Alex M.
Content Manager
October 6, 2026
5 min
read
A rental-property dashboard should help a landlord make decisions in seconds.
It should not be a page covered with charts simply because charts look impressive.
Start with the questions the dashboard needs to answer.
A useful rental-property dashboard should normally show these eight key performance indicators (KPIs):
For example, an October dashboard might look like this:
KPIOctoberRent scheduled$18,500Rent collected$17,200Outstanding rent$1,300Occupancy92%Operating expenses$5,100Cash flow before financing$12,100Open maintenance requests7Leases expiring within 90 days3
These numbers give a landlord an immediate overview of collections, property performance, and operational workload.
One important distinction: cash flow before financing is not necessarily the same as profit. Financing costs, taxes, capital expenditures, and other items may still need to be considered.
Eight meaningful KPIs tell a landlord much more than a dozen decorative graphs.
Portfolio-wide totals can hide differences between individual properties.
A property comparison table makes those differences easier to identify:
PropertyRentExpensesCash flowOccupancyP001$4,500$1,350$3,150100%P002$3,900$1,700$2,20080%P003$5,200$1,100$4,100100%
The landlord can quickly identify which property may deserve further investigation.
For example, P002 has lower occupancy and higher expenses relative to its rent than the other properties. That does not automatically mean something is wrong, but it provides a useful starting point.
Do not automatically conclude that the property with the highest cash flow is the best investment. Debt, taxes, capital expenditures, acquisition cost, and future maintenance can materially change the picture.
Lease expirations create potential vacancy and income risks. A dashboard should make upcoming expirations easy to spot.
Track the following fields:
Sort the table by the nearest expiration date and highlight leases that require attention.
For example, eight leases representing $14,000 in monthly rent expiring within 90 days create a different risk profile from a single $1,500 lease expiring during the same period.
A useful dashboard should show both the number of expiring leases and the monthly rent associated with them.
Maintenance should be tracked as structured data rather than a collection of messages, emails, and notes.
For each request, record:
From these records, calculate:
These indicators help landlords distinguish routine maintenance from issues that require immediate attention.
For example, seven open requests may be manageable if they are minor and recent. The same number may indicate a serious operational problem if several are urgent and have remained unresolved for weeks.
Do not manually type KPI values into dashboard cells. Calculate them from the underlying records so that the dashboard updates when new transactions or maintenance requests are added.
For example, if your Excel table is named Payments and its amount column is named Amount, use:
=SUM(Payments[Amount])
This calculates the sum of the recorded payment amounts. It represents rent collected only if the table contains rent payments exclusively and the relevant reporting period is applied.
To count open maintenance requests, use:
=COUNTIFS(Maintenance[Status],"Open")
These formulas assume the data is stored in Excel tables with the specified names and columns. Period-specific KPIs need appropriate date filters, and outstanding rent should be calculated from rent obligations and payments allocated to those obligations.
The principle is simple: the dashboard should reflect the underlying records, not become another place where data is manually entered.
Organize the dashboard around three questions.
Show the headline KPIs: scheduled rent, collected rent, outstanding rent, occupancy, expenses, and cash flow.
Highlight overdue balances, urgent maintenance requests, and leases approaching expiration.
Use a property comparison table to show where income, expenses, occupancy, and cash flow differ.
Everything else can live in supporting sheets.
A landlord should not have to navigate through multiple tabs just to understand the current state of the portfolio.
Give the workbook to someone who did not build it.
Ask them three questions:
How much rent is outstanding?
Which property has the highest expenses?
Which leases expire within 90 days?
If they need several minutes to find the answers, the dashboard needs redesigning.
The goal is not to display as much information as possible. It is to make the most important information easy to find, interpret, and act on.
A dashboard is successful when it reduces the amount of work required to understand the data.
Spreadsheets can work well for small portfolios, but maintaining accurate data becomes harder as the number of properties, transactions, leases, and maintenance requests grows.
If you spend more time updating formulas and reconciling records than making decisions, a property management system may be a better fit.
RentDoo helps landlords manage rental operations in one place, reducing reliance on disconnected spreadsheets and manual tracking.
Microsoft — SUMIFS function
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/functions/sumifs-function
Google Docs Editors Help — COUNTIFS function
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3256550
