The Elm Street Accounting case study highlights how founder Carrie Christino leveraged STRATAFOLIO to enhance efficiency in managing commercial real estate finances. With experience handling 55 entities using QuickBooks and Excel, Carrie sought a more streamlined solution for her clients. Implementing STRATAFOLIO allowed her to automate tasks like rent roll creation and investor reporting, reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy. This integration not only saved time but also provided her clients with clearer financial insights, demonstrating the platform’s value in real estate accounting.
Carrie Christino spent seven years doing accounting work for a real estate company that grew to have 55 entities. She had to use QuickBooks, Excel, and countless extra hours to track escalations, create rent rolls, build investor reports, and complete other requests.
When Carrie started her own accounting and bookkeeping company, Elm Street Accounting, she wanted to find a better way for her real estate clients to manage, view, and report on their data. (She wanted to find it at her previous company, but was stuck with the business’s existing tools.)
“STRATAFOLIO has hit the nail on the head,” she said. “It was a big eureka when I discovered them.”
With Elm Street Accounting, Carrie wanted to offer bookkeeping and accounting services to a niche she knows—real estate—and offer clients a ton of value. She knew manual processes, like CAM reporting and rent rolls, wouldn’t be the best use of her time, so she looked for tools to help her help clients.
“I wanted a way for my clients to access their data quickly and easily and to see outputs about investment performance,” Carrie said. “When I found STRATAFOLIO, it was exactly what I was looking for. And the fact that it integrated with QuickBooks was really valuable because I was not looking to completely switch to a new system.”
Ultimately, she knew she wanted something sustainable and affordable for small business clients, not something that costs tens of thousands of dollars.
“STRATAFOLIO takes their existing accounting system, QuickBooks, and provides the rest of what a real estate investor needs,” she said.
For Elm Street Accounting’s clients, CAM reconciliations are a big deal. They can be tedious, but are vital for adhering to the lease and making sure no money is left on the table.
When Carrie had to do CAM reconciliations manually, it took four or five months to compile information for the 55 entities in her company’s portfolio. She did the reporting in spreadsheets, which was cumbersome and open to errors.
“CAM reconciliations are a big deal. Clients want to make sure they’re adhering to their leases, lenders like to see accurate CAM info, and they’re an opportunity for a lot of lost money,” said Carrie. “STRATAFOLIO is going to make CAM reconciliation so much quicker, and I’m really excited about that.”
Most people don’t get excited for CAM reconciliations, but Carrie does, now that she has STRATAFOLIO. Carrie is confident she’ll be able to complete all her clients’ reconciliations within one month, with a high level of accuracy.
While Carrie loves that STRATAFOLIO makes her work easier, she really loves what it does for clients.
“Clients are really happy with it,” she said. “I love working with small businesses because they need this kind of support and expertise. It’s very rewarding.”
Without a tool like STRATAFOLIO, Carrie says she wouldn’t be able to offer her clients as much insight into their investments. Her clients like seeing performance statistics without having to go into QuickBooks or waiting weeks for a report.
Carrie said STRATAFOLIO can help a lot of different groups in real estate investing:
Before STRATAFOLIO, an investor who wanted to know how a property was performing would have to request a report and wait for it to be compiled. Or, they had to try to find the information themselves in QuickBooks—a tough task once there are multiple properties.
With STRATAFOLIO, Elm Street Accounting clients never have to look at QuickBooks if they don’t want to. They can see performance and get their common questions answered in their STRATAFOLIO dashboard. They can pull rent rolls and other reports quickly and as needed.
Information helps real estate investors be proactive rather than reactive. They can analyze how properties are performing, make investment decisions backed by data, and make sure no money is being left on the table.
Many of Carrie’s clients come to her with less-than-ideal bookkeeping practices. She helps them clean up their QuickBooks, put in place ongoing processes, and connect the cleaned QuickBooks to STRATAFOLIO.
STRATAFOLIO is only as good as the data going into it, which is why Carrie focuses on tracking and recording correctly up front to make ongoing reporting, reconciliation, and everything else quick and easy.
“Putting in the up-front work of tracking information correctly throughout the year makes everything easier,” she said. “It’s worth the cleanup and careful ongoing data entry to make sure reports in STRATAFOLIO are accurate and timely.”
STRATAFOLIO resonated with Carrie immediately, and she said it clicks with clients as they see how it can eliminate many of the problems they’ve had with tracking and reporting.
“Clients are loving,” she said. “I’m able to offer them a solution that meets their needs, they can see their dashboard, and I can handle the rest of it. They love getting into their STRATAFOLIO dashboard to see reports and see the value in the tool.”
With reporting and data from STRATAFOLIO, Carrie’s clients can make more informed decisions about their investment properties and spend their time on the business, not on the bookkeeping.
“Now that I’m comfortable in the system, I can help my clients with most of their questions,” she said. “If I can’t, I know the STRATAFOLIO team is there to help us both.”
Now that the work is more strategic and less manual, Carrie really enjoys what she does and how she can help clients. She had been looking for a better way to help her clients, and she found it with STRATAFOLIO. She wants real estate investors to know that there’s a better way—that bookkeeping and reporting doesn’t have to be a time-consuming struggle.
“I couldn’t picture adding new clients or growing my business without STRATAFOLIO,” she finished.
C A R R I E C H R I S T I N O
Owner, Elm Street Accounting
Learn how you can keep using QuickBooks and save over 80% of manual effort when using STRATAFOLIO to manage your operations, global finances, assets, and investors. Utilize our two-way connection with QuickBooks to gain one fully integrated system.
Before partnering with STRATAFOLIO, Hatcher-Hill Properties faced several challenges in managing their growing portfolio of commercial leases. Lease terms were tracked manually using spreadsheets, increasing the risk of errors, missed deadlines, and lost revenue due to overlooked escalations or renewals. This approach also made it difficult to maintain visibility across all properties and lease agreements.
Copyright© 2025 STRATAFOLIO, INC.
And, learn why other commercial real estate owners use STRATAFOLIO to increase efficiency and profitability.
Speak to an expert to find out how you can increase efficiency and profitability.
