Best excel alternative

Property management involves juggling multiple moving parts: tenant records, lease agreements, maintenance requests and financial tracking.

Many property managers start their journey using familiar tools like Excel, but as portfolios grow, the limitations become apparent. In this post, we'll examine Excel's role in property management and explore why dedicated software like Hausing might be the upgrade your business needs.

Understanding Excel spreadsheets: strenghts and weaknesses

Excel's strengths

Excel has earned its place as the world's most popular spreadsheet application for good reasons.

• It’s flexible and customizable.

• The learning curve is relatively gentle since most professionals already have some Excel experience.

• It's also cost-effective, especially for smaller operations.

• Excel also provides good data analysis capabilities, allowing you to create charts, pivot tables, and complex calculations to understand your property performance.

Excel's limitations for property management

However, Excel's flexibility becomes a liability as your property portfolio grows.

1. Manual data entry increases the risk of errors, and a single mistake in a formula can potentially affect financial calculations or tenant records for a long time.

2. Excel skills vary. People have very different skill-levels of understanding and creating different formulas. It may cause problems, when it’s time to hand over your job to someone, or even take a vacation.

“The real challenge arose when a colleague, who had been responsible for leases and shared utilities, left her job. Having managed everything alone for many years, her systems were hard for others to understand,” said Ergo, BLRT’s administrative manager.

Read more in their case study.

3. Collaboration becomes problematic when multiple team members need access to the same data. Working on different copies can lead to data inconsistencies and confusion.

4. Excel lacks automated reminders for critical dates.

5. Document management is a challenge. While you can track document names and locations in Excel, the actual files remain stored separately, making it difficult to maintain organized records for each property or tenant.

6. Limited integration possibilities with other systems. You can’t integrate Excel with accounting software or with automatic meter readings systems. You can use it for data source and upload it to other programs for importing data, but usually not the other way around.

Who should use excel for property management?

Excel works best for property managers with smaller portfolios (typically under 10-15 units) who have strong spreadsheet skills and limited budgets. It's suitable for those who don't mind investing time in manual data entry and maintenance.

Hausing user Mikk explained, why Excel didn’t work for them anymore:

“We have 100+ tenants and eventually it got too confusing to manage it all in Excel. Each month we had to keep an eye that all the formulas were correct, the arrival and departure dates were included correctly in cost sharing etc. Also there were no reminders of the contract deadlines or rental price changes, so a lot of manual work had to be done.”

Hausing: a dedicated property management solution

Hausing's Strengths

Hausing has been a natural upgrade from Excel to software for close to 200 companies. Read their stories here.

Hausing addresses Excel's limitations by providing an integrated platform designed specifically for property management workflows. Instead of managing separate spreadsheets, documents, and communication channels, everything lives in one centralized system.

• The platform excels at lease management, automatically tracking important dates and sending notifications before leases expire or require renewal. 

• Work orders are tracked in real-time, with document attachments and progress updates visible to all relevant parties. This transparency reduces the back-and-forth emails and phone calls that typically consume property managers' time.

• Preventive maintenance becomes manageable with Hausing's maintenance calendar system. Rather than relying on memory or scattered reminders, property managers can schedule recurring maintenance tasks for themselves or other assignees.

• Hausing automates invoice generation, handles utility cost distribution based on property-specific rules, and integrates with accounting software to streamline bookkeeping processes. The system maintains a complete audit trail, making it easier to prepare and see financial reports.

• The document management system keeps all property-related files organized and accessible. Instead of hunting through email attachments or file folders, important documents like leases, inspection reports, and contractor agreements are stored with their corresponding properties.

“Our portfolio grew to such extent that it was already difficult to get a good overview of what is happening with excels and emails. Excel is not a working property management software, it's a calculator,” explained Tulevara’s property manager Margus.

Hausing's Considerations

Like any specialized software, Hausing requires an initial learning period as team members adapt to new workflows. There's also a monthly subscription cost to consider, though this often pays for itself through improved efficiency and reduced errors.

Some users who are deeply invested in Excel's flexibility might initially feel constrained by Hausing's structured approach. However, this structure is intentionally designed to enforce best practices and ensure consistency across your portfolio.

Who Should Use Hausing?

Hausing is ideal for property managers ready to scale beyond basic spreadsheet tracking. If you have a scaling business, read the Baltics biggest business campus story on how they went from handling 200 to 800 tasks in month with Hausing’s help. It's particularly valuable for those managing multiple properties, working with teams, or handling complex lease arrangements and maintenance coordination.

Property management companies that prioritize professional communication with tenants and contractors will appreciate Hausing's built-in messaging and notification systems. 

The platform is also excellent for managers who want to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on strategic growth activities.

If you find yourself constantly switching between Excel, email, calendar applications, and file storage systems to manage your properties, Hausing's integrated approach will likely improve your workflow significantly.

Take the next step

• Explore the platform - visit hausing.co to see how integrated property management works

• See it in action - book a personalized demo to understand how Hausing fits your specific needs

• Try it risk-free - start with a free trial to experience the difference firsthand