How best to account for transfers from PM account to bank account

Setup & Support
1

Hey everyone. Wondering if you can help me think through this.

My Property Management (PM) for most my properties uses Appfolio. This integrates quickly and easily into Stessa. It is brilliant! Then, monthly, my PM transfers funds to my Bank Account. I should note that all properties are held personally, none in an LLC.

My question is around the transfer of funds out of PM account and into Bank account - which create two separate journal entries in Stessa. How should I be categorizing these? My latest thought is that since I use Stessa to keep my P&L and track expenses for tax purposes and NOT as a banking app - I should just delete both those journal entries since the “income” is already shown on the PM account. Then the books show really the sum total of both accounts (PM & Bank) without confusion for the transfers between them.

Thoughts on this approach - or should I handle differently?

2

I’m wondering about best practice on this too

3

It’s really up to you to decide how best to handle these line items. Some investors use the “Transfers > Owner Distributions” bucket to track the movement of funds from the PM to your bank account, while others simply delete these records. The “Transfers” category only shows up “below the line” on your reporting, which avoids double-counting, assuming your PM is already sending through all the underlying income/expense transactions. Make sense?