G&A Expenses explode for one main reason. The person spending isn't the person paying. Yesterday, I went line by line through the general ledger on a 176-unit property. Not the summary. The actual ledger. Every recurring charge. Three stood out. The property inspection software: $270 a month. Our industry knows the one. Yes, it adds photo logs and audit trails. On one stabilized building, I'm not paying a subscription for that. The same job gets done for a fraction of the cost, or in-house. The AI leasing tool: $703 a month. And I love AI. I build with it daily and I think it remakes this business. The vendor will tell you one extra lease pays for the year. Fair. So I checked what it actually closed. The math wasn't there. Not yet. That gap is the whole reason AI is hard to sell right now. Hold it against the hard numbers, and it often folds. The marketing design templates: $95 a month. Templates I can make in two minutes with ChatGPT or Gemini for free. Canceled. Entrata and Yardi both bundle their own inspections, AI leasing, and marketing tools. Built in. So there's a real chance you're paying a third party for something your platform already does. Or paying for both and using neither well. I asked my team why they couldn't use the built-in tools. The answer: the reporting was lacking. Both platforms have deep custom report builders. Yardi runs YSR and custom SQL. Entrata lets you configure a report down to the field. Learn the tool and you can build any report you want. The data is already sitting in the system. So the reporting wasn't lacking. The skill to pull it was. And I paid a third party to cover for a skill gap on my own team. Now the deeper problem. It's older than any software. Multifamily runs on a two-party payer system. The owner pays. Someone else does the spending. You feel the cut. Of course you do. It's your money. But it's buried in a budget line you approved once and stopped reading. Invisible by design. And yeah, I approved every one of these at some point. The system is built so you approve once and forget. The person clicking "subscribe" isn't the person signing the check. So the costs mushroom. Pull your G&A from a few years back and set it next to today. The jump will surprise you. It crept in one $95 subscription at a time. Is this whack-a-mole? Yes. You kill three, and two show up next quarter. Do this. Get the financial statement. Then go past it, into the general ledger. Read every recurring charge on the property. One question per line. Not "can I defend this?" "Can they?" Make the people spending your money justify every dollar. The ones who can't go away. The ledger tells the truth. The budget often hides it. Go find those small leaks; they add up.