Most rent roll tools are cloud dashboards that keep your tenant and income data on a vendor's servers. SealedFolio builds your rent roll locally, on your own Mac or Windows machine, and it works with no internet connection at all.
Rent roll software turns your unit, tenant, lease, and payment records into one report: what each property should earn, and what it actually collected. Three kinds of tools do that job. Cloud platforms run it in a browser behind an account, a free rent roll template leaves the updating to you, and SealedFolio runs it as a desktop app on your own Mac or Windows PC with no account and no internet connection.
A SealedFolio rent roll carries one row per unit with the tenant, lease end date, scheduled rent, amount collected, and balance, then a portfolio collection rate on the total line, and it exports to PDF or CSV for a lender or accountant. SealedFolio Pro is $19 a month or $179 a year for up to 3 properties. SealedFolio Portfolio is $39 a month or $297 a year for unlimited properties. Both run on macOS and Windows and keep the tenant list in an encrypted vault on that machine.
SealedFolio is built around one report: the rent roll, the list of every unit you own, who lives there, the lease term, the rent charged, and how much has actually been paid. It is the income snapshot of your portfolio on a single page. A lender wants it before a refinance. Your accountant wants it at tax time. A buyer asks for it during due diligence on a building, because the rent roll shows what the property really earns, not what the listing promises.
Most landlords keep this in a spreadsheet until the spreadsheet gets unwieldy. Rent roll software does the same job, but it pulls the numbers straight from your tenant and payment records, so the rent, balances, and collection rate are never out of date. SealedFolio produces the report on demand from your local data, and it is the rent roll piece of the full local property management toolset.
A rent roll is a document other people read, which is why SealedFolio treats it as a report rather than a screen. Five readers ask for one, and each checks a different column:
Because those readers are outside your household, the roll is also the moment your tenant list leaves your desk. SealedFolio generates it from local records and exports a PDF you hand over, rather than inviting a lender into a hosted account. If you buy steadily, the same numbers feed the portfolio view SealedFolio builds for investors tracking returns.
Whether you build it by hand or generate it in SealedFolio, a complete rent roll usually shows the same columns. If a lender or buyer hands yours back, it is normally because one of these is missing:
Commercial rent rolls add a few more: lease type, scheduled rent escalations, and common area charges. SealedFolio keeps residential and commercial properties in the same portfolio, so a mixed-use owner does not need two systems.
Here is the shape SealedFolio produces, shrunk to four units with sample numbers made up for illustration. A real rent roll carries more columns, but you read it the same way: scheduled rent on one side, what actually arrived on the other, and the gap between them.
| Unit | Tenant | Lease ends | Monthly rent | Collected | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Elm St, Unit 1 | M. Rivera | Mar 2027 | $1,450 | $1,450 | $0 |
| 12 Elm St, Unit 2 | Vacant | n/a | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 12 Elm St, Unit 3 | D. Okafor | Month to month | $1,500 | $750 | $750 |
| 40 Main St, Suite 210 | Kwan Dental LLC | Dec 2028 | $2,900 | $2,900 | $0 |
| Portfolio total (collection rate 87%) | $5,850 | $5,100 | $750 | ||
Even this sample tells a story. Unit 2 earns nothing while it sits vacant, Unit 3 is half paid and needs a conversation this week, and the commercial suite carries the month. SealedFolio adds the deposit held, recurring fees, and per-property totals, and keeps the collected column current as you record payments.
