Plenty of tools let a tenant pay online. The gap is what happens next. Rentwelly connects your own Stripe account and posts every charge, fee, and partial payment to a double-entry general ledger as it clears.
Online rent collection is close to a commodity. Almost every property-management app can put a pay button in front of a tenant, and Stripe itself will happily take the card. What none of that solves is the bookkeeping tail: a payment arrives, and now something has to decide which invoice it settles, what the processing fee did to your margin, and how that shows up on the property's profit and loss.
In most setups a human does that. Rent comes in through one system, then gets exported, categorised, and re-entered into QuickBooks — usually weeks later, usually by someone guessing at which unit a deposit belonged to. That is where small portfolios lose their books.
Rentwelly treats the Stripe charge as an accounting event rather than a notification. The webhook that confirms the payment is the same code path that writes the journal entry. There is no window in which the payment exists in one place and not the other.
Stripe Express onboarding runs inside Rentwelly. You keep the account, the payout schedule, and the relationship with Stripe. Rentwelly is not the merchant of record for your rent.
Recurring rent, late fees, utility splits, and one-off charges become invoices with a real balance. The tenant pays through Stripe Checkout from the tenant portal.
Stripe confirms the charge and the payment is written to the general ledger against that invoice — cash up, receivable down, processing fee recorded as its own expense.
The property P&L, rent roll, A/R aging, and owner statement reflect the payment immediately. There is no export step and no month-end reconciliation against a payments dashboard.
Some rent platforms collect into their own account and then pay you out. That is simpler to build and worse for you: your money sits inside someone else's balance, the payout timing is their decision, and if the relationship ends you are negotiating for funds rather than closing an account.
With Connect, the charge is a direct charge on your Stripe account. You see it in your own Stripe dashboard, the payout schedule is yours, disputes are yours to answer, and your rent is never commingled with another landlord's. Rentwelly's job is to tell Stripe what to charge and to write down what happened.
Management companies who do want to pass a processing charge to owners or tenants can enable an application fee in basis points. It is off unless you turn it on, and when it is on it posts to the ledger like any other line so it never quietly disappears into a net number.
Schedule E asks for rents received, gross. If your books net the Stripe fee out of the rent — which happens by default when you import a bank deposit rather than the underlying charge — you understate income and the expense you were entitled to deduct simply vanishes. Recording the charge and the fee separately at the moment of payment fixes that without any year-end cleanup.
The same applies to security deposits taken through Stripe. A deposit is a liability, not income, and it posts as one. Come tax time the difference between a deposit and a rent payment is already reflected in the books rather than being reconstructed from a spreadsheet.
Related: rent collection software, the tenant portal, and property management accounting. Coming from another tool? See the DoorLoop alternative and Stessa alternative breakdowns.
Free for 14 days, no credit card. Connect Stripe, send your first invoice, and watch the ledger update itself.
Yes, and that is the point. Rentwelly uses Stripe Connect, so you onboard your own Stripe Express account from inside Rentwelly and rent is charged directly on your account. The money moves from your tenant to you on Stripe's normal payout schedule. Rentwelly never becomes the merchant of record for your rent.
Yes. When Stripe confirms the charge, a webhook records it against the invoice and posts the entry to your general ledger. Cash goes up, the receivable goes down, and the payment shows on that property's P&L and on the rent roll without you touching anything. That is the part most rent-collection tools leave for you to re-key into QuickBooks.
The fee is a real expense and it is recorded as one, so your P&L shows gross rent collected and processing cost separately rather than netting them into one number. At tax time that matters: the gross figure is what belongs on Schedule E line 3, and the fee is a deductible expense on its own line.
Yes. Partial payments are supported and each one posts as its own ledger entry, so the invoice balance and the A/R aging report stay accurate through the month rather than only being right once the invoice is fully settled.
Rentwelly supports an optional application fee for management companies who want to pass a processing charge through, and it is set to zero unless you turn it on. Your subscription is the flat monthly plan; Rentwelly does not take a percentage of your rent by default.
Stripe is optional. You can record cash, check, or manual bank transfers directly and they post to the same ledger the same way. The integration exists so that online payments do not become a second set of books.
More on the pricing page or contact us.