in the first month.
Software can match transactions. What it can't do is sign off on your trust compliance, flag a misclassified capital improvement before your CPA sees it, or explain a variance to a state auditor. You're not paying for data entry — you're paying for a compliance partner who knows your portfolio and stands behind the numbers.
Many property managers are running their books in QuickBooks, spreadsheets, or a disconnected mix of both. If you're ready to move to a dedicated property management platform — or you're already on one but need a clean reset — our migration service structures your books correctly from day one.
Clients who go through a proper migration have cleaner audit trails, fewer reconciliation issues, and faster onboarding when they begin their monthly retainer. Getting the structure right at the start costs less than fixing it later.
We review your existing records — wherever they live — to understand what you have, what's missing, and what needs correction before migration.
Your PMS account is configured for your specific portfolio — management fee structures, owner entities, maintenance billing, and trust accounts set up correctly from the start.
We import your history, reconcile opening balances, and establish a verified clean baseline so your records are accurate from day one.
Once setup is complete and verified, you move directly into the standard monthly retainer — with clean books and no re-onboarding.
Scoped per engagement based on portfolio size and the current state of your records.
Schedule a no-commitment discovery call. We'll review your current setup, walk through what daily reconciliation looks like for your portfolio, and tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.
Book Your Discovery CallNo commitment required. Response within one business day.