Search rent roll software and nearly every result is a list of cloud platforms, which is why SealedFolio, a desktop option, rarely shows up in them. The lists are useful, but they hide the choice that actually matters, and it is not the column layout. All three approaches produce the same report. They differ on price, on how much manual updating you do, and on where the tenant list ends up. SealedFolio is the third row.
| Approach | Typical cost | Where the data sits | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud rent roll platform Stessa, Baselane, TurboTenant, TenantCloud, Buildium and similar | Free tiers and paid plans, usually priced per unit or per portfolio | On the vendor's servers, behind an account and a password reset | Landlords who also want online rent collection, screening, and bank feeds in the same tool |
| Rent roll template Excel or Google Sheets | Free | Your machine, or your cloud drive if the sheet syncs | One to three doors, as long as you retype balances and lease dates every month |
| SealedFolio, offline desktop | $19 a month or $179 a year up to 3 properties, $39 a month or $297 a year unlimited | Encrypted vault on your own Mac or Windows PC, no hosted account | Owners who want the report and the totals without putting the tenant list on someone else's server |
The honest read: a template is free and fine at two doors, a cloud platform wins if you need rent collected online, and SealedFolio wins if the rent roll is the point and privacy is the reason. SealedFolio's best rental property software guide ranks the named cloud tools feature by feature, the Stessa vs Baselane vs SealedFolio comparison covers the three landlords shortlist most often, and SealedFolio vs QuickBooks is the one to read if your rent roll currently lives in accounting software.
Rent charges post automatically, and every payment you record updates the rent roll. The collection rate reflects what is actually paid, not last month's snapshot.
Recurring rent and late fees apply on schedule from each tenant ledger, so outstanding balances are right without manual entry.
One portfolio holds single-family rentals, multifamily units, and commercial suites, with per-property and portfolio totals side by side.
Export the rent roll to PDF for a lender or accountant, or to CSV when you want to drop the numbers into your own model.
Tenant names, rents, and balances sit in a local encrypted vault on your Mac or Windows machine. Nothing uploads unless you choose to.
There is no signup and no hosted dashboard. You can build and export a rent roll with the internet switched off.
The checklist is the same whether you land on SealedFolio or a cloud platform. Five things separate a report you can hand a lender from a spreadsheet with formatting:
One honest caveat: if online rent collection, tenant screening, or automatic bank feeds are on your must-have list, a cloud platform fits better. SealedFolio trades those away on purpose to keep the data local.
The steps are the same whether you use a spreadsheet or rent roll software like SealedFolio. Software just removes the manual updating after step one:
Update the rent roll monthly, on the same day you reconcile rent received, and again whenever a lease is signed, renewed, or ends. Monthly is the cadence lenders assume when they ask for a current roll, and it is short enough that a missed payment shows up while you can still do something about it. In SealedFolio the roll updates as you record each payment, so the monthly pass is a review rather than a rebuild.
A free template is fine for a couple of doors. Past that, keeping balances and lease dates in sync by hand is where errors creep in, which is the trade-off covered on SealedFolio vs Excel spreadsheets. The monthly routine around it is laid out in SealedFolio's rental property bookkeeping system, and if you are still choosing a tool, SealedFolio's best rental property software guide compares the common options.
A commercial rent roll in SealedFolio carries everything the residential one does, plus the lease terms that make office, retail, and flex space different. Commercial suites sit in the same portfolio as houses and apartments, so a mixed-use owner runs one report instead of two systems. These are the lines a lender or broker expects on the commercial side:
SealedFolio records lease terms, key dates, and rent schedules per suite, and shows upcoming expirations across the portfolio, which is the same job described on the SealedFolio page for commercial property asset management. It is built for an owner holding a strip center or a few suites, not for an enterprise CRE team with an asset manager per building.
A rent roll from SealedFolio is not just a record, it is a quick read on the health of a portfolio. Three things are worth a look every month. The collection rate, scheduled rent against what actually arrived, flags a tenant slipping behind before it becomes a pattern. The spread between vacant and occupied units is your real income, not the gross potential rent. And a cluster of leases ending in the same month is a renewal risk you want to see early, not in week one of a vacancy.
For a property you are thinking about buying, the rent roll is also where you sanity-check the asking price. Run the in-place rents through the free cap rate calculator or cash flow calculator before you trust the seller's pro forma.
The rent roll SealedFolio keeps current through the year is also your tax prep. Line 3 of Schedule E asks for rents received, meaning what you actually collected per property during the year, not the scheduled rent. That is exactly the collected column of your rent roll, totaled by property. If the roll stayed current all year, April is a report you export, not an archaeology dig through twelve bank statements.
