Property Manager Rent Tracking

A free and simple way to keep track of rent payments for property managers without the overhead of Cozy Co.

Matt Hudson

As a former Condo owner (and a very brief stint as a landlord), I was thrilled to use the likes of Cozy Co ー dedicated software to manage the relationship with tenants and automatically receive rent payments (after some setup).

While I personally enjoyed the software and had positive reviews generally, when my father-in-law prompted me about ways to automate and keep track of rent payments for the properties he managed, I knew that a packaged software solution like Cozy Co wasn’t going to fly. He still wanted to collect checks in real life (it’s an unobtrusive reason to touch base with his tenants!), and he had no need or interest in the bevy of other features like managing the application process or doing background checks. Besides, for the past 20 years a spreadsheet worked just fine... outside of the manual work and the occasional goofed bookkeeping.

That’s where Coda shines — as both an improvement to the spreadsheet he was using and a low-overhead alternative to Cozy Co. Coda is as approachable and simple as a doc or spreadsheet, but can also be as powerful as an app to automate some of those reminders.

The Pain Point: Keeping track of and sending reminders for rent payments

The core problem we needed to solve was multi-pronged: tracking and sending reminders for when rent payments were due and for which tenants.

Ideally, notifications would be a simple email reminder sent a few days ahead of the due date. After that, we’d just need a way to easily keep track of when we received and cashed their check.

The Solution: Four tables, two views, a Pack, and an automation

Constructing an alternative to Cozy Co to keep track of rent payments was easy. We started by making four tables that represent all the key parts of this process:

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