SealedFolio vs QuickBooks
for Rental Properties

The QuickBooks problem for landlords

Look, QuickBooks is genuinely good at what it was designed to do. Invoicing, payroll, accounts receivable, it handles all of that for millions of businesses without complaint. But rental property management is its own thing, and QuickBooks doesn't address these gaps out of the box:

• No built-in Schedule E mapping. You're on your own building a chart of accounts that lines up with Schedule E line items. Miscategorize one expense and your tax report is quietly wrong, until your accountant catches it in April.
• No real estate depreciation. QuickBooks has basic fixed asset depreciation, but it won't handle mid-month conventions, the 27.5-year residential schedule, or separate improvement assets. That's a problem if you're trying to get depreciation right without paying your CPA to do it manually.
• No per-property analytics. You can track by class or project, but that requires manual setup for each property. And even then, it won't calculate cap rate, cash-on-cash return, or ROI per property, not natively.
• Overkill, honestly. QuickBooks has hundreds of features built for service businesses, retailers, and freelancers. As a landlord, you're probably using 15% of the product and paying for the rest.
• Cloud-only, no exceptions. QuickBooks Online stores your financial data on Intuit's servers. The desktop version was discontinued for new purchases. Your data lives in the cloud whether you chose that or not.

What SealedFolio does differently

SealedFolio is built specifically for rental property owners. Every feature, category, and report exists because landlords need it, not because it was useful for a plumbing supply company in 2003:

• Schedule E categories are the default. When you log an expense, you pick from IRS-aligned categories, advertising, cleaning, insurance, mortgage interest, repairs, taxes, utilities, that map directly to Schedule E. No chart of accounts to configure. No guessing.
• Depreciation is automatic. Enter your purchase price, land value, and acquisition date. SealedFolio handles the 27.5-year residential schedule, mid-month conventions, and generates the right number for Schedule E. Add an improvement and it spins up a new depreciation asset automatically.
• Per-property dashboards. Cash flow, cap rate, ROI, vacancy rate, expense breakdown, all of it, per property and across your whole portfolio. At a glance.
• Your data stays on your device. Local encrypted vault, no Intuit account, no data mining. Your financial records belong to you.