You can run a quick estimate in the free Schedule E calculator, check gross against net in the rental income calculator, or work through SealedFolio's Schedule E guide for landlords line by line. The deduction side of the form comes from the same local records that power SealedFolio's rental income and expense tracking.
Most of these come from hand-kept spreadsheets, and they are why SealedFolio posts charges and payments from the ledger instead of trusting anyone's memory:
A rent roll holds tenant names, what they pay, and where they live. That is exactly the kind of record most owners would rather not park on a vendor's servers. SealedFolio keeps it in a local encrypted vault, so a pricing change, an acquisition, or a breach at someone else's company is not your problem. The reasoning is spelled out in why your rental data should not live in the cloud.
Offline also means the rent roll is an installed program, not a browser tab. SealedFolio ships as a desktop app for Windows and macOS, so the rent roll opens on a plane, in a basement unit with no signal, and on the day a vendor's status page is red. Nothing about generating or exporting the report depends on a server being up, and there is no session to be logged out of at the moment a lender asks for the file.
Local is a deliberate trade-off, so it is worth being plain about the limits. SealedFolio does not pull live bank feeds, collect rent online, or screen tenants, because each of those means sending data to a third party. You record payments yourself, and in exchange the portfolio stays on your machine. If automatic bank sync is a must-have, a cloud platform will fit better.
Rent roll software pulls your unit, tenant, lease, and payment records into one rent roll report so the totals stay current instead of a spreadsheet you update by hand. SealedFolio does this entirely on your own Mac or Windows machine, with no account and no cloud.
Yes. SealedFolio generates a rent roll with collection rate entirely on your device, with no internet connection required. Your tenant and rent data never has to leave your machine.
A rent roll is used to prove what a property actually earns. A lender reads it before a refinance, a buyer checks it during due diligence, an accountant uses the collected column for rents received on Schedule E, and a partner uses it to agree a distribution. Owners also read it monthly for vacancy, late balances, and leases expiring soon. SealedFolio generates it from your own records and exports a PDF you can hand over.
Monthly, on the day you reconcile rent received, plus any time a lease is signed, renewed, or ends. Monthly is the cadence a lender assumes when it asks for a current rent roll. In SealedFolio the roll updates as each payment is recorded, so the monthly pass is a review rather than a rebuild.
Free landlord software is usually paid for another way, through payment processing fees, partner offers, or the value of your portfolio data. A free spreadsheet template is the cleanest free option for one to three doors. SealedFolio is not free: Pro is $19 a month or $179 a year for up to 3 properties, and Portfolio is $39 a month or $297 a year for unlimited properties, with no ads, no data sharing, and no account. The SealedFolio guide to the best rental property software in 2026 compares the free cloud tiers side by side.
Yes. SealedFolio installs as a desktop app on Windows and on macOS, and the rent roll, exports, and reports all run locally on that machine. There is no browser login and no hosted dashboard, so the software works with the connection off.
A complete rent roll lists each unit or suite, the tenant, lease start and end dates, square footage or unit type, monthly rent and recurring fees, the security deposit held, and the amount due, paid, and outstanding for the period. Commercial rent rolls add lease type, escalations, and common area charges.
You can, and many landlords start with a spreadsheet template. It works until you have enough units that keeping rent, balances, and lease dates in sync by hand becomes error-prone. Software keeps those totals current automatically.
Yes. Free spreadsheet templates work for a couple of doors, and several cloud platforms offer free tiers funded by payment processing or partner offers, which means your tenant and income data lives on their servers. SealedFolio takes the opposite approach and keeps the rent roll on your own device.
It does. The collected column of the rent roll, totaled by property, is what Schedule E asks for on the rents received line. SealedFolio tracks it through the year so the number is ready in April instead of rebuilt from bank statements.
Yes. The rent roll spans residential units and commercial suites in the same portfolio, with per-property and portfolio totals.
Yes. Rent roll and other reports export to PDF and CSV for your lender, accountant, or records.