How APEK Rentals Cut Month-End to under One Day with Topkey

Joshua Gilbert owns APEK Rentals, a hospitality company managing 70 vacation rentals across Palm Springs and San Diego on Guesty, with QuickBooks Online for the business side. When he first met the Topkey team at VRMA, Joshua was running sales, marketing, and owner relations, and closing the books himself at the end of every month. His goal is to grow APEK to hundreds of properties, but finances that ran through him were never going to get him there. Every property he added meant more time in the books. That’s where Topkey came in.

The Challenge: An Owner Closing the Books Alone

Joshua handled the CEO work, sales, marketing, and owner relations, with the finances on top of it. One operations lead covered field operations, guests, and the office, alongside two full-time maintenance techs and four guest communication VAs. Everyone on the team bought things for the homes, and everyone carried a card. The financial side of all that spending landed on Joshua's desk.

Maybe Half the Receipts Made It to Slack

Before Topkey, APEK's receipt system was a Slack channel. "I had a Slack channel called receipts where everyone was supposed to upload them," Joshua says. "Maybe 50% of people actually did."

That meant about half of the team's spending had no receipt behind it. Every missing one was a charge Joshua couldn't verify, couldn't confidently bill back to an owner, and couldn't defend if the IRS ever came asking. By his own account, an audit would have left APEK with almost no receipts to show.

Checking during the month didn't help. With his bandwidth already stretched thin, Joshua found that looking early was wasted time, since most transactions still weren't done. So he waited until month-end, sent the whole team a message asking for missing receipts, and spent his close chasing them down before the real accounting could even start.

Amazon Receipts Even the Owner Couldn't Decode

Amazon made all of it harder. The team ordered supplies for the homes on Amazon constantly, and a single order could split into several charges across different payments. Matching those charges back to the right order and property fell to Joshua and his office manager, by hand.

Joshua admits he still doesn't understand how Amazon splits its receipts. That meant time spent decoding order splits instead of running the business, and a real chance of getting them wrong. A charge matched to the wrong property, or never matched at all, either landed on the wrong owner's statement or got absorbed by APEK.

Bills Lived in the Accounts Payable Inbox

Paying vendors was just as manual. Invoices arrived in APEK's accounts payable email. Each one was keyed into Guesty as a manual journal entry, then paid in a separate system using whatever method that vendor preferred. Every bill was handled twice, in two places, by hand.

That double handling ate time on every invoice and left no clean link between what was entered in Guesty and what actually went out the door. Joshua had no easy way to confirm a bill was entered correctly and tied to the right property, so the work stayed with him.

Owner billables raised the stakes. Permit renewals in APEK's markets run $1,000 to $2,000 each, and with renewal dates spread across 70 homes, about five come due every month. That's roughly $5,000 to $10,000 a month that has to be charged back to the right owner. Any renewal that slips through gets absorbed by APEK rentals instead.

Owners Waited Three to Five Business Days

Getting money to owners was slow, too. Owner payouts went out by standard ACH, and owners hated the wait, especially when statements were already running behind.

"They've got their mortgage to pay," Joshua says. "If I was running late and it took three to five business days, I'd be losing owners." He understood the frustration firsthand, since he has a mortgage of his own.

For a company trying to grow, every lost owner meant a property and its revenue walking out the door. Vendors felt the pressure too, especially cleaners with their own crews to pay.

Month-End Was the Only Audit

All of it landed at month-end. Joshua spent three to four full eight-hour days every month on nothing but accounting. That's close to a fifth of his working month spent away from sales, owner relations, and growing the business, while owner statements waited on him to finish.

Handing that work off wasn't realistic. With bills living as journal entries in Guesty, there was no way to see whether the work had been done right, so the process gave a capable team nothing to check their work against.

Then came the gut punch. During a city tax audit, which APEK goes through every two years, Joshua discovered that cleaning fees had not been set on some booking channels when properties were onboarded. APEK had been paying for those cleanings without collecting the fee, and by his math the loss came to about $250K.

"It's an example of what happens when we're not auditing things and I was just trusting it was working," Joshua says. It happened before Topkey, and it is one of the reasons he brought Topkey in. From then on, he wanted a process where nothing falls through the cracks.

