Vespy vs. Excel for CAM reconciliation
The spreadsheet is the real incumbent in small commercial property management, and it deserves a serious comparison rather than a strawman. It is free, infinitely flexible, and it already works.
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Where Excel and spreadsheets wins
- Free, already installed, and everyone on your team knows it
- Infinitely flexible — you can model any lease term, however unusual, immediately
- No migration, no onboarding, no vendor to evaluate
- Works offline and can be handed to an accountant as-is
- For a single-tenant NNN building with no gross-up, the math genuinely is trivial
Where Vespy wins
- Every reconciliation retains a trace that can be re-derived years later
- Terms live on the lease, so a term change updates the calculation rather than requiring a formula edit
- Amendments write a new version instead of overwriting history
- The order of operations cannot silently change between properties
- Estimates, true-ups, and credits post through a double-entry ledger
Feature comparison
| Capability | Vespy | Excel |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | From $149/mo Public pricing, no minimum | Effectively free Already licensed with Office |
| Flexibility for unusual terms | Structured terms cover the common cases | Anything you can express as a formula |
| Audit trail | No record of what changed or when | |
| Version history of lease terms | Amendments overwrite the prior assumption | |
| Consistent order of operations | Each workbook can differ | |
| Survives staff turnover | Usually understood by one person | |
| Tenant-ready audit output | You can produce one by hand | |
| Critical date tracking | Calendar reminders, if anyone set them |
Claims about Excel and spreadsheets reflect public product information as of August 2026 and are not a hands-on audit. Capabilities change — verify against their current documentation before deciding. We do not publish competitor pricing here because it varies by configuration.
Where the spreadsheet actually wins
For a single building with one or two NNN leases, no gross-up, and no cap, a workbook is genuinely the right tool. The math fits on one screen, the terms rarely change, and there is nothing software would meaningfully improve.
Excel also wins on flexibility in a way that is easy to underrate. An unusual recovery structure that software has to model as a special case can be typed into a spreadsheet in ten minutes. If your portfolio is full of bespoke terms, that flexibility has real value.
Where it quietly costs you
The failure mode is not a wrong formula — it is the absence of history. A workbook shows you today’s number and nothing about how it was reached, which order deductions were applied in, or what the lease said before the third amendment. When a tenant disputes a charge two years later, that history is exactly what you need.
The second failure is drift. Lease terms change, and the formula does not always change with them. Because there is no link between the document and the calculation, divergence is silent and can persist for years.
The third is concentration. Reconciliation workbooks are usually built and understood by one person. When they leave, the institutional knowledge leaves with them and the next person rebuilds from scratch — often producing different numbers.
An honest recommendation
Stay in Excel if you manage one or two buildings with simple recovery terms and low turnover risk. The switching cost is not worth it.
Move when any of three things becomes true: you have a tenant sophisticated enough to audit, you have enough leases that reconciliation takes more than a few days, or the person who owns the workbook is not guaranteed to be there next year.
Questions
Stop reconciling in a spreadsheet.
Set up your first recovery pool, abstract a lease, and run a reconciliation — free.
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