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. Most tools do this from a cloud dashboard. SealedFolio does it locally on your Mac or Windows machine, with no account and no internet connection, and exports the rent roll to PDF or CSV for a lender or accountant.
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pulls the numbers straight from your tenant and payment records, so the rent, balances, and collection rate are never out of date.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.
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.
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:
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. If you are still choosing a tool, SealedFolio's best rental property software guide compares the common options.
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, 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.
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 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.