TurboTenant vs RentRedi vs Stessa: Which One Actually Does the Books?

This article contains affiliate-free opinions and one obvious conflict of interest: I built Doortrackr, which competes with all three of these tools. Everything below is verified against each company's live pricing page as of October 5, 2026, and where I got something wrong in testing, the pricing page wins. Links to every claim are inline.

Search "turbotenant vs rentredi" or "stessa vs turbotenant" and you'll notice something funny: the top results are written by TurboTenant, RentRedi, and Stessa. Each one compares itself to the other guy and, shocker, wins. They're all answering the same question too: which platform is the better property manager. Listings, screening, leases, maintenance tickets.

That's the wrong question for most small landlords. With four units I have maybe one repair request every other month. If it isn't broken, I'm not paying a subscription to manage it. The question that actually costs you money is the one none of those pages answer: which one actually does the books?

When I was shopping these tools, I already had the tenant side covered for free: Google Drive for documents, Apartments.com for rent collection (free, with automatic payments), Zillow for listings, and Notion for my process docs. Every management platform wanted me to re-buy all of that, plus maintenance ticketing I'd never use, just to get at the bookkeeping. What I actually needed was a faster replacement for my manual spreadsheet and a fix for my bad habit of falling behind on recordkeeping. And once I looked closely, it was honestly wild how bad the management apps are at the money side: they all ship the same feature list and miss the simple stuff that matters, like grouping expenses into jobs or making capital improvements easy to handle.

So that's the comparison you're getting. Receipt scanning, Schedule E, job grouping, and what the bookkeeping side of each platform actually costs once you ungate it. No listing-syndication talk. No screening-fee breakdowns. Just the money side, which is the side that follows you into April.

What does "doing the books" actually mean for a landlord?

Five jobs, no more: capture the receipt before you forget what it was for, categorize it to the right Schedule E line, group expenses by property and by job (so repair-vs-capitalize is answerable), produce a Schedule E report your CPA can use, and let you export your own data. That's the whole test.

Everything else these platforms do (listings, screening, rent collection, maintenance tickets) is property management. Useful if you need it. But a landlord's books fail at the capture moment, not the lease-signing moment, and the IRS doesn't care how pretty your tenant portal is. Per IRS Publication 527, what matters at the end of the year is an accurate record of income and expenses per property. So the scorecard below weights the five bookkeeping jobs and ignores the rest.

TurboTenant vs RentRedi vs Stessa: the bookkeeping scorecard

Here's the head-to-head on the five jobs, based on each vendor's current pricing and help documentation. Details and receipts (the link kind) follow in the per-platform sections.

Bookkeeping job	TurboTenant	RentRedi	Stessa	Doortrackr
Receipt scanning	Expense tracking free; scan/attach depth varies by tier	AI receipt capture, all plans	5 scans/month free; unlimited at $28/mo	Unlimited, every tier including free
Schedule E report	Accounting tools at Pro, $199/yr	Included, all plans	Starts at Manage, $144/yr	Every tier including free
Job/project grouping	No	Only via REI Hub add-on, +$25/mo	Only at Pro, $28/mo	Every tier including free
Per-property P&L	At Pro, $199/yr	Included, all plans	Yes, all tiers	Yes, every tier
Full data export	CSV export	CSV/Excel export	Yes, all tiers	CSV + PDF, every tier
True cost at 3 units (books done)	$199/yr ($16.48/mo)	$144/yr ($12/mo)	$336/yr ($28/mo)	$83.88/yr ($6.99/mo)

The pattern: TurboTenant is a listings-and-leasing machine that added bookkeeping. Stessa is a portfolio-analytics platform that gates the practical parts. RentRedi is the only one of the three that puts a Schedule E report in its base price, and its base price is honest. All three still treat your receipts as an afterthought, and none of them groups expenses by job without an upgrade or an add-on.

Does TurboTenant do the books?

Not really, unless you pay. TurboTenant's free tier is genuinely good at the tenant-facing stuff (listings, applications, screening, rent collection), and their own pricing page will tell you expense tracking is included free. But the accounting tools that matter for taxes, meaning P&L, cash-flow reporting, and connected bank accounts beyond the basics, live behind the Pro plan at $199 per year. And it's annual-only billing: no monthly option, so you're committing the full $199 up front.

