Property management AP

Accounts payable automation for property management companies

A management company with forty buildings is not one business with one ledger — it is forty small cost centers and a few dozen owners. inletAP is built for that shape.

Start free See how it works

The free plan processes 25 invoices a month with unlimited users, takes no credit card and does not expire. You get your own intake address at the end of setup.

Harborview Apartments1 finding
harborview@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
Bright Green Landscaping$1,595.00
Cedar PointAwaiting approval
cedarpoint@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
Allied Plumbing$980.00
Elm Row TownhomesPosted
elmrow@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com
Metro Electric$412.80

One address per building, so each bill arrives coded to it. An example; yours shows your own properties.

Why property management breaks generic AP software

Every AP tool can code an invoice to an expense account. Very few can answer "which building, which owner, and who on site has to approve it" — which is the entire question in property management.

The coding dimension is a building

In most businesses the question is which department. Here it is which building, often which unit, and then which owning entity. A tool that treats the property as a free-text memo field pushes that work back onto a human.

The approver is on site

The person who knows whether an emergency call-out surcharge is legitimate is that building's property manager — not in accounting, without a ledger login, often on a site visit. So approval routing has to work by property.

The vendors are a long tail

Hundreds of small trades, utilities and suppliers, most of whom will never adopt a supplier portal, and some of whom send a photograph of a hand-written work order. Email capture wins here; portal capture quietly fails.

The economics

Ardent Partners puts the average fully-loaded cost of one invoice at $9.84, and best-in-class AP operations at $2.65 against $12.42 for all others (State of ePayables 2025). At 500 invoices a month that gap is the argument.

The parts built specifically for portfolios

A mailbox per property

A portfolio-wide intake address plus per-property and per-JV addresses on your own intake subdomain. Vendors who service one building send to that building's address, and the coding starts out right.

Property and entity as real fields

Property, entity and GL account live on the document. The property is read off the invoice or the mailbox, the GL account is set by rule, any of them can be corrected on review, and they split where one invoice covers several buildings — and the QuickBooks class follows the property at export.

One invoice split across buildings

A landscaping invoice covering five properties is split on the document — by amount, percent, even share, unit count or square footage — and balanced to the cent. Where those buildings keep separate books, it posts as one bill per company.

Approvals that reach site staff

Route by property to the manager responsible for that building. The queue shows the document, the amount, the property and the time left, and works in a mobile browser.

Posts where your books are

QuickBooks Online bills with vendor, class and GL account mapped, or a configurable CSV for owner-specific ledgers and property management systems without a direct connector.

Duplicate control across a long tail

After extraction, every bill is compared with the invoices you already hold on nine rules and six guards — attachment fingerprint, vendor, number, date and amount. A top-tier match is held out of the export until a person decides.

Why this one

What you get that a horizontal AP tool will not give you

Intake separated by property at the door, so coding does not start from zero on every invoice.
One invoice split across several properties, on five bases, balanced to the cent, and saved as a template for next month.
One invoice posting as several bills where the buildings keep separate books — which the SMB tier of this market does not do at all.
Approval routing to the property manager who actually knows whether the charge is right.
Multi-entity separation for owner and joint-venture books that are genuinely separate.
A CSV mapping flexible enough for owner-specific ledgers that sit outside your main file.
No requirement to replace Yardi, AppFolio, Buildium, Rent Manager or whatever you run today.

Pricing

Sized on invoices, not on doors or on people

Count what your AP mailbox received last month. Under 25 is free; 150 is $39; 500 is $99; 1,500 is $249.

Doors and units do not enter into it, so a portfolio of small buildings is not penalized for being fragmented. Neither does headcount, because users are unlimited on every plan.

Vendors send the invoices, so invoices are what you pay for.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude sales tax, which is added where it applies.

Paid plans renew automatically at the price shown — every month, or every 12 months on annual billing — until you cancel. Cancel any time in billing settings: the next renewal stops and you keep the period you have already paid for.

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Property management AP — common questions

What makes property management AP different from ordinary AP?

Three things at once. The coding dimension is a building rather than a department, so every invoice needs a property and often a unit before it means anything. The approver is frequently the property manager, who is not in accounting and does not want to be. And the books are frequently separated by owner or joint venture, so one management company is really running many small ledgers.

Can inletAP split one invoice across several properties?

Yes, and it is a first-class part of the product rather than a coding trick. A split can be computed by amount, by percentage, evenly, by unit count or by square footage; the amounts are held in integer cents so the rows add to the invoice total exactly; the split saves as a reusable template tied to that vendor; and an approval can be scoped to one property's share. Where the properties keep separate sets of books, the invoice posts as one bill per QuickBooks company.

Can each property have its own invoice email address?

Yes, and it is the cleanest way to run this. Alongside a portfolio-wide intake address you can create a mailbox per property or joint venture — harborview@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com — which routes to that property by default. Hand the address to the vendors who service that building and the coding starts out correct.

Does it work with Yardi, AppFolio, Buildium or RealPage?

None of them is built, and we are not going to imply otherwise. What ships is a QuickBooks Online connector, where your books live there, and a CSV export whose columns you configure yourself — a file you map to whatever your system imports, not a tested profile for any of those four. inletAP is designed to sit in front of your property management system rather than replace it.

How does it handle utility bills and recurring vendor invoices?

The same way as anything else that arrives by email, with vendor mapping doing most of the work — a sender domain matches a vendor alias, and that vendor carries a default GL account. The property comes from the invoice, or from the mailbox the vendor was told to use. Recurring invoices from a mapped vendor are usually the first documents to go through without a human touching them.

We are a small management company. Is this overkill?

The free plan covers 25 invoices a month with no credit card, which is a real portfolio's worth of AP. The reason most small management companies do not have AP automation is that the enterprise platforms will not sell to them and the horizontal SMB tools do not understand property coding — not that the problem is too small.

Keep reading

Splitting one invoice across propertiesFive allocation bases, exact pennies, and one bill per company.Duplicate & price checksEvery bill compared against that vendor's history for that building.For property managersPer-building visibility and approvals from the field.For controllersCoding consistency, multi-entity books and close.QuickBooks AP automationRunning property AP into QuickBooks Online.

Try it on one building before you roll it out

Create a workspace, add a mailbox for a single property, and point a few of that building's vendors at it. The free plan covers 25 invoices a month, which is enough to see whether the coding holds up.

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