Good questions, straight answers

Yes. Bank connections run through Plaid — the same infrastructure used by Venmo, Robinhood, and thousands of financial apps — so Prism never sees your bank password. Everything is encrypted in transit with TLS and encrypted at rest in the database, the Plaid access token is encrypted a second time under a key we keep outside that database, and every account is isolated to your organization.

Never. Prism makes money from subscriptions, not from your data. Your financial information is yours — we don't sell it or share it with advertisers.

Link an account in seconds through Plaid and Prism syncs your transactions automatically — no CSV exports or manual entry. Multiple assets can share one bank connection, and new transactions are routed to the right asset and categorized as they arrive.

Enter it by hand. Manual transactions sit alongside synced ones and behave identically everywhere — categorization, splits, reports, per-asset performance. The books do not care where a number came from.

Yes, and one bank connection can serve several assets. Transactions are routed to the right asset by the account they arrived on, so an operating account, a reserve account and a security-deposit account can all sit under the same building.

Yes. How far back a connection reaches is the bank's choice — some send two years, some ninety days. Once an account is connected, the import wizard takes a CSV of the older statements, shows you where its synced history starts, imports only what the sync did not cover, and flags anything that looks like a duplicate. The same importer reads another tool's export, and every import can be undone in one click.

Absolutely. Upgrade, downgrade, or cancel whenever you like from your billing settings. If you downgrade, your data is never deleted — features simply adjust to your new plan.

Yes — the Free plan is free forever and includes automatic bank sync, transaction tracking, and core reporting for up to 3 assets. No credit card required to start.

Three types, side by side in one portfolio: residential property (single family, multi-family, condo, townhouse), commercial real estate (office, retail, industrial, mixed-use, warehouse, medical, hospitality), and businesses (LLC, corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship). Each type has its own set of fields, and every asset — whatever its type — gets its own transactions, documents, ownership records, and the same performance metrics.

One. That is the reason Prism exists. A management company, a laundromat and eleven doors sit in one portfolio, each with the fields its own type actually has, and the same engine underneath them all — bank sync, categorization, documents, ownership splits, and the full performance suite.

That is what the reports are for. Income and expense reports break down by category and by asset over any date range, and export to Excel and PDF. The real-estate schedule lays every property out the way a Schedule E expects to see it. Your accountant does not need a login — though you can give them one, scoped to the assets they work on.

Yes. Reports and transaction lists export to Excel and PDF at any time, on every plan including Free. Closing an account is handled by a person today rather than a button — the privacy page says so plainly and says what we intend to build.

Yes. Ownership is recorded per asset as a percentage, and every change is written to an immutable audit log — so a split that moved two years ago is still answerable. Reports can be run at your share or at the whole asset, and each partner sees only the assets they are entitled to. Ownership tracking is on Pro and up.

You record the refinance as an event on the loan, with its date, balance, rate and term. The amortization schedule reforecasts from that point rather than being overwritten, so the years before the refinance still show the interest you actually paid. Recasts and rate modifications work the same way.

No. A new account is seeded with the categories that match what you told us you invest in — the property packs for property, the business pack for businesses — out of a library of more than 240. You can rename, recolour, add and delete freely; the seed is a starting point, not a schema.

Enter it against the asset whose account paid it, and split it there. A split divides one charge by category — so the landscaping invoice covering three buildings stays with the account that paid it, itemised into the categories it covers. Reports read the allocations rather than the parent, so nothing is double counted. What a split cannot do is spread one charge over several assets; that is not something Prism does today. Transaction splits is on Pro and up.

DSCR, cap rate, LTV, NOI, ROI and cash-on-cash return, per asset and rolled up across the portfolio — plus cash-flow stability, vendor concentration and interest-rate risk. They are computed from your actual transactions and your actual loan terms, not from figures you type into a metrics screen. The performance suite is on Pro and up.

That is the exit planner, on the Enterprise plan. Pick a sale price — or set it from a cap rate, an earnings multiple or a target return — and it works down from price through selling costs, loan payoff and an estimated tax bill (depreciation recapture, capital gains, state rates, the NIIT) to the cash that is left, per asset and for the portfolio. The tax figures are estimates for planning, computed from your own records and assumptions you can change — not advice.

Minutes for the first asset. Add it, link the bank account it pays from, and history comes back with it — so the first report you run has real numbers in it rather than an empty month. Moving from another tool, or want to try things before linking a bank? The import wizard reads a CSV — Stessa, QuickBooks, REI Hub and Baselane exports are recognized — and every import can be undone.

An iOS app is in development. The web app is built to work on a phone in the meantime — the whole interface, not a cut-down version of it.

