What a spreadsheet does well
A spreadsheet opens in seconds, costs nothing and stays on your own drive. Nobody approves your columns, and no subscription decides whether you can still open last year’s file. For a first look at a listing, a workbook is often the fastest honest answer.
Flexibility is why most Canadian investors still start there. A workbook bends to a triplex with a garage, to a seller who quotes heating by the season, or to the one ratio your lender keeps asking about. Software that refuses the odd case is worth less than a cell you can retype.
- No cost, no account, no waiting for a feature.
- Every formula is visible and yours to change.
- The file opens on any machine, years later, with no vendor in the middle.
Where a spreadsheet breaks on a portfolio
A workbook breaks in predictable places once a portfolio passes one building. The acquisition file and the operating file drift apart, a pasted value takes the place of a formula, and the column keeps totalling as if nothing happened.
A missing number is the quietest of these failures. An empty cell counts as zero inside a sum, so an unknown heating cost lowers expenses and raises cash flow at the same time. The workbook then reports a result with more confidence than the evidence behind it.
Version drift is the second. A workbook sent to a broker, a partner and an accountant comes back three times, each copy carrying a different rent, and nothing in the file says which copy was read last.
- A pasted value replaces a formula without saying so.
- A rent increase leaves no date, so last year’s rent is gone.
- A blank cell counts as zero, so an unknown expense flatters the result.
- Nothing separates a figure taken from a lease from a figure you guessed.
What carries over from your workbook
Your own method carries over. Dewin reads a macro-free XLSX workbook, shows the sheet with its named ranges, and lets you map a chosen cell to a Dewin field before anything is imported. Imported values arrive marked for confirmation rather than overwriting what you already entered.
Unit lists move the same way. An Excel file holding unit, tenant, monthly rent, lease start and lease end is read from its first sheet, up to five hundred rows, shown as a validated preview, and written only once you confirm it. A row with an error is listed with its line number, and nothing is saved until the row is fixed.
The source file stays attached to the property in its private document folder. The workbook behind a figure remains available months later, when a lender or a partner asks where the figure came from.
What Dewin adds after the purchase
One record per property is the difference that matters. The analysis you ran before the offer, the leases, the monthly rent collections, the expenses and the mortgage stay in the same file, so last winter’s plan can be set against what the building actually did.
Scenarios sit side by side instead of living in tabs you renamed. A base case and a cautious case each keep their own rents, vacancy, expenses and financing, and the financing calculation separates the loan limit supported by income from the limit based on the property’s value.
The cash flow guide’s worked example runs on five figures: $120,000 of scheduled rent becomes $118,000 of effective gross income, then $76,000 of net operating income after $42,000 of expenses, and $16,000 of cash flow after $60,000 of debt payments. A spreadsheet produces those five figures without trouble. Keeping them next to the leases, the collections and the renewal date is the part a workbook does not do.
Sharing changes too. A report goes out as a link, with its sources and its missing inputs attached, and a co-investor can be invited to one building without being shown the rest of your portfolio.
When a spreadsheet is still the right answer
One property, one owner, one afternoon: a spreadsheet is enough. Nothing here beats a workbook for a back-of-envelope screen of a listing you will probably walk away from before the week ends.
A method you have already automated deserves respect. When your workbook produces the ratios your lender asks for and you are the only person who touches it, the cost of moving is real and the gain is small. The moment to change is when a second building, a partner or a year of operations turns the file into a filing problem instead of a calculation problem.
Dewin does not claim to replace a spreadsheet for everything. Your data can be exported from settings, the MLI Select calculator is free and needs no account, and the fourteen-day trial runs without a credit card, so the comparison can be made on your own numbers rather than on this page.