Own your books.
Own the software.
Forever.
Rental Tab is a bookkeeping software designed specifically for small real estate investors under 100 units. Landlords who were made to own their software, not lease it. It’s a desktop application that lives on your computer and keeps your data at a location you choose. Encrypted, password protected, owned.
$289 buys it for life. Not $289 a year, not $289 per version, not $289 per property. $289, one time, and it’s all yours forever.
What we stand for
Our promises, and we will not waver on any of them
Most accounting software rents you access to your own numbers. We think that is backwards. Here is what Rental Tab commits to, in writing.
No Subscription
You buy the software and it is yours. No monthly bill, no renewal notice, no card on file that quietly goes up every January. You stop paying for accounting software the day you decide we are the solution for you.
Money Back Guarantee
Accounting software is a relationship that must stand the test of time. We realize that it’s hard to evaluate a product like this without taking it for a test drive. We offer a no questions asked 30 day moneyback guarantee once to each customer.
Simple on purpose
Built for someone with three doors, not a CPA firm with three hundred clients. The tools you need along with a clear and intuitive workflow that will have you up and running your books in less than a hour
Security Is Paramount
Every company file includes a 256 bit encryption protocol and designed to be stored where you need it most. Use your own cloud service to ensure your books and attachments are never lost and your data doesn’t not live on a server you cannot control.
One price for life
One version of Rental Tab, and you get all of it. No Basic, no Pro, no feature you can see but cannot click. No paid upgrade when version 2 ships. You install it once and each upgrade is available to you through your assigned product key. The $289 you pay today is the last $289 you pay us. Ever.
No Limits
No limits are imposed on the user to throttle their experience or entice them to upgrade in any way. As the software adapts and improves you will be able to opt in or opt out of those new releases.
Full Data Control
Our software was designed around the principle that it’s your data and you should have full control over it. Your backups will never exist on our servers, and your data will remain yours.
Grow With Us
We’ve trimmed down the bulky cloud based bookkeeping experience to a cost effective option that relies on your expertise as a landlord to use the right tool for the right job. As we grow, you’ll grow along with us and we expect you’ll need sharp tools in the future.
The arithmetic
A subscription is a rent payment for your software.
Bookkeeping is not a service you consume once. You will keep books for as long as you own property: ten years, twenty, until you sell. Software priced per month knows this, and prices accordingly.
Rental Tab is priced like a tool: you pay for it, you own it, and it keeps working. Ten years from now the number is still the number, because a lifetime price means the total never moves, not that it moves slowly.
Updates included the whole way. The only thing that ever changes is the version number.
Your computer
Copy them. Email them to your accountant. Put them on a drive in a safe. They are your files.
Pillar two, in practice
A company is a file, exactly the way it used to be
Each property, LLC, or set of books is one file that you name, save where you want, and back up yourself, the way you would treat a document. Restoring a backup never silently overwrites the books you already have.
There is no account to create. No sync. No server holding your general ledger hostage while a support ticket sits in a queue. If our website vanished tomorrow, the copy on your machine would keep working and your files would keep opening.
- Works with no internet connection at all
- Back up to any drive, folder, or cloud you already pay for
- Quick reports for you CPA at year end
One click, two views
Every door on its own. The whole portfolio together. Same click.
Most landlords end up keeping two sets of numbers: one per property, because that is how you decide what to sell and what to refinance, and one for everything, because that is what the lender and the tax return want. Keeping both in a spreadsheet is where the evenings go.
Rental Tab keeps one set. Switch to a single property and the whole app follows: reports, registers, tax figures, all of it filtered to that door. Switch back to the portfolio and it adds up. Nothing to rebuild, nothing to re-tag, no pivot table.
- Every report runs per property or across the portfolio
- Spot the one door that is quietly losing money
- Hand a lender the whole picture, or one building
Profit and loss, this month
Try it. This is the same switch the app puts at the top of every report.
What it does for you
Less time on the books. More confidence in them.
You did not buy rental property to become a bookkeeper. Rental Tab is built to get the month closed quickly and leave you sure the numbers are right.
