Kantivo's Realtors & Property Management edition turns a closing into one guarded journal entry, keeps earnest money and tenant deposits in an escrow ledger that refuses commingling, and runs your doors with one-click rent invoices and a rent roll that tells the truth about what's held.
Try It Free for 30 DaysSale price, brokerage rate, referral off the top, agent tier on the rest — none of it exists in generic accounting software, so it lives in a spreadsheet next to the books. The journal entry gets typed by hand, the spreadsheet and the GL drift apart, and reconciling agent payments at 1099 time becomes an annual archaeology project.
Earnest deposits belong to buyers. Security deposits belong to tenants. State regulators expect both segregated — and a single mis-clicked deposit account in ordinary software quietly spends a tenant's money on payroll. Nothing structural stops it; you find out at audit time.
The split panel recalculates live: gross, referral, agent tier, house net.
One journal: income + receivable, agent and referral payables, all tagged.
Title company pays; the receivable clears. No spreadsheet touched.
The deposit ledger comes from the same trust engine behind Kantivo's Law Firms edition. Every dollar in the escrow account is attributed to a named buyer or tenant; no one's balance can go below zero; entries are write-once with visible voids; and the bank balance always equals the sum of individual ledgers. The dangerous transaction isn't warned about — it's refused.
Each transaction carries its side, client, agent, and figures, with the waterfall — gross minus referral, agent percentage on the remainder, house net — computed live and posted verbatim at closing.
Flag the escrow bank account once; Kantivo builds the offsetting liability and starts per-person tracking. Buyer deposits and tenant deposits live side by side, each untouchable beyond its owner's balance.
Create a building with its whole unit list in one line. Lease only vacant units; collect the deposit straight into escrow; end the lease and the unit reopens on its own.
One click drafts the month's rent invoice per lease, coded to Rental Income and tagged to the property. The rent roll shows each lease alongside the deposit genuinely sitting in escrow — uncollected deposits stand out immediately.
Properties register themselves in Kantivo's Property tracking dimension, so any report filters down to one building. Rent tags itself; tag the expenses and the per-property income statement is complete.
Agents are Sales Reps linked to 1099-NEC vendor records, so commission payments accumulate on the right form all year. January is a report, not a project.
Lots of real estate operations do both, and the software market punishes them for it: a brokerage tool here, a per-unit property platform there, and a CPA stitching the ledgers together every spring. Kantivo runs both workflows in one double-entry system — shared clients, shared escrow where appropriate, one set of financials.
Bank feeds, reconciliation, AI-assisted categorization, online invoice payments, bills, custom reports, audit logs, multi-company — the full Kantivo platform is underneath. The edition is the real-estate-shaped front door, not a walled-off mini product.
No. The edition is bundled with Pro and above at the standard annual price — that's the head-to-head against property-management platforms billing per unit per month.
Gross commission debits Commissions Receivable and credits Real Estate Commission Income. The agent's share debits Agent Commissions Expense and credits Commissions Payable, tagged to that agent. A referral fee posts the same way against the referring vendor. When the title company's check arrives, a second entry clears the receivable into your bank.
From the agent's tier on their Sales Rep record (say 70%). The referral fee comes off the gross first, then the tier percentage applies to the remainder. Any deal can override the percentage before closing.
The ledger itself. Each buyer's and tenant's money is tracked individually inside the flagged escrow account, and any outflow is checked against that person's balance under a lock — overdrawing one person or applying their funds elsewhere is rejected, not warned about. History is write-once; the only correction is a void with a recorded reason.
One action: itemized deductions (cleaning, repairs) move to operating as Damage & Cleaning Recovery income, the rest refunds to the tenant with a check number on record, the lease ends, and the unit opens for the next tenant. Deductions above the held deposit are refused.
Yes. Each property is a value in the built-in Property dimension; filter any income statement by it in Reports Studio. Rent invoices from this edition tag themselves — tag the building's expenses on entry and both sides of the P&L fill in.
Today each lease drafts its month's invoice in one click with duplicate protection, and memorized transactions can automate steady cases. A batch "invoice all leases for the month" run is on this edition's roadmap.
Immediately. Underneath it's standard double-entry — receivables, payables, income accounts, and a trust liability. The vertical adds enforcement and shortcuts, not exotic structures.
30-day free trial. Realtors & Property Management edition included.