The Solution: One Right Way to Do the Work

APEK moved its card spend, bills, and owner payouts onto Topkey. The work got faster, and for the first time it happened the same way every time, with a record showing it was done. Here's how each piece came together.

Receipts Captured at the Swipe

Receipt automations were one of the main things that drew Joshua to Topkey. After a purchase, Topkey automatically texts the cardholder a link to upload the receipt, categorize it, and assign it to a property. "That way everyone's doing it without me having to chase receipts," Joshua says. Transactions show up in Topkey with the receipt, property, and category already filled in. If anything is missing, Topkey flags the transaction and sends the team member a reminder to finish it. By the time Joshua sat down at month-end, he had a clean, complete list to review and approve instead of a pile of receipts to chase.

Amazon Receipts Arrive on Their Own

The Amazon Business integration brings Amazon receipts into Topkey automatically, tied to the charges they belong to. Joshua and his office manager no longer pull split orders apart by hand, and Joshua calls the integration extremely helpful.

With each Amazon charge matched to its receipt, it can be assigned to the right property and billed to the right owner. One of the easiest places for money to slip through the cracks is now closed.

A Process the Team Can Own

In APEK's first year on Topkey, cardholders coded each purchase up front from the text reminder. With the team doing that work, Joshua could review and approve everything himself once a month.

Now a VA reviews card transactions and bills each day, updating anything that needs it. The only step left with Joshua is the final sign-off. Once approved, everything flows to Guesty as owner charges with the click of a button.

Bill entry was the first big piece he handed off. "I was able to delegate it with Topkey because I can actually trust that it's getting done correctly," Joshua says. "There's only one way to do it." The team had the skills all along; what they lacked was a process Joshua could stand behind.

Owner Charges Reach Guesty without Retyping

The Guesty integration replaced the manual journal entries. Approved expenses go to Guesty in bulk as owner charges with the receipt attached, and Guesty's property list syncs into Topkey on a schedule, so each expense carries the right property. Permit renewals come in with a receipt and are charged back to the owner, while tax payments that aren't charged back are still documented.

QuickBooks Online Keeps Only the Operating Books

Joshua keeps trust money and operating money apart. Property and owner money stays in Topkey and Guesty, and only APEK's own revenue and expenses go to QuickBooks Online, so there is no commingling. Corporate card spend is categorized in Topkey and pushed to QuickBooks Online from the sync queue, keeping the business P&L clean without anyone retyping it.

Bills Paid from One Place

Invoices from the accounts payable inbox go into Topkey Bill Pay with the property and category set, and once approved, vendors are paid directly from Topkey instead of a separate system for each one. Joshua says this is where he has gained back the most time. Adding a vendor is quick, and when one vendor has several approved bills, they go out together with bulk payments instead of one at a time.

Owners Paid the Same Day

Owner payouts moved to Topkey too. APEK still produces owner statements in Guesty, then pays owners from Topkey with same-day ACH¹ from a Topkey deposit account¹, so owners can be paid the same day. For Joshua, that is what keeps a late month from turning into a lost owner. Vendors are paid the same way, and he says they like it too.

What Topkey Replaced

The Slack channel and the month-end chase that came with it gave way to receipts that arrive with the transaction. Amazon orders no longer get pulled apart by hand. Joshua stopped being the person who tracks down what's missing.

Manual journal entries in Guesty and one-off vendor payments in separate systems became a single flow. Bills get entered once, paid from Topkey, and synced to Guesty. Because the work happens the same way every time, Joshua can verify it, and that is what made it possible to hand off.

Standard ACH for owner payouts gave way to same-day ACH¹, so a late month no longer puts an owner relationship at risk. Together, those changes turned the books from something only Joshua could manage into a process his team runs every day.

The Results: Less Time, Fewer Gaps, More Growth

Month-End Shrinks to under One Day

Month-end is where Joshua felt the change first.

"I was spending at least a few solid full days every month going through everything," Joshua says. "Now it's definitely less than one day." With the VA reviewing daily, there is no list waiting at month-end, and owner statements go out with far less friction.

