Almost every landlord starts with a spreadsheet. It's free, it's familiar, and for one tenant it's fine. The trouble starts the moment you have a few tenants, a meter or two, and a month where someone pays late.
Where the spreadsheet breaks
- It doesn't know who's late. A cell can hold an amount, but it won't tell you that today is past the due date and rent hasn't arrived. You find out by remembering to look.
- The utility math is manual. Every metered charge is a hand-typed
(reading − previous) × rate. One fat-fingered cell and the bill is wrong — and you may not notice for months. - There are no reminders. Chasing a late payer means copying numbers into a message by hand, every time.
- It's a single point of failure. One file, easy to overwrite, hard to use on your phone, impossible to give a tenant a clean view of.
None of this means spreadsheets are bad — they're just the wrong tool once "tracking rent" becomes "running a tenancy."
What to look for in an alternative
A good replacement should:
- Show who owes what and who's late — live, without you doing the arithmetic.
- Turn meter readings into correct bills, so utilities aren't a manual chore.
- Send a reminder in one tap, with the amount and breakdown already filled in.
- Work on your phone and your desktop, from the same data.
- Keep your tenants' details private and not force you into payment processing you don't want.
A purpose-built option: FixRent
FixRent is exactly the back office a spreadsheet is pretending to be. It tells you who owes what, who's late, and lets you nudge in one tap — and it builds each bill (rent + fixed charges + metered utilities) from the readings you enter, always showing the math.
What it deliberately keeps simple:
- No payments to set up. You mark invoices paid manually; tenants pay you however you already arrange. No acquiring, no PCI.
- Any currency, set per property (EUR, USD, RUB and more).
- Web and Android, on one shared core, so the two apps behave identically.
Moving over is quick
You don't migrate years of history — you start this month. Add your properties, tenants, and charges once; enter the current readings; and the first dashboard already shows who's paid, who's due, and who's overdue. From then on it's a minute a month, not an afternoon with a spreadsheet.
Ready to stop chasing rent in cells? Start free.