The deeper problem is what the books look like once you're in. TurboTenant logs income and expenses, but there's no job or project layer, so a $6,000 kitchen rehab lands as a pile of loose line items you'll have to re-group by hand at tax time. If you've ever tried to explain to a CPA which receipts belonged to the remodel and which were one-off repairs, you know exactly what that pile costs you. Context is the only conversation an accountant needs that isn't on the P&L, and TurboTenant doesn't capture it.

Worth saying plainly: as a property management tool, TurboTenant is strong, and the free tier is real. If your vacancy problem is bigger than your bookkeeping problem, it's a reasonable pick. It's just not the answer to "who does the books." Our full TurboTenant review goes deeper on where it shines and where the accounting gap opens up.

Is RentRedi's included accounting the real thing?

Half of it, yes. This is the part where I give credit: RentRedi is the only one of the three that includes a Schedule E summary and receipt capture in its base subscription, at $12 a month billed annually ($144/year) on their flat-rate plan. No per-unit fees, same feature set at every billing term. In a category full of bait pricing, that's genuinely honest.

The catch is the ceiling. RentRedi's built-in Accounting Suite handles expense tracking, receipt uploads, and a Schedule E summary. But if you want real double-entry books (balance sheet, advanced financial reporting, the stuff a lender or a growing portfolio eventually demands), that's the REI Hub add-on, billed separately on a per-unit ladder: $25/month for 1-3 units, $39/month at 4-10, up to $99/month unlimited, per RentRedi's own help docs. And it auto-bumps: add unit number four and your accounting bill jumps from $25 to $39 without anyone asking you.

Two more honest flags. First, there's no job or project grouping in the built-in suite, so the rehab-vs-repair problem is yours to solve in a spreadsheet anyway. Second, RentRedi's most-reported complaint cluster is payment processing (held funds, verification delays), which isn't a bookkeeping flaw but is worth knowing before your rent money flows through it. Our RentRedi review covers the full picture. On the books specifically, though: the included suite is the best of these three at the price.

Is Stessa the bookkeeping answer?

Stessa is the closest to a real bookkeeping tool of the three, and it still gates the two features you actually need. The free Essentials tier gives you unlimited properties, automatic bank feeds, and basic reports, which is legitimately useful for portfolio visibility. But receipt scanning is capped at 5 scans per month on both Essentials and the $12/month Manage tier. Five. If you close on a property, turn a unit, or just have a busy repair month, you're over the cap by the second week.

Schedule E starts at Manage ($12/month annual), which sounds reasonable until you pair it with the scan cap. To get unlimited scanning and Schedule E together, you're at Pro: $28/month billed annually, $336/year, per Stessa's pricing page. And the one feature I consider non-negotiable, project expense tracking (their version of job grouping), is Pro-only too.

I say this from experience: I tried Stessa before building Doortrackr, and I quit in frustration. I couldn't believe it cost $28 a month just to combine expenses into projects, and even after paying, doing it wasn't straightforward. Their own community complaints cluster around support (multi-week waits) and bank connections breaking via Plaid, which matters a lot when your whole bookkeeping flow depends on the feed staying alive. If you're a spreadsheet person who wants free portfolio dashboards and you'll enter expenses by hand, Essentials is a fair deal. If you want the receipts actually captured, the math lands at $336/year. Full teardown in our Stessa review.

What would each of these actually cost me at 3 units?

The honest annual bill for a 3-property landlord who needs receipt capture, Schedule E, and job grouping. This is the table none of the vendor-written comparisons will show you, because every one of them loses it.

