Why you can trust The Property Ledger with your numbers
Plain English, no fine print. The fine print lives in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
Your rental books are personal. Before you put them anywhere, you deserve straight answers about who's behind the app, what it keeps, and how you get out. Here they are.
A person, not a logo
Hung Lam — property owner, and the person who built this.
The Property Ledger started during that remodel. I wanted to know where the money was actually going, keep an honest record of the miles I was driving back and forth, and have something that would still hold up when we bought the next place.
I do finance for a living — I'm a director of finance at a public company, where my days are spent reviewing and consolidating financial figures. Executive MBA from UT Austin, undergrad at TCU. So my first answer was a spreadsheet, and for a while it was one.
The spreadsheet failed for a reason that had nothing to do with accounting: I couldn't really share it. My wife is a property owner too, and she needed to log her own expenses and read the numbers her own way — not the way someone who does consolidations for a living reads them. She's who this app is actually designed for: a new property owner who needs proper records without needing to enjoy bookkeeping. If something in here only makes sense to me, it's wrong.
The part I care most about is what lands on your accountant's desk in April. My background is finance and audit, so the CPA package was built to be what a preparer actually wants instead of a pile of exports — and the CPA we work with has been through it and told us what to change.
What I want this to be, for property owners like us: the place your expenses and your mileage go without any fuss, so the overhead stops eating your evenings and you can get back to the part that actually matters — the properties themselves. A partner tool that carries the admin, and one your CPA can trust when the year closes.
This isn't a faceless startup optimising for your attention. It's a tool a property owner built for his own properties first, and it only wins if it quietly saves you time every month.
What we store
Exactly what you put in and nothing more: your property records, transactions, mileage, leases, and the receipt and lease images you upload. All of it is encrypted in transit and at rest, stored on Google Cloud infrastructure in the United States.
What we never store
Your bank login. No bank credentials, ever — imports are files you export from your own bank and hand to the app yourself. If we add automatic bank feeds someday, they'll be optional and clearly marked; nothing will connect to your bank without you choosing it.
Who can see your data
Only you — and the specific people you invite to a specific property, as an editor or view-only.
- We don't sell your data. Not aggregated, not "anonymized," not at all.
- There are no ads.
- There are no analytics trackers in the app today.
How that's actually enforced
Not with a promise — with rules that run on Google's servers, above the app. Specifically:
- Every request is checked against your signed-in identity, on Google's servers. The check does not happen in your browser, so it isn't something a modified app, a developer console or a hand-written script can talk its way past. There is no request the app can make that returns another account's data — not a broad one, not a lucky one.
- Data is scoped per property, not per account. Each property carries its own list of who may see it. A bookkeeper you invite to one duplex sees that duplex and nothing else in your portfolio — and when you switch the invite off or remove them, the access stops on the server, not just in their menu.
- Invite codes stop working the moment you turn them off, and expire on their own after 30 days. A used-up or revoked code doesn't even reveal who sent it.
- We never hold your bank login. Imports are files you export from your bank yourself. There's no stored credential to steal.
- Receipt images and lease documents live under the same per-property rules. They are never public, never guessable-by-URL for someone outside the property, and uploads are limited by size and file type (photos and PDFs only).
- Encrypted in transit and at rest by Google Cloud, on servers in the United States.
- Your account, your exit. One tap exports everything you've entered as a single file. One tap deletes your data and your login — no email, no waiting on support.
- Honest limits. The Property Ledger is beta software, and no method of storing data is 100% secure — anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. We keep operational logs of who did something and when, for reliability and abuse handling; we do not log the contents of your receipts.
What we're adding next
Two things are on the list and are not done yet, so we won't claim them: App Check, which makes Google reject any request that doesn't come from the real app, and an independent security review of the access rules by someone who didn't write them. We'll update this page when each one ships.
The exit door is always open
You can export your entire portfolio as one file, anytime (Reports → full backup) — every property, transaction, lease and mileage entry, yours to keep. And you can delete your account and everything in it yourself, in the app — no "email us to close your account," no waiting on support.
The easiest way to trust an app with your data is knowing you can take it back.
Honest limits
The Property Ledger is beta software, and the figures it produces are organizational estimates — a very good head start for you and your CPA, not tax advice. The details are in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. If something looks wrong, or you just want to ask about any of the above, write to [contact email] — a person reads it.