How Much Did You Make This Month? Why Property Managers Struggle to Answer
"Do you know how much you're making this month?"
That’s what Charlotte Muylaert asked one of her property management clients. It’s a question that exposed an industry-wide blindspot: The silence on the other end revealed everything.
Despite managing millions in assets and overseeing complex operations, this successful property management company couldn't answer the most basic business question.
Charlotte, our VP of Client Success at Revela, has spent years helping property management companies transform from reactive service providers into strategic financial advisors. Through her work implementing Revela's integrated platform for hundreds of property managers, she's discovered that the companies achieving sustainable growth share one critical capability: total financial visibility — both for their own business and their client portfolios
Why Smart PMCs Can't Answer Basic Questions
Property management companies collect and distribute a ton of cash on a near daily basis, but they’re unable to get a clear picture of their finances. While they track maintenance requests, lease renewals, and tenant communications meticulously, most property managers cannot provide real-time answers about their profit margins, cash flow patterns, or revenue optimization opportunities.
Property managers face a persistent cash-knowledge problem. "A lot of property managers cannot answer the question [of how much they make per month], “ she explains. “It's kind of mind blowing.”
The problem stems from fragmented systems where financial data remains trapped in isolated accounting software, divorced from the operational intelligence that drives property performance.
This financial blindness cascades throughout the organization. Property managers make operational decisions without understanding their financial impact, miss profit optimization opportunities across their portfolio, and struggle to explain their unique value to property owners. The result is a business model built on reactive problem-solving rather than proactive financial strategy.
The Broken Trust Account System
Most property managers treat financial reporting as a compliance exercise when it should be a strategic intelligence tool. Month-end processes get bogged down in reconciliation across disparate systems. The opportunity for forward-looking insights disappears. Revenue visibility remains limited to individual property performance rather than portfolio-level analysis.
Property managers typically operate under a trust accounting model where all property funds such as rent collections, vendor payments, and owner distributions flow through a single trust account. While this approach is compliant and convenient, it often creates a reconciliation nightmare. With dozens or even hundreds of transactions moving through daily, it becomes difficult to know which funds belong in escrow, which represent management company revenue, and which belong to owners. The result is that many property managers take no action rather than risk moving money to the wrong place, leaving funds sitting idle when they should be working.
This creates several operational limitations: financial data exists in separate systems from operational metrics, making it impossible to connect rent collection efficiency to profit margins or maintenance spending to portfolio returns.
When you don’t understand your finances holistically and spend excessive time reconciling data, you’re missing out on important questions to ask about your business:
- What units have had recurring maintenance requests? Is it time for an upgrade?
- Which owners in your book of business are looking to acquire new properties?
- Which owners are off-loading properties?
- How fast are you turning around units between move-out and new tenant move-in? What can you optimize?
The Financial Maturity Ladder
Muylaert has observed a clear progression pattern among successful property management companies that she describes as an "accounting-first perspective." Rather than attempting to transform overnight, the most successful companies advance through four distinct maturity levels that directly address the core problem of why most property managers cannot answer basic financial questions about their own business:
Level 1: Basic Compliance Operator
This foundational level represents monthly reconciliation, fragmented accounting systems, and reactive financial reporting. Most property managers start here—and unfortunately, many remain stuck, unable to answer the fundamental question of how much they’re making this month.
Level 2: Operational Integration Specialist
These companies have connected workflows, automated billing processes, and trust account clarity. The month-end processes that used to take days now complete in hours, with clear visibility into management revenue and owner balances. They've solved the trust account reconciliation problem.
Level 3: Financial Intelligence Partner
Companies at this level achieve real-time profit analysis and client profitability assessment. They can instantly answer "Which owners generate the highest margins?" and "What's our actual profit per unit this month?" Their integrated revenue reporting enables strategic decisions about resource allocation and client relationships—like Muylaert's client who managed fewer properties but consistently made more money.
Level 4: Strategic Advisor
At the apex, property managers deliver predictive financial planning and asset optimization recommendations. They help owners plan capital expenditures years in advance. These companies also position themselves as indispensable strategic partners rather than replaceable service providers.
The Power of Financial Intelligence
Muylaert worked with a property management company that exemplifies this upgrade. Initially, their controller spent days each month processing owner disbursements and closing books. After implementing integrated financial systems, she says her client ended up saving a lot of time in conducting their monthly reporting.
"It took me less than two hours to do one of their month end processes that used to take her days."— charlotte muylaert, VP OF CLIENT SUCCESS AT REVELA
More significantly, the company gained visibility into which client relationships generated actual value.
"Their unit count actually went down. So they managed less properties, but they consistently made more money.”— charlotte muylaert
This counterintuitive result demonstrated the power of financial intelligence—the company could identify and eliminate unprofitable relationships while focusing resources on high-value clients.
The transformation extends beyond operational efficiency to strategic positioning. With complete financial visibility, property managers can engage in what Muylaert calls asset management rather than property management:
"Asset management is being able to say, ‘Hey, we went out and did an inspection. And you're gonna need these 3 things in the next 5 years. Here's what we anticipate them costing. Let's start stashing money aside for that and plan for that’."— charlotte muylaert
This shift from reactive maintenance to predictive financial planning positions property managers as indispensable strategic advisors rather than replaceable service providers.
5 Financial Intelligence Principles To Follow
These strategic principles emerge from Muylaert's extensive experience helping property management companies climb the maturity ladder. These represent the practical foundations that separate Level 4 strategic advisors from Level 1 compliance operators.
Each principle builds upon the others, creating a comprehensive approach to financial intelligence that transforms both operational efficiency and client relationships:
- Accounting-First Architecture: Build all systems from the books out with comprehensive financial foundations. Every workflow should connect to financial outcomes, enabling property managers to understand the profit impact of operational decisions in real-time.
- Portfolio-Level Intelligence: Move beyond property-by-property reporting to integrated portfolio analysis. Muylaert's clients can now "look at things like occupancy, what percentage of their portfolio is occupied, turn times, how long is it taking them to actually get a property from a tenant moving out to rent ready for a new tenant" across their entire portfolio simultaneously.
- Proactive Financial Planning: Transform from reactive problem-solving to predictive capital management. This involves helping property owners plan for future expenses, optimize cash flow through interest-bearing reserves, and make strategic decisions about property improvements based on return calculations.
- Strategic Client Relationships: Use financial intelligence to identify and cultivate high-value client relationships while eliminating unprofitable ones. "A portfolio of properties is potentially somebody's retirement,” she adds, emphasizing the strategic importance of these relationships. “This is their start to generational wealth."
- Integrated Revenue Development: Expand beyond traditional property management fees by leveraging financial visibility to identify additional revenue opportunities. This includes management markups, financial planning services, and strategic advisory fees that reflect the true value delivered to property owners.
The property management companies that successfully implement these principles gain sustainable competitive advantages through superior financial intelligence, strategic client positioning, and the ability to deliver institutional-grade financial analysis that transforms them from service providers into indispensable strategic partners.
Scaling from Level 1 to Level 4 isn't easy, but it's achievable for any property management company willing to prioritize financial integration over operational shortcuts. Charlotte's clients prove that when you can confidently answer "How much did you make this month?" without days of reconciliation, you've taken the first step toward becoming the strategic advisor your property owners truly need.
