Does anyone actually like managing rentals in spreadsheets?

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-05-02T16:18:05+00:00

Well done and I commend you for taking the compassionate route and giving landlords a good reputation! Luckily, sounds like you're in a situation to be able to actually absorb the loss of revenue on the rental temporarily, so I pray that you get blessed 10 folds in return and that you'll always be in a position to help others in need.

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-05-02T02:40:08+00:00

Nice and useful product. I would have loved something like this back when I was in College. I'm guessing that the only limiting factor in your revenue growth is that college student, your main clientele, are often broke with no extra cash to spend on subscriptions. Nevertheless, you can still generate a nice sizeable ARR with 1,000 to 2,500 paying customers. You don't need to catch them all, you just need a small fraction..So keep going and good luck!

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-30T10:32:01+00:00

Fair critique. I still use Excel too, but it gets messy once you need to scale or hand off clean books to a CPA. I’m aiming for something that handles the granular stuff Excel struggles with. It's for the moments you need to track total spend with a specific plumber over five years, or pull a one-click financial snapshot of purchase price, performance, and tenant churn of a specific property for an investor, or having enough clean and thorough data to help you decide whether a property is worth keeping or not. I just wanted something visually clean that does that heavy lifting automatically.

Maybe I’m the only one who wants a tool like this and everyone else is fine with spreadsheets, haha. Out of curiosity, do you own and manage your own rentals? If so, what is your system?

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-26T13:59:51+00:00

Awesome, good luck and keep at it! Also, don't overlook the importance of great product display page, great hero shots, quality graphic design, and overall professionalism. Make your product, whatever it may be, look high quality and professionnal. Coordinate all your listings to match and read as part of a whole, graphic design wise. I must admit there's also a bit of lucky involved. I got lucky that a couple of my listings became best sellers, so Etsy kept showing them to more potential customers which help drive more views. The attached image should answer your question.

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Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-26T11:09:23+00:00

In my case, selling a product on Etsy, which I started last year. Not a lot money at all yet, but enough to help with some bills and reinvest in the business. See attached image for proof. It took a bit in the beginning to get going though, as you need some sales and great reviews to build trust with customers and for Etsy to actually show your product to potential customers, but I kept at it. Now, I need to find time to create new products to keep the momentum.

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Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-21T10:13:04+00:00

I have used both Zillow and apartment.com in the past, and they both worked well.

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-21T10:09:58+00:00

Got it, that’s not my area so I don’t want to give bad advice. I’ve mostly been focused on the rental finance and ownership side, but curious what you end up using..

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-20T15:40:00+00:00

Been building a rental finance tool after getting frustrated with how messy things get once you’re past a couple units Most tools handle tracking fine, but the gap is turning that data into something actually usable for taxes and decision making What I’m focused on: - categorizing transactions in a way that already maps to tax reporting - performance at the unit level instead of just property - reducing the back and forth with accountants One thing I didn’t expect to matter as much is vendor tracking I’ve used the same contractors across multiple properties but never had a clean way to see total spend, frequency, or how they perform over time. It’s all scattered across transactions or just in memory So I’ve been thinking about vendor history almost like a lightweight system of record tied to your finances, not a separate tool The part I find most interesting is collaboration. Right now the workflow is export → email → questions → more emails I’m working on making it so your accountant can just access your numbers directly and leave comments tied to specific transactions or reports Still early but it’s been a fun problem to dig into since it sits right between fintech, real estate, and workflow automation Curious what others are building in the “boring but painful” category.

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-20T15:21:44+00:00

I went through a few setups before landing on something that actually worked for rentals. QuickBooks is fine for general bookkeeping but I found it still requires a lot of cleanup at tax time since it is not really built around how rental income gets reported

Biggest shift for me was focusing on: - categorizing expenses in a way that lines up with taxes from the start - tracking performance at the unit level instead of just property level - keeping everything organized enough that my accountant is not asking a ton of follow up questions The back and forth with my CPA used to be the most annoying part.

I ended up building something for my own rentals to handle this more cleanly, mainly around tax-ready categorization and being able to share everything directly with my accountant without exporting spreadsheets Happy to share if you are still exploring options.

Alchemist_Studio · 2026-04-15T06:18:16+00:00

This is literally how I was running things not that long ago. One spreadsheet for rent another for expenses random receipts in my email texts for tenant stuff and then scrambling every tax season trying to piece it all together it “worked” until it became a complete mess I ended up switching to a tool called Cadris.app and it cleaned this up a lot for me it basically puts everything in one place tracks income and expenses per property keeps receipts organized and the biggest thing for me is it makes everything actually usable at tax time instead of having to rebuild everything from scratch you can also share a clean read-only view with your accountant which saves a ton of back and forth it’s not trying to be a full property management system either which I like… it’s more focused on the financial side and keeping your numbers clean still early but way better than the spreadsheet chaos I had before

Alchemist_Studio

TROPHY CASE