Why Excel is bad for your
business
Excel, with its hundreds of columns and fancy mathematical
equations. It looks so professional when really, you’re making property
manager's lives hell?
It’s because Excel was not made looking after
properties. In fact, it’s probably costing you time and increasing your stress-related computer rage. You might justify using spreadsheets because you only
have one or a few properties, or because it’s what you are used to, or because
you think that using software would be costly and just not worth it. So why do
you ask, is Excel so bad for my business?
Excel is not an intuitive system
While it’s great for manually typing data into tiny
rectangles, spreadsheets are not made for automatically generating invoices
that you can print or give access to your tenants. Due to the lack of a central
database with multiple components, you enter your data into one spreadsheet,
then in another for tenant records, then another for receipt records, etc. Talk
about triple handling! So, while it’s easy to create a spreadsheet, trying to
actually turn it into a fully operational property management tool is not
(unless you’re some spreadsheet master).
The worse thing is if you save your work on your
computer and it crashes, you’re more than likely to crash out of horror as
well.
Using spreadsheets for tasks that they weren’t
built for is a long and windy path to go down. We live in a time where there
are simple online tools that can help with correctly managing your property which
cost less than $1 a day (that’s less than one coffee a week made by your local
hipster).
Tools that store all your data securely online, can
advertise your property, Track the rent, manage rent arrears, communicate with
your tenant, do tenant checks, and much more
So, it’s up to you. Will you continue to waste
hours managing data with spreadsheets, or join the online property management
software gang?
Jason Gwerder
Tuesday, 18 August 2020