No more balance spreadsheet: how LeasingTrack works out what a tenant owes

Most small landlords keep a balance somewhere. It might be a spreadsheet, a notebook or a figure in your head: "Anna is 200 short from September." The trouble is that this number lives apart from the records it's meant to sum up. You record a payment in one place, forget to update the other, and by December the two don't match.

LeasingTrack takes a different approach, and it's the main idea behind the app: the balance isn't something you type in. It follows from what's recorded with the lease, meaning the rent that has fallen due and the payments you've recorded. Change a record and the balance changes with it. There's no second number to keep in sync, so nothing can drift.

Here's how that works in practice.

One flat, one quarter

Take a one-bedroom flat let at 600 a month (use whatever currency you work in), with rent due on the 5th. Here is July to September.

July: paid on time

Rent of 600 falls due on 5 July. The tenant pays the full amount on 3 July and you record the payment.

• Rent due so far: 600
• Payments recorded: 600
• Balance: 0

Nothing to do, nothing to remember.

August: paid late

Rent falls due on 5 August, but the money only arrives on 12 August.

• From 5 to 12 August, the balance shows 600 outstanding, because rent is due and no payment has been recorded against it.
• On 12 August you record the payment, and the balance goes back to 0.

You didn't have to remember to "clear" anything. The balance was 600 because a payment was missing, and it returned to zero once the payment was recorded. If you want a calm way to handle the conversation while rent is late, our earlier guide Late rent before winter covers that.

September: partial payment

Rent falls due on 5 September. The tenant explains that a bill came in higher than expected and pays 400, promising the rest with October's rent.

• Rent due so far: 1,800
• Payments recorded: 600 + 600 + 400 = 1,600
• Balance: 200 outstanding

That 200 doesn't need a note in the margin. It stays on the balance until a payment covers it. When the tenant pays 800 in October (600 for October plus the 200 from September), you record it and the balance is back to 0.

The quarter at a glance

The useful part is that the balance has a trail behind it. If a tenant asks "why does it say I owe 200?", you can show them the September rent and the 400 payment, without having to rebuild the story from bank statements.

And if you make a mistake, say by recording 500 instead of 400, you fix that one payment record. The balance corrects itself, because it was never stored separately.

What your tenant sees

You can invite a tenant by email. Once they accept, they see only their own lease: their rent, the payments recorded against it and the resulting balance. They don't see your other properties, other tenants or your expenses.

In practice that saves a lot of "did you get my transfer?" messages. Once you've recorded the payment, the tenant can check it for themselves. If something looks wrong, say a payment they made isn't showing, they can message you in the app, and the conversation stays with the lease instead of getting lost among texts and emails. Tenants can also report maintenance issues there.

It also works the other way round. A partial payment like September's is easier to discuss when you're both looking at the same figure.

Expenses and documents, in the same place

The balance covers what the tenant owes you. The rest of the flat's paperwork sits alongside it, under the same property:

• Expenses: the boiler service, the common charges, the new tap. These are recorded against the property, so you can see the flat's income and costs together. (We covered this in more detail in Before year-end: keep each rental's income, expenses and receipts together.)
• Documents: the signed lease, the handover record, meter photos, receipts. Kept with the property and its lease, so you're not searching through a shared drive when you need them.

To be clear about what LeasingTrack doesn't do: it doesn't import bank transactions, send automatic payment reminders or produce tax reports. You record payments and expenses yourself. The point is that you record each one once, in one place, and the balance follows from it.

What it costs

LeasingTrack is free for up to two properties. Larger portfolios will need a subscription, which doesn't have a published price yet. It runs in the browser and on Android, and the interface is available in 13 languages, so you and your tenant can each use the language you're most comfortable with.

A year-end tip: check every balance before 31 December

This is a good time of year to go through every lease and look at its balance, and it's better done now than in February. While everyone still remembers the details, small mismatches are easy to sort out: a transfer that came in under a different name, a partial payment that was settled in cash, a month where you agreed to deduct a repair.

A simple routine:

1. Open each lease and read the balance. If it's zero and that matches your understanding, you're done.
2. If it isn't zero, check the records behind it. Is a payment missing, or recorded twice, or for the wrong amount? Fix the record, not the total.
3. Agree any real arrears with the tenant now, in writing. A message in the app keeps the agreement with the lease.
4. Pay extra attention to leases that are ending. In Hungary, many fixed-term leases end on 31 December (see our post from 21 October). Settling the deposit at handover is much simpler when the balance is already agreed. How deposits may be used differs from country to country, so if anything is disputed, check with a local lawyer.

If your figures also feed into a tax return, a clean balance at year-end makes your accountant's job easier, but treat this as record keeping, not tax advice. The rules depend on your country and situation.

One balance per lease, worked out from the records, and checked once before the year closes. That's all the spreadsheet was ever trying to do.