Every rent invoice, payment and investment is posted to the right ledger automatically. You look at live figures — P&L, balance sheet and VAT — instead of typing them in afterwards.
Import MT940/CAMT files, match receipts to rent invoices automatically (even one payment across several invoices) and post remainders straight to the right ledger account.
VAT returns, P&L and balance sheet are always ready — on screen and as PDF or Excel. Your accountant gets a complete export bundle, audit file included.
Charts of accounts and exports for the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Spain. Scan purchase invoices and receipts with AI — supplier, amount and VAT are recognised and prepared.
✓Property management with the accounting built in: journal entries, journals, financial years and VAT codes all sit inside RealGrip itself.
✓There is exactly one write route into the general ledger. Every entry runs along it and is posted by double entry.
✓An entry that does not balance is rejected — by the application, and again by the database.
✓A final entry is fixed: the database blocks any change that does not go through a controlled correction. You correct it with a reversal, so that the trail stays intact.
✓Voucher numbers run without gaps per journal and per year, in the form VE-2026-0001.
✓Your accountant gets one zip file: trial balance, journal, the XAF audit file and a read-me.
In RealGrip, bookkeeping is not a separate act you do on the side. It is the administrative record of work you were doing anyway, with a check at every point: an entry has to balance, the period has to be open, and a scanned invoice waits for your approval.
All entries pass through the same function in the core. It rejects a journal entry that does not balance: at least two lines, exactly one amount per line — debit or credit — and the total of debit exactly equal to the total of credit. Submitting the same event twice does not produce a second entry; the core recognises it by its event key and does nothing. When you finalise, a trigger in the database checks the balance once more.
When a voucher is finalised, it takes its number from the sequence for that journal and that year. An administration starts with five journals: VE sales, IN purchases, BQ bank, OD memorial and AN opening. The sequence row is locked within that same transaction; if the transaction rolls back, the number rolls back with it. That way no gaps appear. Every final entry also gets a hash over its own lines and over the hash of the entry before it, so that the vouchers form a single chain.
You photograph a purchase invoice or a receipt, or you drag it in as a pdf, Word, Excel, text or csv file. From a pdf, the first page goes to the AI model, which extracts supplier, invoice number, date, due date, iban, currency, amounts and VAT, line by line. The ledger account per line is taken from the last posted invoice from the same supplier with a comparable description. What comes out is a draft with the scan attached: posting only happens after you have approved it.
You import bank statements as CAMT.053 or CAMT.052 in xml, or as MT940 or MT942 in the SWIFT format — which includes Rabobank’s .swi files. The format is recognised from the content, not from the file name. A pdf statement is refused. You can also connect an account via PSD2; RealGrip then fetches the booked transactions itself. Which banks you can choose comes from the list of the connecting party.
An incoming payment is compared with the monthly amount expected on the current contracts: the sum of the contract components, or otherwise base rent plus service charges. If that matches to the cent, the transaction attaches to that contract, and to the monthly instalment for that month if there is one. Outgoing payments are only proposed with an exactly equal amount, exactly one candidate and a second clue: the supplier’s iban, or their name or invoice number in the description. Marking a payment as made is something you confirm yourself.
Once a VAT period is locked because the return has gone out, the core refuses every new entry with a VAT code in that period; an entry without a VAT code is still possible. The financial year can only be closed once there are no draft vouchers left in it. In a single transaction the profit and loss accounts then go to the undistributed result, the opening balance goes to the new year, and the financial year with all twelve periods is locked.
With commercial property the difficulty rarely lies in the posting itself. It lies in the VAT, in the service charge settlement and in the question of which property belongs to which entity.
Shops below, homes above: part of the VAT on a purchase invoice is then deductible and part of it is not. RealGrip works out a proposal based on the square metres of the building. Units with a signed contract and a floor area filled in are counted; taxed means any contract with a VAT percentage above zero.
If there are no usable metres, the proposal falls back on the pro rata percentage of the administration. The proposal states which of the two sources was used; you set the percentage yourself. Splitting is only possible while the purchase invoice is still a draft.
A line with VAT falls apart into two parts. One keeps its VAT code and carries the deductible VAT. The other has no VAT code: there the non-deductible VAT has become cost. Lines without VAT stay as they are. The amount including VAT does not change — only the split does.
The settlement takes the actual costs for the year from the general ledger: only entries on the building dimension, only on the accounts you designate, and drafts do not count. Allocation is by square metres times rental months; if the floor area is missing for a single unit, the whole building falls back on an equal share times rental months, and you can see which allocation key was used. The rounding is chosen so that the sum of the parts is exactly equal to the total. Next to each share stands the advance payment from the contract times the number of rental months, the difference, and whether a service charge invoice already exists for that year.
If you have several entities, it is the building that decides which administration a rent invoice lands in — not the administration you happen to have open. The route runs from the contract via the unit to the building, and the building carries the entity. A journal line with a building from another entity is refused. An invoice that has already been stamped keeps its administration.
The usual set-up for rental accounting is a management system for the rent, an accounting package for the figures, and a spreadsheet in between because the two do not know each other’s concepts. In RealGrip the general ledger sits next to the contract, the unit and the building, and the lines post to those same dimensions. That is why the service charge settlement comes out of the entries themselves, why a rent invoice belongs to the entity that owns the property, and why the bundle for your accountant comes from the same administration you have been working in all month.
The general ledger is inside RealGrip itself: journals for sales, purchases, bank, memorial and opening entries, financial years with twelve periods, a chart of accounts hung on fixed core accounts, and VAT codes per country. Journal lines carry the building, the unit and the contact along with them, so the figures stay attached to your properties. For the annual accounts and the tax return you work with your accountant, and it is your accountant who gets the export bundle.
CAMT.053 and CAMT.052 in xml, and MT940 and MT942 in the SWIFT format, including Rabobank’s .swi files. The format is recognised from the content, so the file name does not matter. A pdf statement is not possible; a csv statement falls outside the recognised formats.
Not as an ordinary edit: at database level, a change to a final entry is blocked. You correct it with a reversal — a mirror entry appears with debit and credit swapped, and the original entry gets the status reversed. There are also two controlled corrections for the administrator: moving a line to a different ledger account, only in an open period, and deleting a voucher, only if it is the last one in its sequence. Both move the balances along with them, recalculate the hash chain and appear in the audit log.
You request the proposal while the purchase invoice is still a draft. The percentage comes from the ratio between taxed and exempt let square metres in the building, or otherwise from the pro rata percentage of the administration. The proposal states which source was used; you decide the percentage yourself.
One zip file containing three files and a read-me: a trial balance in which the balances are split between balance sheet and profit and loss, the journal with all its lines, and the audit file in XAF 3.2 with a control total of lines, debit and credit. Draft vouchers are left out.
There are charts of accounts and VAT code sets for the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Spain. France produces an FEC file, Germany a DATEV Buchungsstapel, Belgium an Intervat xml and Spain a casilla overview for modelo 303. Each of those is a file you give to your adviser or file yourself: RealGrip does not send anything to a tax authority.
The accounting is bound up with the rest of the system. These topics connect to it directly.
Bank feeds and reconciliation → Letting commercial property → Settling service charges: how to get it right → Rent arrears: a step-by-step plan for landlords → Rent administration: where the rent invoices come from →FinPro is built into RealGrip — no links to external accounting packages needed.