Software for selling property on instalments
Why instalment sales outgrow a spreadsheet
Selling a unit for cash is one transaction. Selling it on instalments is a contract plus dozens of dated payments, each of which is paid, late or still to come — and some of which get renegotiated. Multiply that by a few hundred units and the spreadsheet stops being a record and becomes something a person has to reconcile every month.
The fix is not a prettier spreadsheet. It is a model in which the property, the contract, the schedule and the payments are separate records that point at each other.
From property to contract to schedule
Start with a register of properties — code, cadastre number, surface, type, municipality — optionally grouped into buildings and floors. A sale begins as an invoice for a client with one or more properties on it; confirming the invoice turns it into a contract with dates, an amount and an optional advance.
The contract then generates its payment schedule, from daily to yearly intervals and up to a thousand instalments, with a recurring option for rent. Because the schedule comes from the contract rather than from someone's formulas, it works the same way for every contract of that type.
How do you know what is late without looking?
Every instalment should carry a state that the software computes rather than one a person types: paid, due soon, overdue or critical. In our Real Estate Management app, due soon means due within 30 days and critical means more than 60 days late; choose thresholds that match how you actually collect.
Then put that state where people already look: a board of instalments with totals, a bell in the header listing what is overdue, and a card on the dashboard. One caveat we are upfront about: the state is computed when someone opens the app, and it does not send email or SMS reminders, so decide who looks and when.
One contract model, many kinds of deal
Developers do not only sell. They take reservations, swap units, compensate landowners with apartments and rent out what is unsold. Building each of those as a separate module multiplies the code and the bugs. A better approach is one contract model whose behaviour is set by its type: which kind of contract it is, how the amount is calculated (a fixed sum, a percentage of value, a price per square metre) and how the schedule is built.
Track the cost side too
A property business owes money as well as being owed it. Keep expenses next to the contracts: what each expense costs, what has been paid and what remains, supplier prepayments, and a way to allocate one payment across several open expenses. A per-supplier statement you can print saves an argument every month.
Reports and exports
Finance will ask for the same few things repeatedly — sales, purchases, rent, payments, expenses, stock and clients — so build them as presets of one report builder instead of one-off screens, and let people export to CSV or PDF. If the business already uses Power BI, expose views for it rather than making people export and re-import.
What to check before you buy or build
Whether you are comparing products or scoping your own, these are the questions that separate a real system from a prettier spreadsheet:
- Does one contract model cover sales, reservations, exchanges and rent, or are they separate modules?
- Are overdue and critical states computed from the schedule, or typed in?
- Can several companies share one account without seeing each other's data?
- Can you control view, create, edit and delete per role and per resource?
- Can you add your own fields without a developer?
- Can deleted records be restored?
- Are there reminders, or only on-screen states?
Where our own product stands
Our Real Estate Management app is strongest on contracts, instalments and payments, and it covers expenses, suppliers and reports. It is not a landlord tool: rent exists as a contract type, but there are no lease-renewal reminders and no owner statements. If your business is selling property on instalments, that is the part it is built for.