Property Management Trust Accounting, Handled Every Day

Trust accounting, also called trust fund accounting, is how a property manager keeps track of money held for other people, such as rent collected for owners and tenant security deposits. That money stays in trust bank accounts, separate from the company's operating funds, and is recorded by owner, property, and tenant. The trust accounts are reconciled regularly so the bank balance, the books, and each ledger agree.

Trust Bookkeeping is full service, so our team does the data entry. We enter payables (vendor invoices and owner and management company bills), approve check runs, enter receivables like tenant payments and reimbursements, and reconcile your trust bank accounts every day. We also handle diagnostics, cash suspect and tenant liability corrections, fix system errors that come up after go-live, help with reporting, and raise red flags like negative properties and uncleared deposits. You get a dedicated account manager supported by a team of bookkeepers.

A three-way reconciliation confirms that three numbers agree: the trust bank balance, the balance in your books, and the total of your individual owner and tenant ledgers. Many state regulators expect property managers to keep their trust accounts reconciled this way. Yes, we handle it. Reconciling your trust accounts, including the three-way reconciliation, is part of Trust Bookkeeping.

That is what the service is built for. We reconcile your trust bank accounts daily and raise red flags like negative properties and uncleared deposits as soon as they show up. On AppFolio, Buildium, and Rentvine, our proprietary audit software also runs daily checks to keep your books audit-ready. APM Help clients have had a 100% trust audit pass rate since 2017.

AppFolio, Buildium, Rentvine, and Propertyware, and we have official partnerships with AppFolio and Buildium. We use QuickBooks Online only for corporate books, which is a separate add-on.

You’ll be paired with an Account Manager as close to your timezone as possible. Our working business hours are 8am to 6pm Central, Monday through Friday. We utilize Asana, a work management platform, to communicate with anyone with your team that would be a main point of contact. It helps with keeping track of items sent and ensures we have a searchable paper trail. Your Account Manager will have a dedicated team of bookkeepers to manage daily tasks and schedule screenshare meetings as needed.

If it relates to your property management bookkeeping, we want it, please! We will enter all your tenant receipts, bank deposits, invoices, work orders, signed leases, and more. We like to enter all things that relate to the movement of money on your properties. Through Asana (and your database), we leave confirmation of everything we touch so that you can easily reference it again.

During your pilot period, we work closely with you to ensure we match all your important payment dates and accounting cycles, so that your owners and vendors don’t know anything has changed.

We have an internal checklist that your Account Manager will review weekly prior to sending any payments for authorization. If you use paper checks printed in your office, we will finalize these and send to you or our main point of contact to print and mail. If you use online payables, we will verify all funds in your bank account before sending you (or your eCheck approver) the batch to review and approve. We have a dedicated eCheck approver from your team who will release the funds with a code before anyone gets paid, so you will always have the ability to reject this or do a final review.

Sure! During your onboarding period, we will review what your security deposit turnaround time is, as this varies by state. We will also determine what move out workflow will work best. You or our point of contact can create a task in Asana in regards to the move out or we can communicate in Asana when a security deposit due date is approaching and double check with you that all your tenant charges have been received. We can also enter estimates on upcoming work if you haven’t yet received invoices.