Why I Stopped Checking My Rent Spreadsheet Every Day

For about 2 years, checking my rent spreadsheet was the first thing I did every morning. Before coffee. Before email. Open the sheet, scan for blanks, close the sheet.

It became a ritual. And for a while, it worked.

The Daily Ritual

Here's what the routine looked like. Wake up. Grab my phone. Open Google Sheets. Scroll through the rent roll for the current month.

I'd scan the "Date Paid" column. If a cell was blank and the due date had passed, I'd text that tenant. Something like "Hey, just a heads up, rent was due on the 1st. Let me know if there's an issue."

Then I'd close the sheet and go about my day.

Took about 5 minutes when everyone paid on time. Maybe 15 minutes when someone didn't, because then I'd be going back and forth over text or checking bank deposits.

Five minutes a day doesn't sound like much. But it's not the 5 minutes that gets you. It's the mental weight of knowing you HAVE to check. Every single day. No days off.

When It Started to Break

I started with 4 units. Checking a 4-row spreadsheet every morning is nothing. You can literally scan it in 10 seconds.

Then I bought a triplex. Then a duplex. Then 3 more single-family rentals. Suddenly I had 12 units across multiple properties.

The spreadsheet grew. Multiple tabs, different due dates for different tenants, some on the 1st and some on the 15th. A few had different grace periods because of how their leases were structured.

The 5-minute check became 15 minutes. And the mental math got harder. "Wait, did Unit 7B pay? I thought they did but I don't see it. Let me check my bank app. Okay, they paid on the 3rd but I forgot to mark it."

I started making mistakes. Missing payments that came in. Texting tenants who had already paid. That's embarrassing.

The Week I Forgot

In September 2023, I had a brutal week at my day job. Back-to-back meetings, a project deadline, a client crisis. I didn't check my rent sheet for 7 days.

Seven days.

When I finally opened it on the 8th, I found two tenants who hadn't paid. One was just a few days late and paid immediately when I texted. The other had been late since the 1st and never heard from me.

That second tenant had already spent the rent money. We ended up on a payment plan. I wrote about that whole mess in The $1,400 Mistake.

That was the moment I realized something important.

The Spreadsheet Only Works If You Open It

This sounds painfully obvious. But let me say it again. Your rent tracking spreadsheet does absolutely nothing unless you open it and look at it.

It doesn't alert you. It doesn't send you a text. It doesn't chase your tenants. It just sits there, quietly holding data, waiting for you to check.

And when you're busy, or sick, or on vacation, or just having a bad week, that spreadsheet goes unchecked. And late payments pile up in silence.

The data is all there. The formulas work perfectly. But the system has a single point of failure. You.

If you're noticing cracks in your process, you're not alone. I wrote about the signs your rental property tracking system is failing and it reads like a checklist of my own mistakes.

What I Tried First

I tried setting calendar reminders. "Check rent sheet" every morning at 8am. That worked for about 2 weeks before I started swiping it away like every other notification on my phone.

I tried Google Apps Script. Wrote a little script that would email me if any payments were missing. It worked for 4 months, then broke when Google updated something. I didn't notice it was broken for 12 days.

I tried Zapier. Connected my sheet to a Zap that would send me a Slack message. It was complicated to set up, expensive for what it did, and I still had to configure all the logic myself.

None of these solutions solved the real problem. I didn't need another reminder to check. I needed something that would check for me and only bother me when something was wrong.

What I Do Now

I built RentGuard. I know that sounds like a sales pitch, but it's literally the reason the product exists.

I needed a tool that would read my Google Sheet every day, compare due dates to the Date Paid column, and send me a text if rent was overdue past the grace period. That's it. That's the whole product idea.

Now my morning looks different. I don't check my rent sheet. I don't think about it at all. If I get a text from RentGuard, I deal with it. If I don't get a text, everyone paid. Simple.

I went from 5-15 minutes every single morning to 0 minutes on most days. And the days when something IS late, I catch it on day 1. Not day 7. Not day 11.

The Mental Relief Is the Real Win

People ask me about the time savings. And yeah, not spending 15 minutes every morning scanning a spreadsheet is nice. But that's not the best part.

The best part is not thinking about it. The low-grade anxiety of "did I check today?" is gone. The guilt of missing a late payment because life got busy is gone.

My spreadsheet is still the same. Same columns, same formulas, same layout. I just don't have to stare at it every morning anymore.

For tips on how to stop late payments from slipping through the cracks, read how to stop missing late rent payments. It covers both manual and automated approaches.

Should You Stop Checking Too?

If you have 1-3 units, honestly, you're probably fine checking manually. The volume is low enough that it takes 2 minutes.

But if you're at 5+ units and you have a day job or other stuff pulling at your time, you're going to miss something eventually. It's not a question of if. It's when.

I checked every single day for 2 years and I still missed payments. Because the one day I didn't check was the one day it mattered.

Don't wait until your $1,400 mistake. Set up monitoring now and stop relying on yourself to remember.