Audit-ready books.
Every property.
Every day.

Per unit, per month — $20 at Starter (25–50 units), $18 at Growth (51–75 units), $17 at Portfolio (76–100 units). Your fee is determined by your unit count, not by transaction volume, complexity, or the number of owners on your portfolio. No hourly billing, no surprise add-ons. If your books need cleanup before a retainer begins, that scope is assessed at discovery and quoted separately at $1,000–$2,500 one-time.

Three accounts must agree every business day: your bank feed (actual money), your PMS ledger (what should have moved), and your tenant ledger (what tenants owe and have paid). If any two disagree, we locate the variance, document it, and flag it the same day. Monthly reconciliation finds the same problem 30 days later — sometimes after disbursements have already run on incorrect balances.

AppFolio, Buildium, and DoorLoop have bank feeds and auto-matching logic. Those tools work when both sides of a transaction are clean. They don't catch a vendor who charged twice, a tenant payment posted to the wrong unit, a management fee calculated on the wrong base, or a work order billed to the wrong property. The software flags exceptions eventually. We catch them the same business day.

Several things, not just the cadence. A generalist bookkeeper typically works across industries, operates in QuickBooks rather than inside your PMS, closes monthly, carries no E&O insurance, and has no formal liability for errors in your trust account. Meridian is different on each of those dimensions. We work exclusively with residential property managers — on AppFolio, Buildium, and DoorLoop, natively inside your ledgers, not in a parallel system. We carry Errors and Omissions insurance on every engagement, written into the agreement. Each operator is capped at 15 portfolios, which means your operator knows your properties, your owners, and your vendors by name — not from a ticket queue. We reconcile your trust account against all three legs daily. Every engagement includes a mutual NDA, a formal scope agreement, and a structural boundary that is non-negotiable: payment authority stays with you. The questions worth asking your current bookkeeper: do they carry E&O coverage? Are they capped on client count so they know your portfolio deeply? Are they working natively inside your PMS or translating your data into QuickBooks? For most generalists operating at volume, the honest answer to all three is no.

A variance caught on day two is a five-minute correction. The same variance caught at month-end means 30 days of downstream transactions built on a wrong foundation. If disbursements have already run, you may be unwinding owner payments. If a state auditor arrives, you have 30 days of unexplained discrepancy on record. Daily reconciliation compresses the exposure window to a single business day.

You create a user account for your dedicated operator inside your PMS using your platform's existing role system — the same way you'd add any staff member. That account can view ledgers, post journal entries, reconcile accounts, and stage bills for your review. It cannot initiate owner disbursements, vendor payments, or bank transfers of any kind. Every outgoing payment requires your sign-off. This is written into every engagement agreement.

No. Meridian Books is a specialized bookkeeping firm. We do not hold CPA licenses and do not provide tax advice, financial advisory, or attest services. We keep your books audit-ready and flag items that require CPA judgment — we do not replace your CPA. Tax preparation, tax filings, and payroll are explicitly outside our scope; we refer those out.