Tracking Rent in Excel or Dedicated Software: Which to Choose

14 June 2026 · KX Estate Team

Tracking rent in Excel works well for a handful of properties. The spreadsheet is free, flexible, and easy to understand. But across a portfolio of 10-50 units it starts to let you down: forgotten payments, tax deadlines, mixed currencies, no reconciliation with the bank, and a chaos of file versions. Dedicated software takes this routine off your hands.

When Excel is the right choice

If you have 1-3 properties and one or two tenants, Excel is a sensible starting point. You don’t need a separate system to remember three payments a month.

Excel’s strengths:

1. Free and already installed on your computer, so there’s no barrier to entry.
2. Flexibility: any formula, any column, your own calculation logic.
3. Full control: the file lives with you, with no subscription or lock-in to a service.
4. Simplicity: no learning curve, and any accountant understands a spreadsheet.

For a small portfolio, that’s enough. The problems begin not because Excel is “bad,” but because the volume of data outgrows what manual control can handle.

Where Excel breaks down at 10-50 properties

The more units, contracts, and payments you have, the more each manual operation costs. Typical points of failure:

• Forgotten payments. Excel won’t remind you that rent is due on the 5th. Overdue amounts get noticed weeks later, sometimes months.
• Tax deadlines. You have to keep the income tax payment date in your head or in a separate reminder, because the spreadsheet won’t prompt you.
• Multiple currencies. One property in euros, another in lei, a third in dollars. To consolidate the portfolio into a single currency, you plug in the BNM rate for the relevant date by hand and recalculate from scratch every time something changes.
• No reconciliation with the bank. An incoming payment to your account isn’t tied to a contract. “The money arrived, but it’s unclear who paid and for what” is a familiar picture.
• Version chaos. rent_final_v3_edit.xlsx sitting in three people’s inboxes. Someone edits an outdated copy, and the numbers diverge.
• Formula errors. One shifted range or an overwritten cell, and the report lies, which is hard to spot.

None of these problems is fatal on its own. Together, across a portfolio of dozens of properties, they eat up hours every month and lead to real financial losses.

Excel or dedicated software: comparison table

The takeaway from the table is simple. Excel wins on cost and flexibility; software wins on control, automation, and scale.

What “free” Excel actually costs

Excel is free by license, but not by time. An hour spent by an owner or manager on manual reconciliation and recalculation is a real cost. Across 30 properties, one forgotten overdue payment can easily exceed a year’s subscription to a proper system.

There’s also a tax dimension. Income earned by an individual from leasing immovable property is subject to income tax (the commonly applied rate is 7%; confirm the current rate and your specific obligation with the SFS / Serviciul Fiscal de Stat or an accountant). Meanwhile, the market is becoming more formalized: from January to May 2026, 47.5 million lei of this tax entered the budget, up 27.9% year over year, and the number of registered lease contracts grew by 34% (≈ 15,788 contracts). Source: SFS, 2026. When the tax authority cross-checks contracts more actively, a mismatch between your spreadsheet and actual payments becomes expensive.

What about 1C?

1C is a different weight class: an accounting and bookkeeping platform, not a tool for managing rent. It handles ledger entries and reporting, but payment reminders, a per-property profitability picture, and matching incoming payments to a specific contract have to be built on top. For a real estate portfolio, you often need a narrower tool, built specifically around leasing.

How KX Estate solves this

KX Estate is a rent management system, not a spreadsheet and not an accounting platform. A contract immediately generates a payment schedule a year ahead, shows statuses and overdue items, calculates profitability and payback for each property in EUR/MDL/USD/RON at the BNM rate, and reconciles incoming payments with the bank (MAIB/Victoriabank via Open Banking). IDNO/CUI details and Moldovan taxes work out of the box, with an interface in Russian and Romanian. Excel stays an excellent draft tool; the system begins where manual control can no longer keep up.

Frequently Asked Questions

At what number of properties does Excel stop coping?

There’s no hard line, but in practice the turning point comes around 10 properties: the number of payments, deadlines, and currencies exceeds what you can comfortably keep under manual control without missed dates and discrepancies.

Can you track rent in Excel across multiple currencies?

You can, but manually. You plug in the BNM rate for the relevant date yourself and recalculate the portfolio from scratch every time it changes. Dedicated software does this automatically, so comparisons across properties stay accurate.

Excel or 1C for tracking rent?

1C is an accounting platform, strong in ledger entries and reporting. For managing leasing specifically (reminders, per-property profitability, bank reconciliation), you need a narrower tool. Excel is cheaper and more flexible, but it doesn’t automate control.

Is it safe to keep rent data only in an Excel file?

A single file is a risk: it’s easy to overwrite, lose, or fork into incompatible versions. For a few properties this is tolerable; for a portfolio it’s a weak point, one solved by a single source of data with a change history.