A one-page table of every property you own — address, value, loan balance, rental income and expenses — that lenders ask for whenever you apply for a mortgage, a refinance, a HELOC or a commercial loan while already owning real estate. It shows the underwriter your whole position at a glance: how much equity you hold, how leveraged you are, and whether your portfolio pays for itself.

Yes — no account, no email address, no watermark. Your entries live in your own browser and are sent to the server only when you export, where the file is generated, returned to you and not stored. Prism makes money from subscriptions to the full product, and this tool is one column of it, free.

Three things above all: equity (market value against the loan balance, per property and in total), leverage (the LTV those two numbers imply), and whether the portfolio carries itself (rental income against the mortgage payments, taxes, insurance and operating costs). A schedule that lays those out cleanly answers most of the underwriter's questions before they are asked.

Principal, Interest, Taxes and Insurance — the four pieces of a real monthly housing payment. The loan itself sets the first two; property taxes and the insurance premium ride along, usually through an escrow account. A payment quoted without the TI half understates the real number by hundreds of dollars a month, which is why the calculator asks for them separately and totals all four.

Interest is charged on the balance still owed, and at the start the balance is the whole loan — so most of a level payment goes to interest and only a sliver to principal. Every month the balance falls a little further, the interest share shrinks, and the principal share grows. The amortization schedule lays this out payment by payment, which is also why extra principal paid early saves so much more than the same dollars paid late.

There is no universal number — a cap rate prices risk, so what reads as good depends on the market and the asset. Stabilized property in strong coastal metros trades around 4–6%; small multifamily in secondary markets more like 6–8%; heavier lifts, tertiary markets and most commercial deals push higher. The honest comparisons are local: recent sales of similar buildings, and your cost of debt — a cap rate below the interest rate means the loan eats the yield. An unusually high cap rate is not free money; it is the market telling you something about the tenancy, the condition or the location.

The cap rate ignores financing on purpose: NOI over price measures what the property itself yields, so two buyers with different loans see the same cap rate. Cash-on-cash is the levered version — actual cash flow after the mortgage, against the cash you personally put in. Use the cap rate to compare properties; use cash-on-cash to judge what the deal does for your money once your loan is in the picture.

Everything about how the purchase is financed and everything that is capital rather than operating: mortgage payments, capital expenditures like a roof or an HVAC replacement, depreciation, and income taxes. NOI is rent and other income, less vacancy, less the day-to-day costs of running the property — taxes, insurance, management, repairs, utilities. That is what makes it comparable across buyers: it describes the property, not anyone's loan.

Many buy-and-hold investors look for 6–10% on stabilized rentals, and more when the deal carries extra work or risk — but the honest benchmark is your alternative. Cash-on-cash is a yield on your actual cash, so compare it to what that money earns elsewhere, and remember what it leaves out: principal paydown, appreciation and tax effects all sit outside the ratio. A modest cash-on-cash can still be a strong total return — and a strong one can hide a building that is one roof away from negative.

No — and that is a feature. Cash-on-cash measures spendable cash flow against invested cash, so equity built by the loan amortizing and by the market moving stays out of it. Those are real returns, but they arrive when you refinance or sell, not in the monthly account. Investors who want the fuller picture track total return alongside it — which is exactly how Prism reports each asset: cash-on-cash for the yield, total return for everything the deal has actually made.

Most income-property lenders underwrite to 1.20–1.25x, meaning the NOI must exceed the annual mortgage payments by 20–25%; stronger programs and riskier asset classes push the requirement toward 1.35–1.50x. The ratio is also how DSCR loan programs qualify the property instead of your personal income. Run the calculator backwards with the "payment the income supports" figure: it is the loan size conversation a lender will actually have with you.

The property does not earn enough to make its own mortgage payments — every month, the difference comes out of your pocket. That is not automatically fatal (value-add deals run below 1.0 during renovation on purpose), but it is a state with a clock on it: reserves run down, and refinancing out of it needs the income to have grown. Lenders generally will not originate below 1.0 outside of bridge products.

The textbook ratio uses NOI, which excludes CapEx — so a building with an aging roof can carry a flattering DSCR right up until the roof bill arrives. Many lenders underwrite with a replacement reserve deducted from NOI for exactly that reason. If you want the conservative view, subtract an annual reserve from your operating income before entering it here and read the ratio that remains.

NOI stops before the mortgage and before capital spending: income less vacancy less operating expenses. Cash flow keeps going — it subtracts the loan payments and the reserves, and lands on what actually reaches your account. The two answer different questions: NOI is how the market values and compares buildings; cash flow is whether this building, with this loan, pays you or costs you each month.