80% Less Expense Management Work

Expense management used to be Joshua's job by default, and almost every step of it was manual.

Today Joshua puts the reduction at 80% compared with that manual process. Cardholders submit receipts from a text, Amazon Business receipts arrive on their own, and a VA reviews the day's transactions. Bills follow the same path, entered once in Topkey and paid from the same place. All that's left for Joshua is looking it over and hitting approve.

That 80% is the difference between expense management as a monthly scramble and expense management as a daily routine. It is also what made it possible for Joshua to hand the work to his team at all. Receipts now arrive with the charge instead of weeks later, so the IRS worry he carried before Topkey is no longer hanging over him.

Closing the Gaps Where Cash Leaked Out

Before Topkey, money slipped out of APEK in small ways that were easy to miss. A receipt never got uploaded, an Amazon charge got matched to the wrong property, or a permit renewal never got billed back. Each one meant APEK absorbing a cost that belonged to an owner.

Now those gaps get closed as part of the daily process. Permit renewals and other owner charges reach Guesty with receipts attached, so they land on owner statements instead of APEK's books. Amazon charges come in tied to their receipts and the right property, and anything missing gets flagged before it's approved.

The biggest example is the $250K cleaning fee gap. It ran for two years because nothing in APEK's old process put what APEK paid for each cleaning next to what it collected, and no one saw it until a city tax audit. Joshua is clear that with Topkey in place, a gap like that would have been blocked.

Cleaning payments now run through Topkey's Expense Management and Bill Pay with a property, category, and receipt attached. A VA reviews them daily, Joshua or a teammate approves them, and they land in Guesty as documented expenses against the right property. Cleaning costs no longer disappear into a stack of payments, so a cleaning that was paid for but never collected stands out in the daily review instead of surfacing two years later in an audit.

For an owner who once learned about a $250K problem from a city auditor, that visibility is the point of the whole system.

20% Growth While the CEO Delegates the Financial Operations

When APEK joined Topkey, every new property meant more receipts, more bills, and more owner charges landing on Joshua's desk. Growth and his workload rose together, and the work could not be handed off safely.

That link is broken now. APEK has grown its portfolio by about 20% since joining Topkey, and as CEO, Joshua was able to delegate most of the accounting to his team, significantly reducing his own role in it. New properties plug into the same process. Cardholders code their spend, a VA reviews it daily, and Joshua gives the final sign-off.

That frees the CEO to do CEO work. The time he got back goes to growing the business, which he says is the only thing he wants to spend it on. With a process that scales with the portfolio, the path to a few hundred properties no longer runs through his desk.

Why APEK Rentals CEO Trusts Topkey

Beyond the numbers, what Joshua keeps coming back to is confidence that the work is done right, and a team that listens. "You guys have been so great with my feedback and changing things," he says. "That's one of the reasons I really like you guys." That responsiveness shows up in his team's day-to-day work.

Bulk send to Guesty is one example. Before it, approved expenses went over to Guesty one at a time, a repetitive step that grew with every property APEK added. Joshua was grateful when Topkey built it. Now his VA sends a full batch at once, and expenses reach owner statements without the extra clicks.

He first met the team at VRMA, and he is still sending feedback and seeing it turn into product changes. For an owner planning to grow to hundreds of properties, knowing the platform will keep pace matters as much as what it does today.

The Checks and Balances, Built In

The hardest problem at APEK was never effort. It was a system that relied on manual work and on Joshua being involved every step of the way. With Topkey, card charges and bills come in with their receipts attached, owner charges land on the right statement, and his team runs the process while he focuses on growing APEK.

Next, APEK is rolling out Topkey's Inventory Management, replacing per-house Amazon and Instacart orders with a warehouse cleaners can pull from. Joshua expects it to mean far fewer transactions for the team to categorize.

Asked what he would tell another property manager in his old position, Joshua kept it simple. "If you're doing manual work with no checks and balances, this is the system that makes sure you're getting all yourBuid receipts and that every transaction is charged to the correct person, not absorbed by your business." Coming from an owner who learned the cost of an unchecked process the hard way, that carries weight.

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