Platform	What you need for the books	Annual cost at 3 units
TurboTenant	Pro (accounting tools). No job grouping at any price.	$199 ($16.48/mo, annual only)
RentRedi	Base plan (Schedule E included). +$25/mo if you want full double-entry via REI Hub. No job grouping in the base suite.	$144 base; $444 with REI Hub
Stessa	Pro (unlimited scans + Schedule E + project tracking)	$336 ($28/mo, annual)
Doortrackr	Plus (everything unlimited, jobs included, no gates)	$83.88 ($6.99/mo)

And if you're at 1 property: Doortrackr's free tier does all five bookkeeping jobs with no caps, which makes it the only genuinely free bookkeeping option in this comparison. TurboTenant free is a real free tier too, but what it's free at is property management, not books.

One fair note in the other direction: if you need listings, screening, and leases plus books, none of these four is the whole answer by itself, and that includes mine. TurboTenant-free for the tenant-facing work plus a real bookkeeping tool is a combination a lot of landlords land on, and it's cheaper than forcing one platform to be both.

So which one should you actually pick?

If your vacancy pipeline is the fire, pick TurboTenant and let the free tier earn its keep. If you want one subscription that covers management and passable books, RentRedi's $144/year is the honest middle. If you're an investor first and want portfolio analytics with a bank feed, Stessa Essentials is a reasonable free dashboard as long as you can live inside 5 scans a month. And if the books are the actual problem, that's the specific thing we built Doortrackr to do.

Here's my bias, fully disclosed: I built Doortrackr because none of these tools would let me snap a receipt at the hardware store, tag it to the right property and the right job, and move on with my day in 30 seconds. Income entries take about 10 seconds. Every expense gets an IRS Schedule E category from a dropdown at the moment you log it, so nothing needs to be reconstructed in March. The Schedule E report, the PDF for your CPA, the CSV export, the job grouping: all of it is on every tier, including free. No scan caps, no add-on ladders, no annual-only lock-in.

If that sounds like the problem you actually have, start free with one property and see if a receipt really does take 30 seconds. Your accountant will love you. If it turns out your real headache is screening tenants, I'll be the first to tell you to go grab TurboTenant instead.

Want the deep dives first? They're all here: TurboTenant review, RentRedi review, Stessa review, and the broader best accounting software for rental property roundup. For the full system these tools plug into, start with tracking rental income and expenses.

Frequently asked questions

Is TurboTenant or RentRedi better for a small landlord?

For tenant-facing management, TurboTenant's free tier is hard to beat (listings, screening, rent collection at $0). For bookkeeping, RentRedi wins on paper: its $144/year base plan includes a Schedule E summary and receipt capture, while TurboTenant gates accounting tools behind Pro at $199/year. Neither groups expenses by job, which is what makes repair-vs-capitalization answerable at tax time.

Is Stessa really free?

Stessa's Essentials tier is free and genuinely includes unlimited properties, bank feeds, and basic reports. The catch is the caps: receipt scanning is limited to 5 scans per month on Essentials and Manage, and the Schedule E report starts at the $12/month Manage tier. Unlimited scanning plus Schedule E together require Pro at $28/month billed annually.

Does TurboTenant have accounting?

TurboTenant includes basic expense tracking on its free plan, but the full accounting tools (P&L, cash-flow reporting, unlimited connected bank accounts) are exclusive to the Pro plan at $199 per year, billed annually with no monthly option. There's no job or project grouping at any tier.

Does RentRedi charge extra for accounting?

The built-in Accounting Suite (receipt capture, expense tracking, Schedule E summary) is included in RentRedi's base subscription at no extra cost. Full double-entry accounting via the REI Hub integration costs extra: $25/month for 1-3 units, scaling to $99/month unlimited, billed separately from your RentRedi subscription.

TurboTenant vs RentRedi vs Stessa: which is cheapest for bookkeeping?

At 3 units with receipt scanning and Schedule E included: Doortrackr Plus at $83.88/year, then RentRedi at $144/year (base suite), TurboTenant at $199/year (Pro, annual-only), and Stessa at $336/year (Pro). At 1 property, Doortrackr's free tier is the only option with unlimited scanning, Schedule E, and job grouping at $0.

---

Disclosure: I founded Doortrackr, which competes with all three tools in this comparison. Pricing and feature claims were verified against each vendor's live pricing page and help documentation on October 5, 2026, with links above. If a vendor's pricing page disagrees with anything here, the pricing page wins.