Porchyard vs Stessa
Stessa is a strong financial tracker with bank sync and tax reports. Porchyard is where the rest of the work lives: leases, owner agreements, and billing the owners you manage for.
Stessa was built around one question: what did this property earn and spend? It answers it well, with automatic bank feeds and Schedule E reports at tax time. If that is the whole of your problem, it is a good tool and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Porchyard starts from a different question: what do you have to DO this month? Know which lease renews in April. Produce a statement for the owner whose property you manage and take your fee from it. Those are the jobs Stessa leaves to you, and they are the ones Porchyard is built for.
| Feature | Porchyard | Stessa |
|---|---|---|
| Bank Sync | No | Yes |
| Transaction Categorization | Yes | Yes |
| Schedule E Tax Reports | No | Yes |
| Net Cash Flow Dashboard | Per Property, Year to Date | Yes |
| Automated Invoicing | Yes | No |
Stessa stops at the books. Porchyard carries the same categorized transactions through to invoices, leases, and owner statements.
Each billing period drafts its own owner invoice. Review it, send the PDF, and see what is outstanding, overdue or paid across every property.
Attach owners to their properties, calculate your management fee from each billing period's income, and send each owner an itemized invoice.
Porchyard does not connect to your bank. You import transactions from CSV statements you export yourself, and categorize them by property from there. It also does not generate Schedule E reports: you can export clean, categorized data for your accountant, but the form is not produced for you. Both are on the roadmap and neither is available today, so if automatic bank feeds and finished tax forms are what you are shopping for, Stessa is the more complete answer right now.
If you own a handful of properties, do your own bookkeeping, and want the shortest path from a bank account to a tax return, Stessa is a better fit than Porchyard today. Its bank sync removes the CSV step entirely, and its Schedule E output is finished work rather than an export. Choose Porchyard when the work you actually spend time on is tracking leases and billing the owners you manage for.
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