How Blue Gems Eliminates Financial Guesswork to Grow with Topkey

Orlando-based Blue Gems Management is relatively new to the vacation rental scene, but growing quickly. Cofounders Aidan Groll, JB Bullock, and Julie Bullock originally got into the industry by investing in real estate, but made the pivot to short-term rentals in late 2021. Today, Blue Gems manages approximately 110 properties across popular destinations like Orlando, Pigeon Forge, Scottsdale, and Snowmass. 

The team is largely remote, relying on technology to communicate across time zones and manage their portfolio successfully — and has a clear vision for how they’ll continue to grow.

“Let’s get stable before we grow — we’ve taken that approach with our entire business,” says Aidan. “Our goal is to get to 250 units before the end of 2025. And if that’s the goal, why not build it from the ground up?”

Since the company had originally started buying properties with private investors, then shifted to third-party property management, that meant redeveloping their entire tech stack.

In late 2023, they chose a new slate of solutions: Guesty as a property management system, OpenPhone for vendor and owner communications, Slack for internal comms, Notion as an information database, and Quickbooks for general bookkeeping. 

But there was a gap in the foundation: expense management. With a background in corporate accounting, Aidan knew what it took to run a tight ship around financial operations — but the nature of vacation rental management made it tricky to scale.

Before Topkey: financial ops failing to scale

Blue Gems’ struggles will be familiar to any STR manager. The busy operations team on the ground would sometimes forget to save or submit receipts. Slack messages, emails, texts, and phone calls would go back and forth to try and figure out which expenses needed to be tied to which properties. 

“We always had a delay in our maintenance team getting us answers to all the bookkeeping questions,” says Aidan. “A lot of people were involved and nothing was streamlined.”

The team’s accounts payable process was also time-consuming, and often required attention from managers or Aidan himself. These authorized managers had to log into bank accounts, make vendor payments, and follow up with Slack messages to connect transactions to specific properties.

“You have to rely on your operations team to have accurate books,” says Aidan. “And the more properties you have, the more challenging that becomes.”

Introducing Topkey

As Blue Gems rebuilt their tech stack, they were looking for a solution to their expense management headaches. After learning about Topkey at a 2023 VRMA event, Aidan immediately recognized the value of an automated expense management system tailor-made for short-term rental managers. 

Since they had fewer than 50 properties at the time, Aidan wasn’t sure they were ready to take the plunge. “But I knew if we started with Topkey now, we stood to benefit in six months to a year,” he says. “We’d be experts in the software, and our financial reporting would be much better.”

So after discussions with our founder Jon and a brief trial period, Blue Gems added Topkey to their purposeful tech stack. 

“It was the right decision,” Aidan says. “We’ve been grateful to grow with Topkey and not worry about the accounting and financial components of our business as we scale.”

Topkey benefits: eliminating guesswork, saving time, and improving visibility with an integrated finance stack

Since implementing Topkey, the Blue Gems team has more than doubled the number of properties in their portfolio while slashing the amount of hours spent on expense management.

“The finance tech stack has turned into a tech stack of its own when you factor in trust accounting and expense management, Quickbooks, and the whole nine yards,” says Aidan. “I think that Topkey coming into the picture solves a very real problem bridging the gap between the CFOs, the revenue managers, the finance strategists, and the people that are in the field who have direct insight into these expenses.”

The end result for Blue Gems: more accurate expense reconciliation in far less time, with greater control and visibility over how expenses are billed — or not — to their homeowners.

Eliminating guesswork with virtual cards and seamless integrations

Blue Gems now ensures highly accurate expense management by issuing a separate Topkey virtual card for each property they manage, and only using that card to pay expenses for that property. Aidan estimates 90% of their expenses are paid virtually. 

And when the operations team does need to make a local purchase — say at a Lowe’s or Home Depot — Topkey makes it much easier to tag properties in real time. As soon as the transaction is processed, the purchaser gets a text on their phone, takes a photo of the receipt, and tags the property. 

“It’s a 3-second process,” says Aidan, “and that was a big game-changer in terms of benefiting the ops team.”

For accounts payable processes, Blue Gems now uses Topkey’s Bill Pay functionality to tag vendor payments (like carpet cleanings or third-party maintenance visits) to specific properties. 

