A rent ledger for the landlord with two doors

Owning two flats is not a business and it is not nothing. It is a pile of dates: rent due, deposits held, insurance renewing, a boiler serviced, a lease ending in March. Spreadsheets handle this until a tenant changes and the old rows start lying to you, which is usually around the third year.

Why a spreadsheet fails quietly

Property records fail in three specific ways that a general spreadsheet cannot prevent:

Overlapping tenancies. A new tenant starts before the old one's row is closed. Now a month shows two incomes for one door and you cannot find the mistake by looking at totals.

Deposits that look like income. A deposit is not rent. Mixed into the same column, it inflates the year and gets spent.

Repairs with no history. When the same boiler is fixed twice in eighteen months, the second invoice should be a conversation about replacing it. That needs a per-unit history, not a row somewhere in June.

None of this is exotic. It is just structure, and a tool built for tenancies has it while a grid does not.

The four things worth recording per unit

1. The tenancy: start date, rent, deposit held, and when it ends. One screen per unit.

2. The rent: what came in, when, and anything outstanding. A month that is short is a fact to see, not a figure to reconstruct.

3. The deposit: held, returned, or partially deducted - and why.

4. The maintenance: date, what was done, cost, and the name of the person who did it.

Everything else is a report. Four records per unit is why this takes five minutes a month instead of a lost Saturday.

Overlaps are the whole problem

The single test of a property tool is what it does when one tenancy ends and another starts in the same unit. Three behaviours are possible:

It double counts. The classic spreadsheet outcome.

It refuses. Better than double counting, and useless in practice, because the real world overlaps by a week.

It allows a short overlap and attributes money by tenancy, not by unit. This is the one you want. Each payment belongs to a tenancy with dates, so a shared month splits correctly and the unit's annual total stays honest.

When you are comparing tools, this is the question to ask, and it is the question most product pages never answer.

Rent, deposit and repair history in one place

A year in the life of one door, as it should read:

January: rent received, twelve months, nothing outstanding.

March: boiler repair, 180, receipt attached.

June: tenancy ends, deposit returned minus 60 for a broken door, with a note.

July: new tenancy, higher rent, deposit held, one week of overlap with the old one, recorded twice and counted once.

If you can produce that from your system in under a minute, your system works.

What it does not do

No accounting. No tax filing, no bank reconciliation, no profit and loss statement. It is a property record.

No tenant portal, no online payments. Rent is marked as received; how it arrived is between you and the tenant.

No cloud sync or multi-user access. One file, backed up by you. Some landlords keep the file on a USB drive in the same drawer as the leases.

No legal document generation. Leases are a legal matter, usually with a local template and sometimes a lawyer.

What is in the download

A Windows program that runs from a folder, an Android app, and a web/PWA edition - one purchase, three formats, seventeen languages, no account and no subscription. The data lives in one file on your device, so backing up your property records is the same action as backing up anything else.

Rental Property Manager - Offline Rent & Tenant App for Small Landlords (Windows, Android, Web)

$19.00

Questions people ask before buying

How many units can it handle? It is built for the landlord with a handful - single digits is the comfortable range. If you are running fifty units with staff, you want a property management platform with accounting.

Can I keep records for a tenant who left? Yes, closed tenancies stay in the history. That is the point of a per-unit view.

Does it print receipts? Payments can be recorded and printed or saved as a PDF, which covers most casual landlords' needs.

Is the money side enough for my tax return? For a small portfolio, most people export the yearly figures and hand them to their accountant. It will not produce a filing-ready statement by itself.

If the same week also involves invoicing for other work, [the offline invoicing app](https://www.getly.store/product/freelancer-billing-offline-invoicing-time-tracking-app-windows-android-web-mvcitu66) uses the same local-file approach, and the two sit together without fighting.

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