Comparison

ProperLease vs a spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is free, familiar, and genuinely fine for a while. It stops being fine at the exact moment you need it most: a deposit dispute, a late payer, or an accountant asking for last year's numbers.

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48provinces and states with a lease document a spreadsheet cannot produce

0history retained when you overwrite a cell

1tab you have to remember to update, every single month

Nearly every landlord starts in a spreadsheet, and there is nothing embarrassing about that. One tab for rent, one for expenses, a column for deposits. It works right up until the portfolio grows, a tenant pays half the rent, or you need to prove what you sent and when.

This page is not an argument that spreadsheets are bad software. It is a look at the specific jobs a rental business needs doing, and which of them a grid of cells can structurally do.

Where ProperLease wins

The honest case for choosing ProperLease over a spreadsheet.

It keeps a history, not a number

A spreadsheet stores the current value of a cell. Overwrite it and the previous value is gone. ProperLease stores every payment as a dated, permanent entry, so questions like how often this tenant paid late, or what the balance was on the day you sent the reminder, have an answer.

It produces documents

The output of a spreadsheet is a number. The output of a tenancy is paperwork: a lease on the right provincial or state form, a late rent notice, a condition report, a deposit statement. ProperLease generates those from the same records that drive your rent tracking.

The totals cannot quietly break

Inserted rows that fall outside a SUM, a figure typed into the wrong column, a month skipped during a busy stretch. None of those announce themselves, and they all look plausible until the year-end numbers do not match the bank. A ledger with one way in does not have that failure mode.

Tax season is an export, not a reconstruction

Expenses categorised per property as you spend them come out as a report already lined up to the T776 or Schedule E. The alternative is a February spent reading bank statements backwards.

Where a spreadsheet is the better choice

A comparison you can trust has to be able to say this part out loud. Here is where they genuinely win.

It bends to anything

No software will model your one strange arrangement as fast as you can type a column heading. If your situation is genuinely unusual, a spreadsheet will accommodate it today and no product roadmap is involved.

You already own it, and so does everyone else

It is installed, you know the keyboard shortcuts, and any accountant or co-owner on earth can open the file. That is real value, and it is worth being honest that it costs nothing extra.

Nothing is locked in

The file is yours, offline, forever, in a format that will still open in twenty years. If you are the kind of owner who wants no account and no dependency, that argument does not go away.

Side by side

ProperLease against a spreadsheet, feature by feature.

	ProperLease	a spreadsheet
Leases and documents
Province and state lease documents	Fills the official government form in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. Generates a residential lease carrying the required disclosures in 45 US states.	No. A spreadsheet holds data, it does not produce a tenancy agreement. You draft the lease somewhere else and store the file loosely.
Late rent and eviction notices	Plain-English notice templates filled from the tenancy record, emailed, and logged with the date they went out. They are our own wording, not the tribunal's official form.	No. You write the notice by hand from whatever template you found, and hope the one you found is current.
Move-in and move-out condition reports	Built in, photo backed, attached to the tenancy so move-out compares against move-in.	Possible as a tab and a folder of photos, but nothing ties the move-out photos to the move-in ones.
Documents stored against the tenancy	Documents attach to the tenant and the lease: the signed lease, ID, insurance, the move-in inspection. They sit on the record they belong to, not in a folder.	A folder on your desktop, connected to the spreadsheet only by you remembering.
Rent and money
Dated rent ledger per tenant	Every payment is a permanent dated entry. Nothing is overwritten, so the history survives.	As good as your discipline. A cell you overwrite keeps no record that it ever held a different number.
Late rent surfaced without you looking	Expected rent is compared to what arrived. Anything short or missing is flagged on the dashboard and in your inbox.	You notice when you look. If the tab is two weeks stale, so is your picture of who has paid.
Deposits tracked as money you owe back	Held separately from rent, so the balance you owe at move-out is never guesswork.	Usually a single column. It rarely survives contact with a partial deduction at move-out.
Expenses tracked per property	Categorised per property and unit, with receipts attached, as you spend rather than in April.	Workable, and this is a spreadsheet's strongest suit, as long as you enter everything and the categories stay consistent.
Tax and reporting
Year-end reports built for the T776 and Schedule E	One export per property, with the categories already lined up to the form your accountant is filling in.	You build the summary yourself each year, and rebuild it each year after that.
Real cashflow per property	Rent in, expenses out, per door, so you can see which property is actually earning.	Achievable with formulas, until a row is inserted outside a SUM and the total is quietly wrong.
Dated record of what you sent	Every notice and reminder ProperLease sends is logged with the recipient, the date and the time. A resend adds an entry rather than replacing one.	None. A spreadsheet has no idea what you emailed a tenant or when.
Cost and effort
How it is priced	one property free, forever. Premium is $14.99 CAD a month or $99 CAD a year for the whole portfolio. No per-door charge, no per-document fee.	Free, or already included in software you pay for anyway. This is a genuine advantage.
Time to get running	An evening. Add a property, add a tenant, import your payment history from CSV.	Minutes to start, then ongoing effort forever. The cost is spread out rather than absent.
Works from your phone	A native iPhone app. Mark rent paid, photograph a receipt, start a condition report from the doorway.	Editable on a phone in the technical sense. Nobody does it standing in a doorway.

This comparison reflects publicly available information as of September 21, 2026, plus our own reading of how these approaches work in practice. Products and prices change, and we do not publish other vendors' prices here. Check the vendor's own site before you decide. If you think something on this page is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Frequently asked questions

Is a spreadsheet good enough for one rental unit?

Often, yes, for a while. One unit and a reliable tenant is the case a spreadsheet handles best. The trouble starts at the second unit, the first late payment, or the first deposit dispute, because those need history and documents rather than a current balance.

What can ProperLease do that a spreadsheet structurally cannot?

Three things. It generates the lease document for your province or state, it produces dated notices and keeps a record that they were sent, and it keeps an append-only payment history that survives being edited. Those are jobs about documents and time, not about arithmetic, which is what a spreadsheet is for.

Can I move my existing spreadsheet into ProperLease?

Yes. Export it to CSV and import it. Properties, tenants and payment history map across, so your year to date figures carry over rather than resetting to zero. Most landlords do it in an evening.

Do I have to stop using my spreadsheet?

No. Plenty of owners keep one for a side calculation or a projection they like. What changes is that the spreadsheet stops being the system of record, so a stale tab no longer means a wrong answer about who owes rent.

What does ProperLease cost compared with a spreadsheet?

A spreadsheet is free, and that is a real point in its favour. ProperLease is one property free, forever, and Premium covers the whole portfolio at $14.99 CAD a month or $99 CAD a year. It is not priced per door, so a second or fifth unit does not change the bill.

Why spreadsheets fail self-managing landlords Know your real cashflow Import your existing data Lease documents by province and state

Run your rentals with absolute clarity

ProperLease helps self-managing landlords in Canada and the US track rent, generate provincial and state leases, serve notices, and stay tax ready.

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