How ERB Properties Saves $14k per Year with Expense Management Automation

When Tulsa Realtor Emily Burke started renting out her investment property on Airbnb in 2019, she found early success. Her background in sales and marketing served her well — and friends (and friends of friends) soon started asking her to manage their properties as well.

Emily soon found herself with an unexpectedly flourishing short-term rental business, and recruited her cousin Nicole to join her. As of 2024, their company manages over 40 rental homes in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. 

Organic growth like Emily’s tends to happen when property managers are committed to providing a great experience to guests and owners alike. Under the twin brands of StayinTulsaOK (for guests) and ERB Properties (for owners), Emily and her team deliver on both fronts. They’re deeply connected to the local community and passionate about creating impeccably designed experiences. 

But the journey from one rental home to 40 required not only passion but painstaking processes — especially when it comes to financial operations.

Before Topkey: a “nightmare” of spreadsheets and documents

As most STR managers know, a growing company leads to growing complexity. For Emily and her team, that became evident around expense management. As more properties needed last-minute purchases or occasional repairs, keeping track of receipts and closing the books every month became increasingly challenging.

For a while, they tried issuing corporate AmEx cards to individual employees. But those cards, along with any balance carried by the company, started showing up on employees’ personal credit reports — so those cardholders had to be removed. That meant corporate cards were shared between employees, and deciphering who had made what purchases for which properties became incredibly complex. 

Emily puts it simply: “Expense management was a nightmare.”

ERB brought on Sasha Mascarenas as a part-time bookkeeper, and she worked out of multiple spreadsheets to reconcile transactions. If employees forgot to immediately note in a Google doc which expense was made for which property, she had to chase it down at the end of the month. Occasionally that even meant referencing weeks-old time cards to try and determine which employee had made a purchase for which property. 

“We needed to deliver owner statements by the 10th, and we would be burning the midnight oil until 11:59pm on the 9th,” said Sasha. There was so much back-and-forth to reconcile expenses to properties that her work looked more like project management than bookkeeping. Recording a simple owner transaction on a statement took a lot of manual data entry and work. 

“Many things fell through the cracks,” Emily says. “With such a high volume of transactions, we couldn’t guarantee with 100% certainty that every reimbursable expense was accounted for.”

Introducing Topkey

When the ERB team went to the VRMA conference in 2023, they had a goal: find a better solution for financial management. They connected with a few vendors, including Topkey founders Jon Sukhia and Bryan Beshore. 

“Topkey was very open and transparent,” Emily says. “They had a clear vision and really seemed to understand the problems short-term rental managers needed to solve.”

Emily and her team began using Topkey in May 2023. Today, ERB issues a number of virtual and physical corporate cards through Topkey, holds owner funds in Topkey interest-earning accounts*, and automates expense management through the Topkey platform.

“Since implementing Topkey, our processes and outcomes have drastically improved,” Emily says. 

Saving time and money with automated expense management

Now, when employees make a purchase on a Topkey credit card, they immediately get a text message prompting them to upload a photo and tag the receipt with the correct property. That eliminates the manual legwork of matching up expenses to owner statements to close the books.

“It saves us hours and hours every month,” Emily says. “Now, instead of manual data entry and expense tracking, Sasha can spend her time on more productive tasks.”

Sasha believes that without Topkey, ERB would have had to hire additional bookkeeping support.

“When I started, there were only two other people making purchases. Now we have six. Without Topkey, I don’t know if I would have had the bandwidth to organize and keep track of so many purchases across so many team members. For my sanity, I don’t know if I could have stayed on board!” 

Streamlining operations with PMS and bookkeeping software integrations

Emily and Sasha joined Topkey as early customers, and have provided valuable feedback on the product’s development. Their financial operations have continually improved as new Topkey features and integrations have launched — and Sasha couldn’t be happier. 

“My dream is to not have to ever go into Quickbooks, and just use Topkey for everything,” says Sasha. As she describes, most bookkeepers have a “love-hate relationship” with Quickbooks. “You have to use some type of system, and it’s the most universal one. But Topkey’s features and integrations allow you to have a personalized system that really works for your specific business needs.”

Thanks to the integration between Topkey and Quickbooks, Sasha no longer has to manually map data between systems. And now that Topkey supports American Express cards, “I don’t have to go and log into our AmEx account to export another report and pull it all into one place.

"Every quarter, we’re moving something new over to Topkey.”

“As Topkey continues to add more integrated features, our operations have become more streamlined and efficient,” Emily says. “Every time we share feedback or request a feature, they jump on it. To this day, even with less direct access to the founders, the level and quality of service hasn’t changed. They’re very attentive to our specific needs.”

Reallocating resources to support growth

The bottom line, according to Emily, is that “Topkey saves us money. We aren’t paying a bookkeeper’s hourly rate to do data entry. Sasha and the rest of our team can focus on more productive tasks that will help the company grow.”

As the ERB portfolio increases in size, so does its staff. And Emily appreciates how simple it is for new employees to get started in Topkey. “It’s a really easy process that doesn’t require any training,” she says. “We can instantly create cards for them, and they receive a notification when they make a purchase to complete the transaction and assign a property. That’s it.”

Looking back, Emily wishes Topkey had been around when she first started managing multiple properties. “I would have saved myself so much time.” But she advises her more established peers not to hesitate out of fear. “I know it’s intimidating to think about changing big financial processes."

"Don’t be afraid to make the switch. It’s a very easy process, and it allows your people to be much more efficient and productive.”

Ready to learn how Topkey can help your team unlock new levels of efficiency — and growth? Contact us today for a free consultation. 

*Topkey is a financial technology company and is not a bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank; Member FDIC.