Comparison · Answered in the open
Spreadsheets + a VA vs. SherpaFolio.
We're not going to pretend the spreadsheet stack doesn't work — we ran our first years on it. Here's what it actually costs, where it breaks, and what you're really buying when you replace it.
The spreadsheet stack, honestly priced.
A capable VA runs $8–15/hour offshore (2026 rates); month-end for a 20–40 door portfolio typically eats 20–40 of their hours plus several of yours reviewing. Call it $400–900/month in labor, plus QuickBooks, plus the template someone built two years ago that only one person fully understands. On pure dollars, that's cheaper than most software suites. The price isn't the problem.
The error modes are the problem.
Every operator who's run this stack knows the catalog: the booking that landed after the export, the refund that never made it back into the owner's column, the copy-paste that shifted a row, the property that changed owners mid-month and got attributed to the wrong one, the VA's perfectly reasonable question that sat in Slack for four days. None of these are incompetence — they're what happens when reconciliation is a monthly human ritual instead of a continuous process.
The real cost isn't the error. It's the owner who catches one. An owner who finds a $200 mistake audits every statement afterward, and you spend hours a month re-earning trust a system should have kept by default.
What Folio replaces — and what it doesn't.
SherpaFolio ingests bookings, fees, and expenses continuously, reconciles against QuickBooks, and keeps a live owner portal so month-end becomes a review, not a rebuild. Ownership changes are attributed by date, clawbacks flow through a trust ledger with a paper trail, and each owner's statement arrives with an AI-written closing summary in plain English. Last month that was 20 owner statements, reconciled to the penny, from a process measured in minutes.
What it doesn't replace: bookkeeping judgment. If your books are a mess, onboarding starts with a cleanup — that's real work, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of pitch this page exists to avoid. And your VA doesn't disappear; ours moved from assembling statements to reviewing exceptions, which is a better use of a good VA anyway.
The honest decision rule: if your owners never question statements and month-end takes an afternoon, keep the spreadsheet — sincerely. The moment either stops being true, the math flips fast.