Rent in, bills out
Bill a tenant, record what they paid, enter a bill, write a check. Every screen is named after the thing you are actually doing, so there is nothing to translate first.
Let the bank do the typing
Import the file your bank already gives you and clear a month in one sitting. Categorize, match to a bill you already entered, or ignore it. No keying transactions one at a time.
Know it is right, not hope it is
Reconcile against the statement and it will not let you call it done while a difference is still sitting there. Click any figure in any report to see exactly what is behind it.
Tax time stops being a scramble
Your accounts already line up the way Schedule E wants them, and the contractors you paid are tracked for 1099s. Your accountant gets a clean file instead of a shoebox.
The paperwork stays with the money
Leases, receipts, and statements attach to the transaction they belong to and are encrypted with everything else. No more hunting through three years of email for one invoice.
Real books underneath
Under the plain screens is proper double-entry accounting, not a glorified spreadsheet. The numbers hold up when a lender, a partner, or the IRS asks to see them.
Prefer the full list? Open it here
Money in
- Invoices for rent, late fees, and anything else you bill
- Receive payments against the right invoice, with balances that stay honest
- Sales receipts when the money and the invoice are the same moment
- Security deposits tracked as the liability they are
Money out
- Enter bills and pay bills, with per-line categories
- Write checks on a check that looks like a check
- Credit cards as their own accounts, reconciled like any other
- Mortgage payment splits across principal, interest, and escrow
Getting transactions in without typing them
- Bank and card import from the file your bank already gives you
- A review queue: add it, categorize it, mark it a transfer, or ignore it
- Match downloads to open bills instead of double-entering them
- Recurring and memorized transactions for the ones that repeat
Making sure it is right
- Reconcile against the statement, with one number that has to hit zero
- Drill from any figure down to the transaction that caused it
- Register and journal views for when you need to see the raw entries
- Verify Company Books, an integrity check that re-derives the books and never changes data
Reports and tax time
- Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, General Ledger, Trial Balance
- Per-property reporting, so every door stands on its own
- Tax Center that lines your accounts up with Schedule E
- 1099 tracking for the contractors you paid
The property side
- Properties, leases, and tenants in one place
- Vendors and customers with history you can actually find
- Attachments: receipts and leases stored with the transaction, encrypted
- Mileage and reminders for the things that slip
Pillar four
Encryption that assumes the worst about your laptop
Your books hold bank balances, tenant names, and every dollar you have made. A laptop gets stolen. A backup drive gets left at an office. Rental Tab is built so that neither one hands your ledger to a stranger.
Encrypted on disk, per company
Each company file gets its own encryption key. Cracking one tells an attacker nothing about the next. The encryption is bound to the company itself, so a file cannot be swapped underneath you.
Backups are encrypted too
A backup is not a plain copy of your data. Put one in a cloud folder or on a thumb drive without worrying about what it would mean if the drive walked off.
Cold open requires sign-in
Opening a file on a machine that has not been unlocked means signing in first. Attachments, including the lease PDFs and receipt photos, are encrypted along with everything else.
Rental Tab is checked by an automated certification suite of more than 300 tests covering the ledger, the cryptography, backup and restore, and deliberate attacks on the file format.
Pillar three
You should be done in an evening, not a quarter
Small-portfolio bookkeeping does not need an implementation consultant. It needs software that opens, does the thing, and closes.
No setup wizard marathon
Make a company, name your properties, pick your accounts. You can be entering real transactions the same evening you install it.
Words that mean what they say
Bills are bills. Checks are checks. Nothing is renamed into product vocabulary you have to learn before you can pay the plumber.
One number to chase
Reconciling shows you a single difference. Click any figure in a report and it opens the transactions behind it. No hunting.
Coming from ANOTHER SOFTWARE
Bring your balances with you, to the penny
If you have been keeping books in elsewhere, you do not start over. Keeping a GL export from your current books will allow you to quickly rebuild them in Rental Tab with the help of an IIF Import.
A successful migration brings over your customers, vendors, chart of accounts, and balance sheet. A quick archive of your GL gets you back in motion in the same day.
- Keep each company separate, or fold a property into an existing set of books. Your call.
