Spreadsheets vs building management software: an honest comparison

When is a spreadsheet the right tool?

Be fair to the spreadsheet. For a single building of six to twelve units, managed by one committee member who is comfortable with formulas, a well-built spreadsheet does the job: a sheet of invoices, a sheet of shares, a multiplication, a sheet of payments and a running balance per owner. It costs nothing, everyone understands it, and it can be emailed as a PDF.

It works because the hard problems are small. One person edits, so there is no version conflict. Owners rarely change, so the shares sheet is stable. The reserve is a second column, and the person who maintains it is the same person who knows it is not to be spent. If that describes your building, keep the spreadsheet and spend the time on the building.

Where does the spreadsheet break?

The spreadsheet does not break on size; it breaks on specific events. Five of them account for most of the failures:

• A second editor. Two people with the file, or one file on a shared drive, and within a quarter there are two versions of the truth and no record of who changed a share or deleted a payment.
• An ownership change mid-period. The March charge has to be split between seller and buyer by days, the seller's final balance has to be certified, and the buyer's statement has to start clean. In a spreadsheet this is a manual edit to the shares sheet that silently rewrites history.
• The reserve fund. A column is not a ledger. When the operating account runs short, the spreadsheet cannot stop anyone from spending the reserve, and cannot show an owner that it was not spent.
• Owner access. Owners want to see their balance, their statement and the building's position without asking. A spreadsheet means one person answering the same question forty times a year — or forty owners not asking and not trusting.
• Reminders and follow-up. Who is overdue, who was reminded and when, who has a payment plan — this is a process, and a spreadsheet has no memory of process.

Each of these is survivable alone. Together, they are the reason the third year's spreadsheet looks nothing like the first and nobody can explain a balance from 2024.

What does the manual month actually cost?

The honest way to compare is to price the manual month. For a managing agent with, say, twelve buildings, a typical month includes entering and allocating invoices, posting payments from bank statements, producing statements, chasing arrears, answering owner questions, and the occasional transfer certificate. In our experience a careful manual process takes three to five hours per building per month — more at year end. Time your own; the figure varies with the building and the person.

Twelve buildings at four hours is 48 hours a month. Value that time at whatever an hour of administrative staff costs your business — at €25.00 an hour it is €1,200.00 a month, before the cost of the mistakes: the allocation that was off by a share, the payment posted to the wrong owner, the reserve contribution that never got separated. Those do not show up in the hours; they show up at the AGM.

Software does not remove all of that time — someone still has to approve the invoice and read the bank line — but it removes most of the calculation, all of the retyping, and the questions a portal answers. Whether the difference pays for a subscription is arithmetic you can do for your own portfolio; our pricing is public so the comparison is straightforward.

What software has to do to be worth it

Not every piece of software is better than the spreadsheet; some are a worse spreadsheet with a sign-in. To be worth switching, it has to do the things the spreadsheet cannot:

• Keep an audit trail: every change to a share, a charge or a payment, with who and when, that cannot be edited away.
• Hold ownership as dated records, so a mid-period sale splits the charge correctly and the historic statements stay as they were.
• Run the reserve as a separate ledger with its own balance and its own movements.
• Allocate by the method the regulations set — area, shares, meters, custom rules — and reconcile every allocation to the invoice, to the cent.
• Give each owner their own view of their own data, and nobody else's.
• Remember the process: who is overdue, what was sent, what was agreed.

Everything else — dashboards, AI, integrations — is welcome, but secondary. Our comparison guide goes through the categories of software on the market and where each one sits against this list.

Questions to ask any vendor

Ask these before you sign anything, and ask for a demonstration of the answer rather than a description of it:

• Show me an ownership change on the 19th of the month. What happens to the March statement for the seller and the buyer?
• Show me the reserve fund balance and how a withdrawal is recorded. Can an operating payment be posted against it by mistake?
• Show me who changed this owner's share, and when.
• Show me an allocation of €1,237.40 by area across eight units. Where does the rounding cent go?
• What does an owner see when they sign in, and what can they never see?
• How do I get my data out — all of it, in a format I can open — if I leave?
• Which countries' formats does it support for dates, currency and VAT, and can that differ per company?

A vendor who cannot demonstrate the first four is selling a spreadsheet.

What Domera does and does not do

Domera is the ledger of the building: it allocates expenses by the method you set, keeps the reserve on a separate ledger, records ownership with dates, produces statements and the transfer certificate from the same figures, tracks the building's compliance calendar, and gives owners a portal with their own balance. Every financial and compliance record carries an audit trail, and each company's data is isolated at the database level.

It does not do your accounting: it produces the figures your accountant needs, not the statutory return. It does not decide the allocation method for you; the regulations do, and you configure them. And it will not make a badly run building well run — it makes a well-run one visible. If your building is the small, single-person case from the first section, a spreadsheet may serve you for years. If it is not, price the manual month and compare.