Buildium reduced my workload by approximately a factor of 5!

Overall, my experience has been fantastic. I took my time onboarding over a period of about 3 months, then I ran the software concurrent to QuickBooks for 2 months, cutting Quickbooks off on Jan 1 and using Buildium exclusively.

Pros

Residents having 24/7 access to their account to make payments and submit requests is a huge time saver. Requests go to the right place automatically and payments are deposited into the proper account. Accounting is a breeze since it is all done online - reconciliations take no time at all!

Cons

I wish it were easier to add residents to leases that have already been signed and to assign leases mid-lease.

Definitely Worth a Try

Overall, I think Buildium is a good company and I think they are struggling with the fast growth process, as many companies do. The cost of their program is less than Appfolio and the folks that work for them are better at helping out with issues. I found Appfolio's phone support to be mostly snarky know-it-alls and patronizing 20-somethings with an attitude who seemed to be bothered by my questions . Buildium support has never come across that way.

Pros

The set up process and assistance in doing it was quite seamless. The ongoing support is there if you need it and the tutorials, although not great or always up to date, do help you figure things out without having to call in.

Cons

The close-out of a tenant can be awkward and not intuitive. The return of security deposits with interest and charging of fees is clunky. Also, when a lease runs out, the system doesn't roll them over to month-to-month. It simply just closes out the lease on line and makes it look like the tenant doesn't live there anymore or owe any rent. This is both frustrating and stressful because if a tenant owes money and decides not to declare that, they could potentially get away without paying rent. There needs to be a change in the rollover of the leases in the system so we don't miss collecting rent.

We've been using Buildium for about 2 years, long enough to get a good feel for its strengths and weaknesses. My overall impression is that this is a good product for small to medium size residential property management firms (10-100 units). If you have fewer than 10, this product is overkill. If more than 100, you'll probably find it too simplistic. The product is geared to residential properties and residential associations. Managing commercial portfolios with it can be difficult. The Good: Accounting functionality is pretty strong. GL, AR, AP, budgets and property ledgers are handled seamlessly. Very easy to use even for beginners. I like the global search functionality. You can pretty much find anything using it without navigating through the menus. Pricing is relatively inexpensive. It's cloud-based, so you don't have to maintain any software on your own computers. You can access it anywhere with a web browser. Some people see this as a negative, but we've not had any issues with Buildium being down unexpectedly. The scheduled maintenance times are generally late at night. Support is good if you're having problems with the standard functionality. In general I would say the support staff understands their product well. And you can get them on the phone to explain things. That's becoming less common with companies today. Document management is hit & miss. I love that I can post a PDF receipt for every expense right there in the ledger. However, documents at the property- or owner level are less helpful. It's just one big bucket per property or owner. Having a folder structure would be a big help. (Not there today.) Buildium offers tenant bill-pay through an online portal for rent payments, and also outbound electronic payments to property owners. It's done through a 3rd party vendor and at additional cost. This is a double-edged sword. Very convenient; it makes the bookkeeping entries for you automatically. But if you're doing outbound payments, make sure to treat it just like an online banking account (long passwords, be careful of who in your office has access to it, etc.) Allowing for extra security questions or letting users limit the IP addresses that have this outbound payment functionality would be helpful. The Bad: As noted, you'll get frustrated if you're trying to use this for commercial properties. The designers make assumptions that you're doing residential. CRM functionality is practically non-existent. This is an accounting package. They do have some decent (and customizable) postal-mail templates and can do mail-merge so you can send notices to tenants and owners. But this does not extend to email. You'll need another product to do CRM and do double data entry between systems. There is no integration layer or API, so no chance of integrating this with your CRM system or generating custom reports. The reports, while nice-looking, are as-is and not customizable in any way. You're stuck with what they give you. They make some odd design decisions sometimes. For example, you can't generate an association owner invoice for an owner who lives someplace other than the managed property. The invoice is always addressed to the managed property, even if you entered a different mailing address for the owner, as if an association owner would never rent out the property. These types of oddities abound, and the product support folks will never acknowledge it as a problem. They'll tell you to fill out an enhancement request, which may be considered for implementation someday, or may not. You'll never know. Providing a way to customize reports or providing an API would help in this area. In Summary: Buildium is good at what it does, but what it does is pretty limited. You will likely be happy if you're in their demographic sweet spot (10-100 residential units). It's cheap enough to sign up and try it out to see if it's right for you. If you manage commercial properties, have a very large or complex portfolio, or need integrated CRM capabilities, it's probably not for you.

Best accounting program for rental property income and expenditure

With Buildium, all my income and expenditure information, receipts and invoices plus lease agreements etc are all stored in the one place. At tax time, printing out reports for my tax agent is simple and quick.

Pros

Easy to use and can cope with multiple properties. Reports can be generated for variations in financial year reporting of different counties. You can set up recurring bills so they appear on your list of things to do which reminds you and you don't have to re-enter all the data each time you have a bill to pay.

Cons

This is an American based program and for American users, it offers the ability to pay bills direct from your bank account etc. For me in Australia, this facility is unavailable.

Gets the Job Done; Would like more Features

Software functions well and is reliable, Customers and Clients tell us they DO NOT like the portal and don't understand reports. I have volunteered to be in a user group to develop reports but have not been contacted yet.

Pros

The software is easy to use and fairly flexible; we do use it in some ways that are not intended to address unique situations. I also like that there is a forum for user requested features where the community can "vote" on improvements.

Cons

Development of new features that are highly requested by the community could be responded to faster. There are also some requests that seem more like fixing a bug than a new feature that are ignored completely. These are things that affect our staff on a daily basis, e.g. emails that are automatically sent to customers and clients that have a link to the message thread in the portal where they can respond directly in thread (which is a good thing)- - EXCEPT the link is so cryptic that the average user does not realize it is a link, so they end up emailing us and we spend countless hours copying and pasting just to try to keep our documentation complete. If the developers would make the link more apparent and/or make email replies automatically update the message thread it would be really great.