A common rule of thumb is $100–$300 per unit per month after everything, including reserves — but the figure is only meaningful next to the cash it took to produce. $200 a door on a $30,000 down payment is a strong yield; the same $200 on $150,000 down is not. Use the per-door number as a quick screen, then judge the deal on cash-on-cash and on how honest the expense line is — thin cash flow usually means vacancy, repairs or management were left out.

A screening shortcut: assume operating expenses — vacancy, taxes, insurance, management, repairs, but not the mortgage — consume about half of gross rent, then see whether the other half covers the loan payment with room to spare. It is a first filter, not underwriting: taxes alone vary enough by state to break it in either direction. Use it to decide which deals deserve the itemized version this page computes, not to buy.

Owner-occupied homes finance to 80% conventionally (higher with mortgage insurance); investment property usually caps at 75–80% on a purchase and a touch lower on a cash-out refinance; commercial lenders commonly hold to 65–75%. Every point of LTV is a point of cushion the lender loses if values move, which is why the rate sheet gets better as the ratio gets lower — and why the combined figure, with every lien counted, is the one that matters.

LTV measures the first mortgage alone against the value; combined LTV (CLTV) adds every other lien — a second mortgage, a HELOC drawn or even just open. A property can sit at a comfortable 65% LTV and a precarious 95% CLTV at the same time, and a lender evaluating a new loan or a refinance underwrites to the combined number, because in a sale every lien gets paid before you do.

At purchase they are the same number, and a lender will use the lower of price and appraisal. From then on, LTV is against current market value: that is what a refinance appraises, what equity is measured on, and what this calculator expects. Tracking it over time cuts both ways — amortization walks the ratio down while the market moves it in either direction, which is why a figure computed from last year's value is already stale.

The tenant pays base rent plus the three nets: property taxes, building insurance, and common-area maintenance (CAM) — the landlord's costs of owning the building, passed through pro-rata by square footage. The tenant separately carries its own space: utilities, janitorial, its own insurance. What CAM contains is defined by the lease, not by convention — management fees, reserves and admin markups ride inside it at some buildings and not others, which is why two identical base rents can be very different deals.

A gross (full-service) rent bundles the building costs into one number the landlord pays out of; a NNN rent quotes the building cost separately and passes it through, so the tenant bears increases in taxes, insurance and maintenance. A $24 NNN space with $9 of nets costs more than a $30 gross space — the only fair comparison is the all-in effective rent this calculator computes. For the landlord, NNN trades lower headline rent for insulation from cost inflation.

Whichever the number you are comparing against used — and in commercial practice that is almost always rentable square feet, which includes the tenant's share of lobbies and corridors via a load factor of typically 10–20%. Dividing a quoted rent by usable feet overstates the cost against every listing computed on rentable. Ask which figure a broker's PSF is built on before comparing; on a whole-building sale, gross building area is the usual basis.

It normalizes size out of a comparison, nothing more. Within one submarket and property type it is a fast sanity check — a warehouse at double the going PSF needs a reason. Across types or markets it misleads, because it says nothing about income: a $180/SF building at $14/SF rent out-earns a $120/SF building at $7. Use PSF to shortlist, then let the income numbers — cap rate, NOI — make the decision.

Lenders will price a payment over 25 years but not the risk of one rate for 25 years, so the loan amortizes on the long schedule and matures on a short one — commonly five, seven or ten years. At maturity the remaining balance comes due at once: the balloon. In practice it is refinanced rather than paid, which is exactly the risk to plan for — you will be re-qualifying at whatever rates, values and coverage ratios exist that year, not this one.

The amortization period sets the payment — the years over which the balance would reach zero at that payment. The term is when the loan actually ends. A "25 due in 10" pays like a 25-year loan and stops in year ten with the balance still owed. The longer the amortization relative to the term, the lower the payment and the larger the balloon; matching the two (a fully-amortizing loan) trades a higher payment for no maturity risk at all.

Annual debt service divided by the loan amount — the all-in cost of carrying the debt, principal and interest together, as a percentage. It compares directly against the cap rate: a property bought at a 6.5% cap with money at an 8.5% constant loses cash on every borrowed dollar, whatever the interest rate alone suggests. Underwriters quote it because it collapses rate and amortization into the one number cash flow actually feels.

Lower is safer, and most underwriting wants daylight between the break-even and reality: a common screen is break-even at or below 85% while the market runs meaningfully higher. The gap — your margin of safety — is what absorbs a lost tenant, a slow lease-up or a soft year. A break-even in the mid-nineties means one vacancy puts the property underwater monthly; above 100%, the property cannot cover its bills even full, and the plan has to be rent growth, cost cuts or restructured debt.

