Import your Stessa data in one drag-and-drop. Get STR-specific tax intelligence, AI categorization, and CPA-ready packages that Stessa was never built to provide.
Stessa was built for long-term rental investors. It doesn't understand the 7-day average stay rule, material participation hours, the STR exception, or cost segregation. Those are the rules that save STR operators thousands.
Stessa gives you a general ledger — but your CPA still has to map transactions to Schedule E lines, calculate depreciation, and figure out personal use day allocations. That's billable time you're paying for.
Stessa is a passive tracker. It records what happened but never tells you what to do about it. You won't get a notification that you're 50 hours from qualifying for the STR exception — you'll find out in April.
Since the AppFolio acquisition, Stessa's roadmap has shifted toward long-term property management. STR-specific features aren't coming. If you're a short-term rental operator, you've outgrown it.
Drag and drop your Stessa GL export. Perch maps every transaction to the right IRS category automatically — properties, income, and expenses preserved.
Perch's AI categorizes transactions into STR-specific tax categories — not generic buckets. Cleaning, supplies, platform fees, mortgage — all mapped to Schedule E and Form 8825 lines.
Material participation hours, personal use day thresholds, QBI limits, cost segregation triggers — Perch monitors everything and alerts you before the window closes.
Connect your bank via Finicity for automatic transaction import. Pull 14 months of history to cover a full tax year — no manual entry, no CSV juggling.
Schedule E prep, Form 8825 mapping, depreciation schedules, per-property P&L — assembled automatically. Your CPA gets a clean package instead of a spreadsheet.
Built on the tax engine used by real estate CPAs. Ask questions in plain English. Get answers based on actual tax code, applied to your actual numbers.
Perch imported 1,247 transactions from your Stessa GL. 89% were auto-categorized into STR tax categories. We identified $4,200 in deductions that were miscategorized as personal expenses in Stessa, and flagged that you qualify for the short-term rental exception — worth an estimated $11,800 in tax savings this year.
Switching from Stessa at tax time? Catch up in under an hour.
Full Year Tax Prep — $49Yes. Export your General Ledger from Stessa as an Excel file, then drag and drop it into Perch. All your properties, transactions, and categories are imported automatically. The entire process takes under 2 minutes.
Perch adds STR-specific tax intelligence that Stessa was never built to provide: material participation hour tracking, personal use day monitoring, the short-term rental exception, cost segregation triggers, AI-powered categorization into IRS tax lines, and auto-generated CPA packages. Stessa tracks income and expenses. Perch optimizes your tax position.
No. You can run both side by side. Many users import their Stessa history into Perch and then use Perch going forward for its tax intelligence features while keeping Stessa for basic bookkeeping if they choose.
Stessa uses generic accounting categories. Perch maps every transaction to STR-specific categories aligned with Schedule E and Form 8825 line items — the exact categories your CPA needs for tax filing. Our AI also separates personal from rental transactions automatically.
Yes. Stessa was designed for long-term buy-and-hold investors. Perch is built specifically for short-term rental operators — Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com hosts who deal with nightly bookings, platform fees, cleaning turnovers, and the unique tax rules that apply to properties with average stays of 7 days or less.
Perch has its own bank connection via Finicity (Mastercard Open Banking). Connect your bank accounts directly in Perch and pull up to 14 months of transaction history automatically. You can also upload bank CSVs from Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, and other major banks.
Import your Stessa data free. See what STR-specific tax intelligence looks like.
Import Your Stessa Data Free