The landlord software vs spreadsheet question is usually asked as if it had one answer. It does not. It has a tipping point, and the tipping point is a unit count, not a feature list. Below is what a spreadsheet genuinely handles well, the four workloads that break it, and a way to test the alternative on your own property without spending anything.
What the spreadsheet handles well
For the first tenancy, Excel is the right tool, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. One rent line per month, a deposit, a short column of costs, one statement a year. It is already on your machine, it costs nothing extra, and it bends to whatever layout you prefer. Nearly every private landlord starts this way, and for a single flat there is no reason not to.
The problem is not the start. It is that each additional tenancy does not add work in a straight line. It multiplies the number of places where the same number has to be right.
The four workloads that break it
Index clauses. An index rent changes on a date, calculated from a consumer price index reading against a recorded base. The spreadsheet typically holds the current rent and nothing else: not the base index value, not the reference month, not the adjustment history. When the next adjustment is due, the inputs live in an old letter, if they live anywhere.
Prepayments. Every lease carries a monthly service-charge prepayment. Over a year that is twelve rows per lease that must reconcile against what actually arrived, including a mid-year change after the last statement. Three leases in, this is where the first silent copy error appears.
Recoverable costs. Which cost items can be passed on to tenants at all, and by which apportionment key: floor area, persons, consumption. In a spreadsheet that logic lives in formulas exactly one person understands, and it gets re-derived from receipts every year.
The annual statement. This is where the other three converge. What each tenant prepaid has to reconcile against their share of the actual costs, per lease and per key, for a fixed billing period. In Germany the annual Nebenkosten settlement also has to reach the tenant within twelve months of the end of that period, after which back-payment claims are generally lost. A statement rebuilt from a shoebox of receipts each January is the single biggest time cost in small-scale letting.
Landlord software vs spreadsheet: a tipping point by unit count
Vendors like to argue by feature list. The honest argument is workload:
| Units | What the year looks like | Where the spreadsheet stands |
|---|---|---|
| 1 tenancy | One rent receipt to check each month, one statement to build. | Fine. Stay in Excel. |
| 2 to 4 | Index dates and prepayment changes diverge per lease; tabs multiply. | Still works, but the statement starts eating evenings. |
| 5 to 10 | The statement becomes a multi-week reconstruction; one mis-copied prepayment turns into a tenant dispute. | The tipping point for most landlords. |
| More than 10 | Administration has become reconstruction. | The question is no longer whether, only which system. |
The boundaries are not laws of nature. A landlord with two commercial leases and index clauses hits the wall earlier than one with six identical flats. But unit count predicts the tipping point better than any feature checklist does.
What landlord software must cover before it is worth paying for
- Units, leases and tenants on one property record, not in parallel lists
- Cold rent, prepayments and the recoverable cost items recorded on the lease itself
- Index and step rents with the base value, the reference date and the adjustment history
- An annual statement built from the data you entered during the year, not from a year-end import
- A trail of who changed which figure, so a line in the statement can be traced to its source
A tool that only sends rent reminders replaces the pleasant part of the spreadsheet and leaves you the hard part. The test is the statement: if the software cannot produce it from data already in the system, you have bought a second place to type. That workload is what Manage in REPM is built around, and the landlord page shows the scope for small portfolios specifically.
Free tools and the fine print on kostenlos
Free landlord tools exist, and some are decent. Just read where the boundary sits before you enter a year of data. The common patterns: free up to a unit count; free because advertising or partner offers finance the product; and free until the annual statement, which is exactly the workload you came to solve, sold as the paid tier. None of this is scandalous, but it means the real comparison is never free versus paid. It is which paid boundary matches your unit count. REPM states its boundary on the pricing page: Lite covers small portfolios for 19 euro a month after a free 30-day trial, and syndication with the guided sales process sits in Pro.
Migrating the spreadsheet: what to bring, what to leave
Bring the master data: address, areas and units, the current leases with cold rent, prepayment and deposit, the base values behind each index rent, and the list of recoverable cost items per property. Leave behind the years of historic monthly rows (keep the old workbook as an archive), the formula logic, and every tab whose purpose nobody remembers. For a handful of units this is an afternoon, not a data project, and it doubles as a useful audit: leases with no recorded index base tend to surface at exactly this step.
Test it on your own property before spending anything
The spreadsheet question is not settled by a comparison chart. It is settled by your own data. REPM Lite is the free self-serve trial: add a property, split it into units, record a lease with cold rent and prepayment, no card and no sales call. If the property record does not beat your spreadsheet at the workloads above, keep the spreadsheet with a clear conscience. Start free in REPM Lite.