AppFolio Bookkeeping and Accounting Support
A CPA working directly in your AppFolio instance. Owner statements that reconcile, trust and deposit accounts that tie tenant by tenant, management fees posted in the period they belong to, and a month-end close that lands on the same day every month. If your balances stopped tying somewhere and nobody can say when, that is a solvable problem.
Software knowledge is not the same as property accounting.
Plenty of people can navigate AppFolio. Far fewer can tell you why the owner statement disagrees with the bank, whether a cost is recoverable from tenants at year end, or which entity should be carrying an expense. Property accounting is not general small business accounting with different account names: money moves between entities, some of the cash in the operating account is not yours to spend, and the person who owns the building is not the person managing it.
Diana Posner is a CPA and Certified Fraud Examiner who audited real estate and construction companies for the first half of her career, then ran finance inside a real estate management and development company. The software is the tool. The judgement is the service.
Worked in AppFolio every month
- Owner statements, draws, and distributions
- Trust and security deposit account reconciliation
- Bank reconciliation across operating, trust, and deposit accounts
- Management fee posting and accrual
- Vendor payables, expense coding by property, and 1099 filing
- Rent roll tie-outs, receivables, and delinquency review
- Month-end close on a published schedule
- Diagnosing balances that stopped tying months ago
When the setup is the problem
- Chart of accounts rebuilt to produce real property-level reporting
- GL accounts mapped to the correct financial statement lines
- Property, owner, and entity structure corrected for consolidation
- Balances stranded by a prior migration traced and cleared
- Recoverable expenses flagged so CAM reconciliation is possible at year end
- Reporting templates set up so your team can pull what they need directly
Running AppFolio and QuickBooks together.
The common structure is AppFolio running the properties and QuickBooks carrying the management company or the ownership entities. It works well until nobody owns the seam between them, at which point intercompany activity drifts, management fees are recorded once on one side and never on the other, and consolidated reporting becomes a manual spreadsheet that everyone distrusts. We work in both and treat the seam as part of the job.
Questions we get asked.
Do you work inside our AppFolio account?
Yes. We work directly in your AppFolio instance rather than exporting to a separate system and handing back a spreadsheet. You keep ownership of the account and control the access level, and the reporting your team already runs stays where it is.
Our owner statements do not match the bank. Where does that usually come from?
Almost always one of a handful of causes: distributions recorded in a different period than they cleared, security deposits sitting in the operating balance, management fees accrued but never drawn, owner contributions posted to income, or a reconciliation that has quietly been off for several months. Finding it is a matter of working the reconciliation back to the last month that tied, which is exactly what we do first.
Can you fix an AppFolio setup someone else configured badly?
Yes. A chart of accounts that cannot produce clean property-level reporting, GL accounts mapped to the wrong statement line, properties and owners structured so consolidation is impossible, or a migration that left balances behind are all fixable. We correct the structure before recoding activity, because doing it in the other order means doing it twice.
Do we have to leave AppFolio to work with you?
No, and we would usually advise against changing systems while the books are unreliable. Fix the accounting first, then decide whether the software is genuinely the constraint. We work in AppFolio and QuickBooks, and plenty of clients run both.
Can you handle both AppFolio and QuickBooks?
Yes, and that combination is common: AppFolio running the properties and QuickBooks carrying the management company or the ownership entities. We keep the two consistent, handle the intercompany activity between them, and produce consolidated reporting across the whole structure.
How do you handle security deposits and trust funds in AppFolio?
Deposit and trust funds are reconciled separately from operating cash, tenant by tenant, so what is held in trust ties to what is owed back and neither is quietly funding the other. New Jersey sets specific requirements for holding residential security deposits and paying interest to tenants, and licensed brokers have separate obligations for client funds. We work to your obligations under those rules and will say plainly if what we find does not meet them. This page is general information, not legal advice.
Tell us what is not tying.
A free consultation, no pitch. Describe what AppFolio is telling you and what you expected instead, and we will tell you where that usually comes from.
diana@posneraccountingsolutions.com
Cranford, New Jersey. Serving New Jersey and the New York metro area.