Rental property spreadsheet vs Rentaer: which should you use?

What a spreadsheet does well

A spreadsheet is free, flexible and familiar. For one property with a single long-term tenant, a sheet with columns for month, amount due and amount received can be enough. You can add any column you like and share the file with an accountant.

If that describes your whole portfolio and you open the file regularly, a spreadsheet is a reasonable choice. The problems below appear as the number of properties, tenants and currencies grows.

Where spreadsheets start to break down

Spreadsheets do not act on their own. Nothing creates next month's rent row unless you remember to add it, nothing tells a tenant what they owe, and a broken formula or a sorted column can quietly corrupt months of history. Version confusion is common too: the copy on your laptop, the copy in email and the copy on your phone drift apart.

Common failure modes landlords report:

• Forgetting to add a month's rent row, so an unpaid month goes unnoticed.
• A formula overwritten by a typed number, breaking every total below it.
• No tenant-facing view, so every question about rent history becomes a manual reply.
• Mixing currencies in one column, which makes totals meaningless.
• No reminder schedule—follow-ups depend entirely on your memory.

What Rentaer adds on top

Rentaer keeps the same records a spreadsheet would—properties, tenants, payments, repairs—but adds the parts a spreadsheet cannot do:

Each tenant has a bill day, and Rentaer's scheduled monthly billing creates the pending rent bill on that day. You review and confirm payments instead of building rows by hand. A tenant who signs in with their recorded email can open My rent and see their own paid and unpaid history, which removes most 'what do I owe?' messages.

• Automatic monthly bill creation on each tenant's bill day (1–28).
• A tenant portal with their rent history, instead of screenshots of your sheet.
• Per-record currencies: a property in euros and one in dollars stay separate, and totals are grouped per currency rather than converted.
• Maintenance requests with priority and status, linked to the property.
• One shared, always-current record—no file versions to reconcile.

An honest cost comparison

A spreadsheet costs nothing but your time: creating rows, checking formulas, answering tenant questions and chasing late rent manually. Rentaer automates the repetitive parts of that routine. The trade-off is that a dedicated tool is opinionated—you follow its workflow instead of designing your own columns.

If you manage one unit and enjoy spreadsheets, stay with yours. If you manage several units, bill in more than one currency, or want tenants to see their own history, the manual upkeep usually costs more time than the tool does.

Moving from a spreadsheet to Rentaer

You do not need to import anything to get started. Add your properties, add each tenant with their bill day and notification day, and record the current month's payments. From the next bill day, Rentaer creates the bills for you. Keep your old spreadsheet as an archive of past years—Rentaer is a working record, not a historical ledger you must backfill.