How River Town Rentals Spends 80% Less Time On Finances

River Town Rentals started the way a lot of hospitality companies do, with a couple of properties and a founder who could keep the numbers in his head. Lejean McFarlane began with two of his own short-term rentals in Columbus, Georgia, where tracking what came in and what went out was simple enough to do by feel. Then he started managing properties for other owners, and what began as a hobby quickly became a business. Today, they manage more than 35 properties across the area.

Lejean was running Guesty as his PMS and QuickBooks Online for accounting, so the tools were in place. What was missing was the system connecting them. The financial operation that held everything together still lived in spreadsheets and his own memory, and as the portfolio grew, that became the ceiling. Expenses slipped through the cracks, month-end turned into a scramble, and he started to feel trapped in the finances. He had even outsourced the books to an accounting firm, but he was still the one clearing the month's transactions himself, because there was no system underneath to actually hand off.

The Challenge: A Growing Portfolio Run on Spreadsheets

Money slipping through the cracks

Before Topkey, there was no real process behind expenses. Lejean and his team bought what each property needed, batteries, an air filter, supplies for a turnover, and the receipts, when they were kept, lived in someone's phone photos or notes rather than one central place. With that much moving at once, keeping every charge straight came down to memory. "Not being able to remember so many things at once, because it's just a lot," is how he describes it, and with new properties coming on, there was only more to track each month.

The biggest issue he was running into was when his team would make a single register run for several properties at once, where there was no clean way to break that one receipt apart. A hundred-dollar charge might cover supplies for three different homes, and he had no way to tell his accounting firm which items belonged to which property. So the charge would sit uncategorized, or he would simply absorb it. "Sometimes I was eating the cost, you know, which, of course, is not good," he says. For a growing company, those small absorbed costs were quietly compounding into real money.

Outsourced the books, but the month-end was still his

In the earliest days, Lejean ran all of it himself in Excel, pulling Guesty reservation reports, calculating each owner's payout, subtracting his management commission, and sending the results to the owner. He is the first to admit it did not scale. "Not the best method at all," he says. So he did what most growing operators do. He brought in an accounting firm, hoping it would take the financial work off his plate.

But it did not take him out of the process. His firm used Uncat to collect every transaction that hadn't been categorized, and clearing that queue was still on him. Because he was too busy during the month to keep up, the items piled up until the 31st. "Before I would have like 60 items to have to sit down on the 31st of the month to go through," he recalls, and by then the charges had sat too long for him to remember what many of them were for. Going through them all in Uncat took him about two days. Even with a firm in place, he stayed the bottleneck.

The Solution: A System the Whole Team Could Run

With Topkey, River Town Rentals finally had a system underneath the finances. His team now categorizes their own charges as they spend, so most of the month is already done by the time it reaches Lejean. He still reviews what comes through and hands clean, finished transactions to his accounting firm, but he is no longer reconstructing the whole month by himself.

Putting spending in the team's hands

River Town Rentals runs lean, but Lejean is not the only one spending money on properties. A second lead, a field inspector, and an interior designer all make purchases in a normal week. With corporate cards, each of them carries a card tied to Topkey, so a purchase is captured against the right property the moment it happens rather than surfacing weeks later as a mystery line item.

Issuing and controlling those cards is fast, which matters for a business that adds properties and people as it grows. Lejean can spin up a virtual card for a new hire in minutes, and freeze or delete one the day someone leaves, without ever putting company spending under an employee's personal name. "I could easily now just go on Topkey and freeze the card, delete it. I hire someone, I could order a card and it would get to them in like two days," he says. Next to the slow process of adding an employee to a traditional business card, that speed takes a real friction point out of onboarding.

Catching every expense at the source

Getting cards into the right hands was only the beginning. The harder part was catching every purchase at the moment it happened, which is where leakage used to start. Now, the second anyone on the team uses their card, Topkey texts them to handle it on the spot: tag the charge to the right property, add a quick note on what it was for, and snap a photo of the receipt, all from their phone. "It even sends me a text message, or my team a text message, to just do a quick categorize," Lejean says, and that small prompt at the point of sale helped substantially.

Because the receipt is captured in Topkey right then, it is no longer buried in someone's camera roll, which also makes owner conversations easier. As he puts it, keeping the receipts on hand "makes it a lot smoother when it comes to dealing with the owners."

