Why the comparison is worth an afternoon
Software for co-owned buildings does a different job from software for rentals. A rental tool tracks tenants, leases and tickets; a common expenses tool must allocate one invoice across many owners by a legal share, keep a reserve fund apart, produce a statement per unit and hold the evidence for the AGM. Across Europe the share carries different names — per mille in Cyprus and Greece, Miteigentumsanteile in Germany, tantièmes in France — but the mechanics match. Many general tools cover none of this, so the calculation returns to a spreadsheet. Check the seven points below against your own buildings before you sign.
Allocation methods and rounding
Ask which methods exist, and whether they can be set per expense category rather than only per building. You will need at least ownership share (per mille or fraction), square metres, equal parts, and a lift or floor-based share so a ground-floor unit can carry zero. Then ask how rounding is handled. An invoice of €1,000.00 over 13 units does not divide evenly; software that rounds each line on its own leaves a gap of a few cents for someone to post by hand every month. The answer you want is a largest-remainder distribution in cents, so the lines always sum to the invoice. Ask to see it on a real invoice with an odd number of units.
Owner portal, not owner PDF
Owners will ask for their balance whatever software you use. The question is whether they can look it up themselves. A portal should show, per unit, the current common and reserve balances, every statement as a PDF, the payments applied and the building's documents — and nothing about other units. Check that access is scoped by the owner's identity in the database, not by hiding menu items. Check that owners without an account still receive the statement by email. Check that it is a website: owners abroad — common in Paphos, the Algarve or the Costa del Sol — will not install an app for one building.
Reserve fund kept apart
Most European jurisdictions expect a reserve for major works — the fonds de travaux compulsory in France since 2017 under the loi ALUR, the Erhaltungsrücklage (formerly Instandhaltungsrücklage) in Germany, the reserve fund typically kept by the management committee in Cyprus. Whatever the name, the software must give it its own opening balance, levies, charges, payments and closing balance on every statement, and its own line on any clearance or settlement certificate. Where the reserve fund is a category inside the operating account, it will be spent as operating money and the AGM will not be able to tell.
Audit trail with actor, time and values
Financial software must record who changed what and when — and what the value was before. Ask whether changes to expenses, allocations, payments, statements, units and ownership records are logged automatically, whether the log holds the old and new values, and whether anyone, the vendor's administrators included, can edit or delete an entry through the application. Ask too whether a posted payment's amount, date or allocation can be rewritten at all; the safer design blocks that in the database and forces a correcting entry. The audit trail is what a new committee, an auditor or a court will read.
Data isolation between companies
A property manager's software holds the data of many buildings and, in a multi-tenant service, many companies. Ask where the isolation is enforced. Application-level checks depend on every developer remembering them; database-level row-level security (RLS) in PostgreSQL applies to every query whether or not the application remembers. Ask which the vendor uses, whether managers can be limited to their assigned buildings, and where the data is hosted — for GDPR purposes, an EU region. Ask how sign-in is protected against automated attacks.
Pricing you can compute
Prices come per unit, per building or per tier. Compute your own figure: a committee with one block of 18 units, a manager with 40 buildings and 900 units. Check that the basics — allocation, statements, payments, the owner portal — sit in the plan you would buy, not in the tier above. Check whether owners pay anything (they should not) and whether a free trial runs on your real data without a card. A price list that needs a call to interpret is itself a data point.