One rental flat hardly counts as management. One tenant, one rent, one lease — who needs software for that?
Until the moment your tenant asks about an electricity settlement from six months ago and you're digging through your phone gallery for a photo of the meter. Or the day the lease expires and you find out a week later.
What actually needs handling with one flat
The list is shorter than with five units, but it isn't empty:
- Rent — whether the payment arrived, how much, and for which month
- Utilities — readings, rates and settling up with the tenant
- Documents — lease, handover report, confirmations; a complete set, not "somewhere on the drive"
- Deadlines — lease end, technical inspections, readings
- Deposit — how much was taken, what was deducted and on what basis
Every one of these can be handled in a spreadsheet. The catch is that a spreadsheet won't remind you of anything, and won't calculate anything by itself.
Rent and payments
With one tenant you remember whether they paid. What you don't remember is whether they topped up 40 PLN for water in March, or whether August's transfer was the full amount. A running balance is the only thing that settles those conversations — and the only thing a spreadsheet won't work out for you without formulas.
How to set the rate and when to raise it is covered in How to set rental price.
Utilities
The most common source of disputes in any tenancy — including a single flat. You need three things: a starting point, regular readings and a transparent conversion into an amount. The whole process is laid out in How to settle utilities in a rental apartment.
Documents and the handover report
The lease and a handover report with photos are your only evidence when the deposit discussion starts at move-out. Keep them together — not in your inbox, not in a drawer.
Deadlines
This is what hurts most with a single flat, because you have no routine. Lease end, gas inspection, meter reading — none of it happens monthly, so none of it becomes a habit. Why automatic reminders change the most here is covered in Why a modern rental management app ends missed deadlines.
Can you do this for free
Yes — and without a catch. In SmartRentier the Kawalerka plan is free forever, no card and no trial period. It covers one property and includes every feature: finances, utilities, documents, deposits, handover reports, issues, yield analysis and the tenant panel.
We don't strip modules from the free plan — plans differ by scale only. Your tenant gets their own access at no extra cost; how that tidies up contact is covered in the article on keeping tenant contact in a single thread.
Where the free plan ends
Honestly — there are limits, and it's worth knowing them upfront:
- 1 property — a flat, house, garage or commercial unit
- 2 tenants — enough for a whole-unit tenancy or two rooms let separately
- 10 documents and 1 GB of file storage
You only pay once a second flat comes along. The details are on our free rental management software page, and paid plan rates are in the pricing.
And when the second flat arrives
That changes more than the limit — you start asking which unit earns what, and who paid for which flat. What shifts at that point is covered in How to manage multiple apartments without losing your mind.
For now, though, you don't need to worry about it. Create a free account, add your property and your tenant — setup takes a quarter of an hour, and the Kawalerka plan stays free for as long as you let a single unit.