In every instance — virtual card purchases, physical card purchases, or accounts payable payments — Topkey automates the entire expense management process. Our integrations ensure information flows seamlessly into the rest of the Blue Gems tech stack, including Guesty and Quickbooks.

“We no longer have any guesswork on which property an expense is for,” says Aidan. “There’s no disconnect between accounts payable and the actual expense that gets recorded in your owner statement and Quickbooks.”

Saving time with automated tagging

In addition to improving accuracy, Topkey saves the Blue Gems team valuable time — Aidan estimates an hour or two per property, per month. “For us, that’s up to 200 hours a month. It’s basically replacing a full-time bookkeeper at a certain point.”

On top of the savings in bookkeeping time, Aidan values the convenience of Topkey’s virtual cards. “We no longer have to go to the bank to sign up and set up all of these cards. We don’t have to wait for them to ship or show up and activate them. Just a few clicks of the mouse, and we have a new virtual card that we can directly tie to a property.”

And with Topkey’s Bill Pay workflows and approval thresholds, Blue Gems has been able to shift the bulk of vendor payments from the executive team to the operations staff. 

“What’s cool about Topkey is that you can create a bill pay user role within the software, so even an entry-level employee can only have the ability to create bills,” says Aidan. “Then, they don’t have to involve a manager except for getting approval — which has been great to alleviate the time spent by managers and even myself being involved in our accounts payable process.”

Improving owner trust with increased visibility

It may sound counterintuitive, but Aidan also values how Topkey has allowed his team to not bill certain expenses to owners. 

“Topkey helps us strategically determine whether some costs should actually be for our company, rather than the owner,” Aidan says. “Maybe we’re at fault, or we see an opportunity to build more rapport with our owners. The ability to change expenses from ‘bill to owner’ to ‘bill to corporate’ has helped us earn more trust with our owners.”

This is crucial for Blue Gems’ growth. “We’ve seen a lot of owners that we’ve taken over from other property management companies report that failing to have accurate financials was a big pain point, and why they wanted to join our team,” Aidian says. “We now have visibility all the way through the process to say, ‘Hey, does this really make sense to charge our owner, or should we eat this bill because we either messed up or it would be a great opportunity to hold this owner long-term?’ I think a lot of property managers miss out on that opportunity.” 

Why Topkey: increasing ROI through purpose-built software for STR managers

When Aidan was building his financial tech stack, he looked at general expense management solutions like Ramp and Bill.com. “But what I loved about Topkey — and why I don’t really think there was anything to compare it to — is that it catered specifically to the short-term rental industry.”

With Topkey’s banking solutions through Thread Bank, Member FDIC, property managers can manage multiple business checking and high-yield owner deposit accounts. Coupled with cashback rewards from expenses, Aidan says that creates a significant ROI for property managers. 

“I always try to pitch Topkey to my friends that have short-term rental management companies, and the biggest selling point I tell them is that it’s a profit center,” says Aidan. “When we look at the cost of the software compared to the interest we’re earning, the cashback rewards, and the savings of not needing to hire another bookkeeper or employee, we have a direct return on our investment.”

In the first month of using Topkey, Aidan reports that Blue Gems was already generating income on the software — rare for the vacation rental industry. “For us, Topkey is right up there with PriceLabs in terms of delivering an actual return.”

Aidan also values the relationships he’s built with the Topkey team. “Topkey is not just solving a very real problem in this industry, but it’s also built by some incredible founders and people,” he says. “Matthew, their customer success manager, is my favorite person to work with across my entire tech stack portfolio. Talking to him almost every week — he’s incredible. Jon has also been very open to feedback on the product and how to make it better. It’s been a dream for us.”

Finally, Aidan shares a piece of advice with other leaders of STR companies with ambitious growth goals but a reluctance to invest in technology too early.

“Don’t be scared of the inventory count,” he says. “Even if you only have 10 units now, when you get to 100, you’ll be very grateful that your accounting and finance processes were dialed in from the ground up. Because if you’re building a skyscraper, you start with the foundation — and I think Topkey should be the foundation in really any successful short-term rental management company.”

Ready to strengthen the foundation of your STR company? Book a demo today to learn how Topkey can help automate and improve your financial operations. 

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