I built rental accounting software because REI Hub broke my balance sheet

I own a couple of multifamily properties in Boston with a business partner. Nothing huge — just the kind of small portfolio where you're personally involved in every decision and every dollar matters. When tax season rolled around, I needed accounting software that could handle a two-member LLC filing a 1065 partnership return. That narrowed the field pretty fast.

QuickBooks felt like overkill — built for a restaurant, not a landlord. Stessa is great for solo landlords but it's not real double-entry accounting and doesn't handle multi-member LLCs. Baselane is excellent for banking but doesn't have a real balance sheet yet. Then I found REI Hub.

REI Hub was close. Really close. Double-entry, proper balance sheet, mortgage payment splitting, Schedule E reports — all for $15/month. I set it up, connected my bank accounts, and started entering loan balances.

That's where things went sideways.

The bug that cost me three evenings

When you add a property loan in REI Hub, there's a field called "Current Loan Balance." Looks exactly like you'd expect — enter your balance, move on.

Except it doesn't post to your books. It's a display field. The software shows it on screen, but it never becomes a journal entry. Your liabilities section looks populated. Your balance sheet looks like it should work. But partner equity is off by a substantial amount, and the sheet just won't balance.

I'm a software engineer — I can read a support doc. But most landlords aren't, and a balance sheet that looks right but isn't is exactly the kind of thing that erodes trust in otherwise solid software.

The other patterns I kept hitting

It wasn't just REI Hub. A few things came up consistently across every tool I tried:

• Rule-based categorization breaks down fast.Rules work great when bank descriptions are clean. They fall apart when you get "ROTO ROOTER 87329-A" or "PAYMT FROM SMITH J" — which is most of the time. AI handles these naturally. Rules don't.
• Multi-member LLCs are an afterthought.Most tools assume one landlord, one login, one Schedule E. If you have a partner, you're patching around the tool instead of using it.
• Partnership return support is basically nonexistent. None of the tools I tried handled partner capital accounts, profit allocations, or K-1 generation natively. You were expected to export reports and let your accountant figure out the rest.

So I built something

I was planning to build tooling for my own properties anyway. After hitting the same walls everywhere I looked, I figured: if I have to solve these problems for myself, I might as well solve them properly.

Kulta is what came out of that. The things it does differently:

• Loan setup creates the opening balance journal entry automatically.Enter your loan balance, you're done. The balance sheet balances. No support articles required.
• AI categorization, not rules. Messy bank descriptions get handled correctly without you maintaining a ruleset.
• Built for multi-member LLCs from day one.Partner access, capital accounts, and partnership-friendly reporting aren't add-ons.
• Works for any landlord, not just LLC owners.Solo landlord filing Schedule E on a personal return? That works too. The partnership features are there when you need them, invisible when you don't.

To be fair: REI Hub is solid software and the team clearly cares about it. For a sole owner who doesn't need partnership accounting, it's a legitimate choice. I just needed something different.

Kulta has a free tier — not a trial, an actual free plan. Connect your bank, categorize transactions, run reports. No credit card. If you're a landlord who's been frustrated with tools that almost work, it's worth a look at kulta.app.