The short answer
At three properties a spreadsheet and a banking app still just about cope. By five or six they do not: the rents land on different days, one tenant pays weekly, a boiler fails at one address in the same week a fixed term ends at another, and the tax return is pieced together in January from a year of bank lines. What a landlord at this size needs is one place where each tenancy’s rent is expected on its day, each repair is logged against its home and each cost is filed for HMRC as it is paid.
LetCompliance does that from one login, priced by the size of the portfolio rather than by the property: Solo is £14.99 a month for up to 3 properties and Portfolio is £19 a month for up to 10, with no VAT added. Making Tax Digital, Direct Debit rent and the tenant portal come with both.
Who this is for
- A landlord with 3 to 10 homes let in their own name, alone or jointly, in England
- Running the lets without a letting agent, or with one for finding tenants only
- Doing your own Self Assessment, or handing the figures to an accountant at the year end
- Holding some homes in a limited company too: mark those, and they stay in the portfolio but out of your personal tax figures
What it does at this size, in the order it matters
The rent
Each tenancy gets a rent charge on its own rent day, weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly or monthly, and one rent page shows what is due in the next 30 days, what has arrived and who owes what across every home. Rent paid by standing order is confirmed for every property in one go. Rent can also be collected by Direct Debit into your own Stripe account, and each collection marks its charge paid. No commission is taken on the rent. Stripe charges 1% of each Direct Debit payment with a 20p minimum and a £4 cap, and £5 for a disputed payment.
The tenants
Each tenant gets a portal of their own from a link, with no app to install and no password: their rent and receipts, repairs, messages and documents. Tenants pay nothing for it. Finding the next tenant runs from the same account: an advert with an Apply button, applications, viewings, referencing ordered per check and the tenancy agreement signed online.
Repairs
A tenant reports a repair from the portal with photos, and it lands in your tenant inbox, dated, with a response clock: 24 hours for an emergency, 7 days for urgent and 14 days for routine, LetCompliance’s own guide rather than a legal deadline. Send the job to a contractor from your own list, who quotes and updates it from a link with no login, and the work and its cost stay in that home’s history.
Money and tax
Every rent payment and cost is filed against its home in HMRC’s categories, so Finance shows what each home makes and what the whole portfolio nets, and Insights puts the homes in order of what they leave you each month. Photograph a receipt and it is read into a draft expense for you to check; bank statements come in as a CSV file and are matched line by line.
HMRC treats all your UK lets as one property business, so each quarter there is one Making Tax Digital update covering every home in it, not one per home. It is built from those records, and you check it and send it to HMRC from your account. LetCompliance is recognised by HMRC for Making Tax Digital for UK property income. The figures for your tax return’s property pages (SA105) are ready at the year end, and any plan can give an accountant a read-only link.
Certificates and deposits, in the background
Gas safety, electrical and EPC dates are kept against each home with reminders before they run out, and each deposit’s protection deadline is tracked, so the dates that never line up across a portfolio are watched for you.
The price at your size
| 3 properties | Solo: £14.99 a month, or £119.92 a year |
| 4 to 10 properties | Portfolio: £19 a month, or £152 a year |
A year costs the same as eight months paid monthly. At 10 homes, Portfolio comes to £1.90 a home a month. The price does not change with the number of tenants or rooms, and an HMO counts as one property, however many rooms you let in it.
Above 3 properties you need Portfolio. It has everything in Solo and adds the properties table, which sorts, filters and groups every home and downloads as a CSV, with the portfolio-wide PDF pack and bulk reminders.
Every new account starts with the 3-day trial, with no card and no limit on properties, so the whole portfolio can come in before you choose. Making Tax Digital, the tax pack and Section 8 and Section 13 notices open on a paid plan, not in the trial.
What an agent would cost for the same homes
On agents’ own published price lists, full management runs from 12% to 21.6% of the rent, VAT included. For five homes at £1,200 a month that is £8,640 to £15,552 a year. Portfolio for the same five homes is £228 a year paid monthly, or £152 paid yearly.
What the agent’s fee buys is time. Without one, the viewings, the visits and the calls are yours, or a trusted person’s near the homes.
Bringing the homes in
Upload the spreadsheet you already keep, as an Excel file or a CSV, or paste the rows straight from it. Each row is a tenant, so a repeated address becomes one home with several tenants, and the rent, the deposit, the certificate dates, the value and the mortgage balance come in on the same rows. Nothing is saved until you have checked it, and importing the same sheet again later updates what is there rather than adding it twice.
How to choose, whatever you buy
- Price it at the size you expect to be in two years, not the size you are today
- Check that it expects each rent on its own day and says when one is missing, not only what arrived
- Check how a tenant reports a repair, and whether they have to install anything to do it
- Check whether it sends Making Tax Digital updates to HMRC itself, or needs bridging software beside a spreadsheet
- Check how the portfolio comes in: from your own spreadsheet, or by weeks of typing
- Try it with two or three of your own tenancies before you move the rest
The rules that grow with the portfolio
- Making Tax Digital. It depends on your qualifying income: your rent and any self-employed income before expenses, with only your share of a home you own jointly counting. Three homes at £1,200 a month bring in £43,200 of rent a year. If that is your qualifying income for the 2025 to 2026 tax year, you will need to use Making Tax Digital from 6 April 2027, unless an exemption applies (GOV.UK, “Work out your qualifying income” and “Find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax”, read 2 November 2026)
- One business, one update. One or more properties in the UK are treated as one UK property business, and no separate digital records are needed for each property (GOV.UK, “Create digital records”, read 2 November 2026)
- Deposits. In England and Wales each deposit goes into a government-backed scheme within 30 days of receiving it (GOV.UK, “Deposit protection schemes and landlords”, read 2 November 2026)
- Gas. Each gas appliance and flue is checked for safety at intervals of not more than 12 months (Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, regulation 36, legislation.gov.uk, read 2 November 2026)
- Electrics. In England the electrical installation is inspected and tested at intervals of no more than 5 years (Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, regulation 3, legislation.gov.uk, read 2 November 2026)
None of these dates lines up across a portfolio, which is why LetCompliance keeps each one against its own home.
Common mistakes at this size
- Keeping one spreadsheet for the rent and another for the costs, so the two never agree at the year end
- Tracking rent by tenant instead of by tenancy, so a couple paying half each looks like one tenant in arrears
- Leaving Making Tax Digital until the first update is due, then typing in every rent and cost since 6 April at once
- Moving every home across in one evening without checking the first two or three
Is there a plan for more than 10 properties?
Yes. Portfolio Plus covers up to 20 for £29 a month, and Professional any number for £49 a month. Moving up keeps everything already in the account.
The honest limits
- There is no live bank feed. Bank statements come in as CSV files and are matched line by line
- There is no App Store or Google Play app yet. It runs in the phone’s browser and goes on the home screen
- Making Tax Digital covers UK property income only. Self-employment and foreign property need software that covers them
- The tax return goes from LetCompliance only when UK property is the only income you need to add yourself and you have no property loss from an earlier year, or capital allowance beyond a car, to claim, and no relief or charge to add. Otherwise the quarterly updates still go from here, and the return goes from other software or your accountant
- The tenancy agreements and notices follow the law in England