For the register runs that used to cause the most trouble, Topkey lets him split a single charge across multiple properties straight from the receipt, breaking it down line by line. "The split, it controls you and makes sure you don't go over, don't go under," he explains. Those guardrails mean the allocation always reconciles, so the hundred-dollar charge that once got absorbed now lands accurately across three different properties.

A large share of that spending runs through Amazon, especially when the interior designer is furnishing a new property. The Amazon Business integration brings those orders in ready to categorize with receipts attached. "I do have the Amazon integration, mainly just to categorize, saving receipts," Lejean notes, folding what is usually a painful reconciliation into the same routine.

Clean books, handed off ready

All of this changes what month-end looks like. Topkey flags each transaction as complete or incomplete, so instead of hunting through a pile blind, Lejean can see exactly what still needs attention. Anything his team tagged at the point of sale is already done, leaving him to finish only the stragglers rather than rebuild the whole month.

When the month closes, he hands his accounting firm a set of completed, categorized transactions instead of a stack of unexplained charges, so they can record it in QuickBooks Online without chasing him for context. Because every expense is already tagged to the right property, that same clean data flows straight into the owner statements that get built and sent out each month. The back-and-forth that used to stall the close is gone, and the month moves cleanly from close to owner statements without him having to rebuild it first.

The Results: What Changed

Month-end close, from two days to two hours

That new rhythm shows up most clearly at month-end. What used to eat two full days, close to 16 hours he had to block off, now takes about two hours. That is an 80% cut, and roughly 170 hours a year of his own time handed back. When asked for the biggest return Topkey delivers, he did not hesitate. "Definitely the end of the month closeout for categorizing items."

$2,500 monthly cash leakage stopped for good

The hours were only half of it. The other half was the money that used to disappear. Before Topkey, Lejean estimates he was losing an average of around $2,500 a month to expenses that slipped through untracked. That's over $30,000 a year in revenue just walking out the door. With every purchase now tagged at the source and split correctly across properties, no more cash leakage is taking place. For a company in the STR industry, which is known for tight margins, that is money going straight back to the bottom line.

80% less time spent on financial operations

The deeper result is the one Lejean was chasing all along. With a real system underneath the finances, the handoff he never quite pulled off finally works. He no longer dreads closing out the books at the end of the month. 80% of the time he used to spend on finances has come back to him. The time saved goes right into acquiring and keeping his owners happy.  "It saves me a lot of time so that I can focus on onboarding new properties, search for new clients, and the relationships with the owners," he says.

Why Topkey

Lejean wasn't looking for another accounting tool. He already had Guesty, QuickBooks Online, and an accounting firm. What he needed was the operational layer connecting all of them, one that could capture expenses as they happened, involve the rest of the team, and eliminate the month-end scramble that still depended entirely on him. Topkey gave him that missing process without forcing him to rebuild the way his business already ran.

Built around his existing operation

One of the practical advantages was that Topkey fit into the financial stack River Town Rentals already relied on. He could continue using his existing American Express and Chase cards while gaining company cards he could issue, freeze, and manage himself. That meant he could modernize the financial workflow without replacing everything underneath it.

His team adopted it quickly as well. Instead of paying out of pocket or texting him for clarification, they simply made purchases, categorized them, and attached receipts as part of the normal workflow.

A support team that shows up

Lejean says one of the biggest differences has been the relationship with Topkey after implementation. Rather than disappearing once he was onboarded, the customer success team has stayed engaged, responding quickly when questions come up and regularly introducing new features that can make his financial operation even more efficient.

"They reach out to me whenever I need something, and when I need something from them, they respond very fast, it's a good relationship and they're very professional," he says. That ongoing partnership has given him confidence that, as River Town Rentals continues to grow, Topkey will continue evolving alongside the business rather than becoming another piece of software he eventually outgrows.

A Financial Operations Tool Built for STR Operators

River Town Rentals didn't need another accounting tool. It needed a financial operation that could scale with the business instead of depending on its founder. Today, expenses are captured as they happen, the team owns the day-to-day workflow, the accounting firm is no longer blocked so month-end doesn’t bring the business to a halt.

The result isn't just an 80% faster close or thousands of dollars recovered each month. It's that Lejean has his time back to focus on what actually grows River Town Rentals: onboarding new properties, strengthening owner relationships, and expanding the business with confidence.

Could your month-end close be smoother? Learn how Topkey helps short-term rental operators build financial operations that make month-end easy, no matter how many units they manage.