About Landlord Ledger

Why this exists, and how the files were actually tested.

Landlord Ledger is an independent, one-person shop that makes spreadsheets and paperwork templates for people who own a handful of rental units and manage them themselves. Not a software company, not a SaaS product with a monthly bill — a set of files you buy once and keep.

Why it exists

Small landlords sit in an awkward gap. Property-management software is priced and designed for portfolios ten times larger, and most of it charges every month for features you'll never open. The alternative is what most people actually do: a bank app, a notes file, a shoebox of receipts, and a rough memory of who paid. That works right up until a deposit dispute, a missed renewal deadline, or an April scramble to reconstruct a year of expenses.

The toolkit is the middle option — files that do the arithmetic and the remembering, in tools you already own.

How the files were tested

This is the part worth being specific about, because “tested” usually means nothing.

• Independent recomputation. Every workbook was filled with a full year of deliberately messy demo data, then every computed figure was recalculated independently — outside the spreadsheet — and compared cell by cell. Thousands of individual checks across the four workbooks.
• Deliberately awkward data. The test year includes partial payments, catch-up payments, a mid-year rent increase, a tenant moving out mid-lease, a vacant month, a missed month, a refund, and the IRS's mid-year 2026 mileage-rate change — the cases where naive spreadsheets quietly get the wrong answer.
• Real recalculation, not just reading. The finished workbooks are opened and recalculated by a separate spreadsheet engine, so the numbers you see are the numbers the formulas actually produce — not values typed in to look right.
• Google Sheets, live. Each workbook was uploaded to Google Sheets and used there, because “works in Google Sheets” is a claim that's easy to make and easy to get wrong. The files deliberately avoid macros and newer Excel-only functions for exactly this reason.
• Print tests. The .docx templates and the PDF were printed in black and white to check they're usable at a kitchen table, not just on a screen.

What that testing does not cover: whether a given expense belongs on a given tax line for your situation, or whether a notice period is correct in your city. No amount of formula testing can settle those, and the files say so where it matters.

Where we're careful

Landlord-tenant law, screening rules and tax treatment vary by state and city and change over time. Everywhere the toolkit touches a legal or tax question, it tells you to verify locally rather than pretending to a certainty it doesn't have. That's also why you won't find “court-proof”, “guaranteed compliant” or “wins disputes” anywhere on this site — the files help you keep a clear, consistent, dated record, and a clear record is what tends to help. See the terms and license for the full disclaimer.

No fake reviews

The toolkit launched recently, so there are no customer testimonials on this site. When there are real ones, they'll be real ones — quoted with permission and attributed. Invented praise is worth less than a plain description of how the thing was built, which is what this page is.