Yardi Breeze

Pros

There are three things that stand out, Online Payments with RentCafe is very easy to set up and tenant love it, we have 100% adoption for online payments. The Owner Portal has had much bigger impact that we expected, we several owner who outside the country and in other states, having not a document repository but not having to send tons of emails, the owners can review documents on their schedule and they know where to locate agreements, insurance policies, etc. Lastly, generating monthly could be easier!

Cons

Being a long Yardi Voyager user, not having the ability to export data into Excel for custom reports or special projects is something I would really like to see.

Pros

Easy to list properties online for potential residents to find. Easy to set up online payment for residents. Customer support has been responsive and helpful. Some nice, innovative features on the property management side of the software.

Cons

The accounting side of the software is pretty weak and clunky compared to competitors. There's no way to set up bank feeds, so cash reconciliations are 100% manual. The way banks are paired with GL accounts is convoluted and difficult to set up and understand. You can attach documents to payables and receivables (great!) but not to general journal entries (why not?). There is no way to customize basic financial reports in the way you would in software like QuickBooks. Customer support chat feature doesn't work with my company but other companies' chat features (e.g. Intuit) work just fine. Navigation is clunky - it often takes several clicks to get where you need to go. There is a "Favorites" feature that allows you to create your own list of frequently visited areas in the software, but that in and of itself is pretty clunky and confusing, and I shouldn't have to set up favorites in well-designed software. I've had weird errors here and there that customer service couldn't explain and that were solved using a silly workaround (such as removing a couple of lines from a journal entry and putting them into a separae entry). There is no way to "hard close" your books for a given period, so there is nothing stopping a user from posting transactions into a closed period, so if you're a company that needs to get an audit, don't use Yardi. Overall, the accounting side of this software feels like a beta test - it's pretty good, but it's not quite fully baked.

Pros

It was about $150 per month less than Appfolio. We are a very small company and It was strictly the cost savings that prompted us to change. Beyond that, truly Appfolio is heads and shoulders over Yardi Breeze.

Cons

Where to begin -- here are just a few things. We were lead to believe that we would be able to pay owner monthly distributions by ACH or E-check. We submitted all the required documentation. When it came time to do our first owner check run, it wasn't happening. We were told we "didn't request this feature, which is nonsense, we did everything as instructed. We had to instead print paper checks, and tell each owner what happened. And now, it appears we will need to do paper checks again for February, because they are still monkeying around getting us this functionality.

The owner statements are horrible, and will be the cause of much confusion. They list the opening balance at the top of the statement, and the closing balance at the bottom -- all good. BUT they then list the line items of income and expenses from LATEST to OLDEST, so the running balance is totally worthless, since it never reflects historically what the balance actually was after any particular trans action.

The Tenant refundable deposits are co-mingled with the seller's funds, so you must explain to an owner that although it shows $xxxx.00 in their account, $yyyy.oo of that is tenant security and is not the owner's funds. The statement should show the owners funds, and perhaps a separate place on the statement showing current tenant security deposit being held in trust.

When printing a check to a vendor, which may cover a number of invoices from a number of different owners or properties, there is no line item detail on the check stub -- just one bulk amount, which makes it impossible for the vendor and the management company to know exactly what part of the check is meant to be applied to which invoice.

Oh, and there is no tax module for folks in Arizona or elsewhere if you need to collect and remit SALES tax charged monthly on the rent.

We posed questions to Support about how to manage particular functions, and on occasion were told to ask our accountant! We weren't asking accouting questons, we knew what had to be done, but not how to do it on their system.

I could go on and on, but I'll stop here for now

Pros

It is genuinely the most user-friendly software I've used. Almost everything is self-explanatory and if you not, the help section will easily guide you. Plus the chat feature is a lifesaver in getting an issue resolved quickly.

Cons

There are some features that could be added, like the ability to add photos to a maintenance request, more specific reports on insurance, more customizable reports in general.

Pros

The rent collection is most helpful feature. Reports are incredibly easy to send out to owners each month. The accounting system is extremely robust. I was able to get up and running pretty quickly. However I am still learning new features all the time.

Cons

The implementation time was very long, over a year. However, my previous setup was not able to be imported (manual system) so I understand why. Nevertheless, I would not change anything. We are very happy to be in the cloud with Yardi Breeze.