Excel vs. dedicated rent software for Indian landlords

Most Indian landlords with under twenty units track rent in a spreadsheet. It's free, it works, and it's already on the laptop. There's nothing wrong with that — until there is.

This is a candid look at where Excel (and Google Sheets) actually fails for a small landlord operation, what tends to break first, and what the cheapest reasonable upgrade looks like. We make a desktop app that competes with the spreadsheet, so take the bias as read — but the failure modes below are the ones we hear from the people who actually switch.

What Excel does well

Three things, genuinely:

• It's already paid for. If you have Microsoft 365 for anything else, the marginal cost of using it for rent is zero. Google Sheets is just free.
• It bends to your workflow. A column for "deposit received in cash", a sheet per property, a tab for utility deposits — you add what you need.
• The data is yours. A .xlsx file is a standard format. Five years from now, twenty years from now, you can still open it.

For one or two units, this is enough. The reconciliation work is small, the reminders fit in your head, and the documents fit in a single Drive folder.

Where Excel breaks

The breakage is gradual, then sudden. Specific failure modes, in the order they tend to show up:

1. Reconciliation creep

Each month you download a bank statement, open the spreadsheet, and manually match deposits to tenants. With three units this takes ten minutes. With ten units and a couple of late payers, it takes an hour and a half. By twenty units it's the most-dreaded chore on your list and the one most likely to be skipped.

"Skipped" doesn't mean nothing happens — it means you genuinely don't notice when somebody is two months late, because you stopped reconciling in October.

2. The "did Suresh pay last month" problem

With five units you keep payment status in your head. With fifteen, you don't. So somebody asks "did Suresh pay rent for March?" and you have to open the file, find the right sheet, find the row, and read across.

A spreadsheet doesn't show you who's behind. You have to look.

3. Documents go to twelve different places

Lease scans live in WhatsApp. Tenant ID copies live in email. Rent receipts live as photographs. Police verification forms live in a folder on your desktop called tenants. None of it is searchable together.

The first time you actually need to produce a five-year-old lease for a legal dispute, you will spend a day looking for it.

4. Mistakes you don't catch

You typo a row. The tenant column has 14 rows but the rent column has 13. The April row is below March which is below February. You nudged a column left at some point in 2023. None of these surface until you accidentally short-bill someone or the math at year-end doesn't add up.

5. Two computers, no source of truth

You edit the file on your laptop on the road. Your spouse edits it at home. Neither version has the other's changes. Now there are two spreadsheets and you're not sure which is current.

Cloud sync (Drive / OneDrive) helps but doesn't eliminate this — anyone who's used Google Sheets seriously has lost a row to a "you and a collaborator made conflicting edits" merge.

The "should I switch" test

A simple heuristic. Stay in Excel if all of these are true:

• You have fewer than five active units.
• All your tenants pay on time, every month, by the same channel.
• You don't keep tenant documents at all (or keep them all in one place already).
• Reconciliation takes you less than fifteen minutes a month.

If even one of those isn't true any more, the spreadsheet is costing you more than it's saving — usually in hours, sometimes in actual rent that fell through the cracks.

What the upgrade options look like

Three categories, ranked by cost:

Option A: A desktop app (₹2,499 once)

A purpose-built desktop application that lives on your laptop, like Nexus Landlord. Pay once, no subscription, no cloud account. Imports your bank statement and reconciles automatically. Stores leases as files in the same database. Shows you who's behind without you having to look.

Limitations: not collaborative. Not on mobile. If you want your accountant to see live data, you're emailing them an export.

Option B: An Indian SaaS (~₹500–1,500/month)

Cloud-hosted, has a tenant portal, has mobile apps, runs on someone else's servers. Costs ₹6,000–18,000 a year, every year, forever.

Worth it if you want tenant-facing features (tenants paying through an app, raising maintenance tickets). Probably not worth it for tracking alone.

Option C: A US/global SaaS (~₹2,500–40,000/month)

Buildium, AppFolio, RentRedi — these are best-in-class but built for professional property managers in the US handling 50+ units. Pricing matches. Indian banking workflows are a poor fit. Almost certainly overkill below 100 units.

The lowest-cost path forward

For most Indian landlords with 5–30 units, the math is straightforward:

1. Stay in Excel until reconciliation pain becomes the bottleneck. Below five units, this is fine.
2. When it tips, switch to a one-time-purchase desktop tool. ₹2,499 once pays for itself in saved hours within the first year.
3. Only consider a subscription SaaS if you actually want tenant-facing features (online rent collection, tenant apps). Otherwise you're paying monthly for storage and nothing else.

Nexus Landlord is the option-A tool we built for this. There's a free in-browser sandbox so you can play with it before paying.