Physical occupancy counts occupied space; economic occupancy counts collected rent against what full occupancy would bill. They diverge through concessions, delinquency and below-market leases — a building can be 95% full and 82% paid. Break-even is a cash question, so the economic figure is the one to compare against it: measure your cushion in collected dollars, not occupied doors.

One owner's paycheck. SDE adds back the full compensation of a single working owner, because the buyer of a main-street business replaces that owner and takes that money; EBITDA instead charges a market salary for the management the business needs, because the buyer of a larger company hires it. The line between them is roughly where owner-operators stop and management teams start — and multiples differ by basis, so never price an SDE figure on an EBITDA multiple or the reverse.

The defensible ones are documented and non-operational: one working owner's salary, payroll taxes and benefits; interest; depreciation and amortization; genuine one-time items (a lawsuit, a move, a flood); and personal expenses run through the business — the car, the phone, the travel — that a buyer will not inherit. What fails diligence: a second working family member's pay without charging their replacement, "one-time" costs that recur every year, and below-market rent from a building you also own. Every add-back gets challenged; the paper trail is the price.

Yes — SBA lenders underwrite small-business acquisitions on it. The test is coverage: after the new owner takes a living wage and pays the acquisition loan, the SDE has to leave a cushion, commonly 1.15–1.25x on the debt service. That is why an inflated SDE fails twice — once in diligence when the add-backs fall apart, and again at the bank when the coverage math is run on the honest number.

Most main-street businesses trade at 1.5–3.5x SDE, with the multiple rising on size, growth, recurring revenue and how well the business runs without its owner. Under $500k of SDE, 2–3x is the crowded middle; businesses with real management depth price closer to EBITDA multiples of 4–6x. Industry matters — service businesses with contracts beat project shops; anything owner-dependent gets discounted. Brokers and databases publish comps by industry; the range this calculator takes is exactly that spread.

No. The earnings multiple prices the operating business; a building the seller also owns is valued separately, as real estate, and the business's earnings are adjusted to carry a market rent for occupying it. Skipping that adjustment inflates the business (free rent looks like profit) and strands the building's value. Owning both sides — the company and its premises — is exactly the position Prism is built to track as separate assets with their own numbers.

Price minus the variable cost of one sale — what each unit contributes toward the fixed bills, before profit exists. A $45 service that costs $19 to deliver contributes $26, and the break-even is simply how many $26 contributions the monthly fixed costs consume. Stated as a percentage of price it is the lever board: raising price moves it dollar-for-dollar, cutting variable cost the same, and volume moves it not at all.

Variable costs scale with each sale — materials, direct labor paid per job, card fees, shipping. Fixed costs arrive whether anything sells — rent, insurance, salaried staff, software, the loan payment. The honest test is "if sales doubled next month, which line doubles?" Semi-fixed costs (a second technician at some volume) step rather than scale; treat the current step as fixed and re-run the numbers when you cross it.

Pick the unit you actually sell — a billable hour, a job, a monthly client — and the same arithmetic holds. An agency billing $150 an hour with $60 of direct delivery cost contributes $90 per hour, so $18,000 of monthly overhead breaks even at 200 billed hours. The subtlety is capacity: a service break-even is also a utilization rate, and if breaking even takes more hours than the team can bill, the price is the problem, not the volume.

Export your records and upload them to the import wizard: Stessa, QuickBooks, REI Hub and Baselane exports are recognized from their own columns, categories are mapped onto yours (suggested automatically, confirmed by you — mapping is a review step, not magic), properties become assets, and duplicates are flagged before anything is written. Then link your bank accounts and Plaid keeps new transactions arriving — the import covers the years the bank will not resend. Every import can be undone, so many people import first, poke around, and only then connect a bank. Most still run both tools for a month and cut over at a month boundary.

No. Prism keeps per-asset, transaction-based books — closer to how an investor thinks than to a general ledger. If your accountant needs a true double-entry system with a balance sheet — debits, credits, a closable period — a tool like REI Hub or QuickBooks is the right call, and our comparison pages say so. What you get instead is the investment layer those tools stop short of: per-asset performance, break-even, total return, and ownership-aware reporting.

No. There is no rent collection, tenant screening, lease signing or banking — Prism is not a property-management platform. It reads the bank accounts you already have through Plaid and turns what happens in them into books and performance numbers. If collecting rent inside the tool matters to you, Stessa and Baselane both do it well.

Prism is in private beta — signup is by invite while we get the details right with early users. Request an invite and we will be in touch; the free plan (up to 3 assets) is there when you are in. Every tool we compare against has open signup today, and the comparison tables say so.