Comparison
Vespy vs. Excel for CAM reconciliation
The spreadsheet is the real incumbent in small commercial property management. It is free, flexible, and already works, so it deserves a fair comparison.
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Where Excel wins
- Free, already installed, and everyone on your team knows it
- Infinitely flexible: any lease term can be modeled 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, the math really is trivial
Where Vespy wins
- Every reconciliation retains a trace that can be re-derived years later
- Terms live on the lease, so a change updates the math
- 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 | Quoted by portfolio size 14-day free trial, no credit card | 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 |
Where the spreadsheet actually wins
For one building with one or two NNN leases, no gross-up, and no cap, a workbook is the right tool. The math fits on one screen and software adds little.
Excel also wins on flexibility. An unusual recovery structure that software has to model as a special case takes ten minutes to type into a spreadsheet.
Where it quietly costs you
The failure is not a wrong formula. It is missing history: a workbook shows today’s number but not how it was reached, or what the lease said before the third amendment.
Formulas also drift from the lease, silently, and the workbook usually lives in one person’s head. When that person leaves, the next one rebuilds it, often with different numbers.
An honest recommendation
Stay in Excel with one or two simple buildings and low turnover risk. Move when a tenant can audit, reconciliation takes more than a few days, or the workbook’s owner might not be there next year.
Questions
Can I import my existing reconciliation spreadsheets?
Portfolio data (properties, suites, tenants, leases, charges) imports through a generic CSV path with saved column-mapping profiles. Formula logic does not import, because the terms are re-modeled on the lease rather than copied as formulas. Most firms start by re-running one prior-year reconciliation in Vespy and comparing it against the workbook to confirm the numbers match.
Is a spreadsheet really unsafe for CAM?
It is not unsafe so much as unaccountable. The arithmetic is usually right. What it cannot do is prove it was right, or show what changed between versions, which is what matters when a tenant exercises an audit right.
What about a free CAM reconciliation template?
A template solves the blank-page problem, not the history problem. It will still have no audit trail, no version history, and no link to the lease. If you want to work through the math without committing to software, our free calculator runs the same waterfall in your browser.
Stop reconciling in a spreadsheet.
Set up a recovery pool, abstract a lease, and run a reconciliation on the free trial.
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