- Upload an IIF file and enter a quick journal entry to bring your balance sheet current.
- Store an encrypted version of your GL history so you never lose any history.
Import verification
Side by side
How Rental Tab is different
| Rental Tab | Typical cloud accounting subscription | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | $289 once, a lifetime license | Every month, forever, at whatever the price becomes |
| If you stop paying | Nothing. It keeps working. | You lose access to the software, and often to your books |
| Where your books live | A file on your computer | On their servers, under their terms |
| Who can read your ledger | You. It is encrypted on your own disk. | Whoever the vendor’s policies and staff permissions allow |
| Feature tiers | One version. You get all of it. | Basic, Plus, Advanced. The report you want is usually one tier up |
| Cost over 10 years | $289, the same as over 1 year | Ten years of payments, plus every increase along the way |
| Upgrades | Free, for as long as we make them | Bundled into the price that keeps rising |
| Works offline | Completely | No |
| If the company shuts down | Your copy still runs and your files still open | You have however long they give you to get your data out |
The right-hand column describes the subscription model in general terms. Specific vendors differ, so check the current terms of whatever you are comparing against.
Pricing
One lifetime price. That’s the whole page.
Rental Tab lifetime license
Not per month. Not per year. Not per version. Not per property.
- A lifetime license: buy once, use it forever
- The complete application: every feature, no tiers
- No per-property, per-tenant, or per-transaction fees
- Keep as many separate company files as you need
- Every update, including major versions, free forever
- Help moving your books over from QuickBooks Desktop
- Email support from the person who built it
- No subscription, ever
- No renewal, no maintenance fee, no reactivation
- No paid upgrades, not even for major versions
- No account required to use it
Already bought it? Download the latest version with your license key.
Questions
The things people ask first
Really no subscription? What’s the catch?
No catch. Rental Tab runs on your computer, so there are no servers for us to pay for month after month, which is exactly why a monthly bill was never necessary. You buy the software, you own the copy, and it keeps working whether or not you ever hear from us again.
When you say “lifetime,” what exactly does that mean?
It means you pay $289 once and never pay us again for Rental Tab. Not a renewal, not an annual maintenance fee, not a reactivation charge, and not a paid upgrade when a major new version comes out. Your license does not expire and there is nothing to keep current.
If we ever raise the price, that is for new customers. What you paid is what you paid.
What happens when a new version comes out?
You come back to this website, enter your license key on the download page, and get the newest installer. It runs over the top of what you have and your files open the same as before. No charge, ever, including major versions.
Where exactly is my data?
In a file, in a folder you chose, on your machine. Rental Tab does not send your books anywhere. We do not have a copy, cannot produce one, and would not be able to read yours if we somehow had it, because it is encrypted with a key that never leaves your computer.
The only information we hold about you is the order record at Lemon Squeezy, our payment processor: your name, email, and that you bought the software.
How many computers can I install it on?
It is a personal license for you and your own properties. Install it on your desktop and your laptop. If you need to move it to a new machine, just install it there and enter your key again.
Do I need to be an accountant to use it?
No. Rental Tab keeps proper double-entry books underneath, but you work in the screens a landlord actually uses: bills, checks, invoices, bank imports. If you have ever used QuickBooks Desktop, this will feel familiar within an hour. If you haven’t, you will still be fine.
I’m on QuickBooks Desktop now. Can I move?
Yes, and we help with it. You export your company from QuickBooks and the balances are migrated into Rental Tab, checked against your QuickBooks trial balance so the two match to the penny before anything is written. You choose whether each company stays its own file.
It is a guided migration rather than a one-click button, so email us and we will do it with you.
Mac or Windows?
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. There is no Mac build today.
What if I don’t like it?
Email us within 30 days of buying and we will refund you in full. Keep the files you made. They are yours either way.
Who is behind this?
WB Capital LLC, Arizona, USA. Rental Tab was built to keep books on real rental property, and it is still used that way every month. Email support@rentaltab.com and you will reach a person.
Stop renting your accounting software
Buy it once. Keep your data. Keep the copy. $289 for life, and that is the last you will hear from us about money.