Comparison
Excel vs Zurently
A spreadsheet gets you through your first five tenancies. It breaks quietly around tenancy ten. Here’s where Excel still wins, where it stops working, and what the migration actually looks like.
The short version
If you only read one thing on this page.
Excel is free, flexible, and has no learning curve. It wins for agents managing 1–5 tenancies with simple rent tracking.
The breaking point is usually around tenancy ten — when search, version control, and handover evidence start costing more hours than the spreadsheet saves.
Zurently isn’t “better than Excel.” It’s what comes after Excel, once your tenancy volume makes a spreadsheet the bottleneck.
What Excel still does brilliantly.
Excel is free forever, with no subscription to renew and no vendor that can disappear on you. Every agent’s spreadsheet looks different because every agent’s workflow is different, and Excel bends to that workflow instead of imposing its own. The cells are yours, the formulas are yours, the structure is yours.
It works offline, on any device, in any region, without waiting for a mobile app to sync. It has zero learning curve if you already know how to use it — and most SEA agents already do. Your data lives in a file format every other tool on earth can read; there is no lock-in and there is no migration cost when you move.
For an agent managing one to five tenancies with straightforward rent tracking, the simplicity is the feature. The monthly row of rent-in, the tab per property, the occasional repair cost noted in column F — that is enough structure for the job at that scale. For many agents, Excel is the right tool — right up until it isn’t.
Where the spreadsheet stops scaling.
Search degrades quietly. “Did that tenant report the leak in March or May?” Excel has Find, but across fifteen tabs and three hundred rows you lose ten minutes every time. Version control goes next: the latest figures are either on your laptop, in an email attachment, or on the shared drive, and which one is current depends on who updated last and whether they remembered to tell you.
Photo evidence lives in a separate world from the spreadsheet. You photograph move-in condition on your phone, file it somewhere in your camera roll, and hope you can find it fourteen months later when a deposit dispute needs exactly those photos paired with exactly that rent ledger row. The handover pack doesn’t exist as a document — you reconstruct one in Word, from scratch, every time.
Disputes sharpen all of this. When a landlord contests a deduction, you’re reassembling the timeline from WhatsApp screenshots, bank statements, and spreadsheet cells that don’t link to each other. Each reassembly eats a weekend. The spreadsheet didn’t break — the tenancy outgrew the spreadsheet.
Feature by feature
Where each tool fits.
Read this table top-to-bottom. Excel wins the top rows — the simple stuff. As the features get more complex, the advantages flip.
| Feature | Excel | Zurently |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per month | free | S$49 Solo / S$199 Power |
| Setup time | zero | 15 minutes |
| Fully customizable | ✓ | within product scope |
| Works offline | ✓ | mobile app cached |
| No vendor lock-in | ✓ | CSV export anytime |
| Search across all tenancies | slow | ✓ |
| Version control (single source of truth) | — | ✓ |
| Photo evidence attached to events | — | ✓ |
| Handover PDF pack (SCT-ready) | — | ✓ |
| Renewal commission dashboard | — | ✓ |
| White-label landlord portal | — | ✓ |
| Multi-user collaboration | with OneDrive / Google Sheets | ✓ |
| SEA-specific compliance | — | ✓ |
Cost per month
- Excel
- free
- Zurently
- S$49 Solo / S$199 Power
Setup time
- Excel
- zero
- Zurently
- 15 minutes
Fully customizable
- Excel
- ✓
- Zurently
- within product scope
Works offline
- Excel
- ✓
- Zurently
- mobile app cached
No vendor lock-in
- Excel
- ✓
- Zurently
- CSV export anytime
Search across all tenancies
- Excel
- slow
- Zurently
- ✓
Version control (single source of truth)
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
Photo evidence attached to events
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
Handover PDF pack (SCT-ready)
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
Renewal commission dashboard
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
White-label landlord portal
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
Multi-user collaboration
- Excel
- with OneDrive / Google Sheets
- Zurently
- ✓
SEA-specific compliance
- Excel
- —
- Zurently
- ✓
Migration
What moving from Excel to Zurently actually looks like.
Step one
Pick one tenancy to start.
Don’t migrate everything at once. Pick your most complicated active tenancy — usually your longest-running one, or the one with the most issues logged so far. Add it to Zurently first. You’ll spend about fifteen minutes transferring the basics: property address, landlord and tenant contacts, start date, monthly rent, deposit held. That’s it for the setup.
Step two
Log past events in bulk.
If you have a year of rent payment history in a spreadsheet column, log them in Zurently as past events. Takes about ten to twenty minutes depending on how many events you’re migrating. You’re not recreating every WhatsApp message — you’re logging the events that would matter in a renewal case or a deposit dispute. Rent paid, repairs done, inspections completed. Photo evidence where you have it.
Step three
Run both in parallel for one month.
Keep your Excel spreadsheet alive. Log new tenancy events in both places for thirty days. At the end of the month, check which one you actually reached for when you needed information. If Zurently won that test, migrate the rest of your tenancies. If Excel won, we’d rather know than sell you a tool you won’t use.
There’s no rush. Zurently’s Solo Agent tier gives you twenty active tenancies. You can migrate one per week over five months and never pay more than S$49 for the transition.
Questions
Common questions about leaving Excel.
Can I import my existing Excel spreadsheet directly into Zurently?
Not at launch. There's no one-click import because agent spreadsheets vary wildly — no two look the same, so automated mapping would introduce errors. Manual transfer takes 15-20 minutes per tenancy. We'll build an import tool if the first 10 paying agents specifically ask for it; otherwise we'd rather ship features that matter more.
What if I just want to keep using Excel?
Then keep using Excel. For agents managing 1–5 tenancies with straightforward rent tracking, Zurently is overkill and Excel is the right tool. The migration case kicks in around tenancy 10, or the first time you have to reconstruct a handover pack from scratch for a deposit dispute. Until then, stay on the spreadsheet.
Do I lose my historical data if I stop paying for Zurently?
No. Every account includes CSV export — all tenancies, events, photos, and documents. If you cancel, you download a CSV bundle that covers everything you logged. The data is yours. We're a tool, not a vault.
What about version control between my business partner and me?
The core value-add over Excel is a single source of truth. Zurently's Power Agent tier includes 3 user seats — you and two others work from the same tenancy records. Every event is timestamped and attributed to whoever logged it. No more 'which spreadsheet is current?'
Is Zurently really faster than a spreadsheet I already know how to use?
For the first tenancy you log, no — Excel wins because you already know it. By tenancy 5, it's a wash. By tenancy 10, Zurently is faster because search, version control, and handover pack generation become the bottleneck on Excel. The honest answer is: you'll feel slower in week one and faster by month two.
When is it time to leave Excel?
If you’re searching for “that repair invoice from last March” more than once a week, if you’ve ever recreated a deposit-dispute evidence pack from scratch in Word, or if you’ve wondered which of your three spreadsheets is actually the current one — that’s when. Book a demo.