Compare · CHICS vs Spreadsheets
CHICS vs Spreadsheets
A lot of smaller landlords still run on Excel — one workbook for tenants, another for properties, a third for maintenance, and a rent tracker glued onto the side. It works, until it doesn't. CHICS replaces that stack with a single system built for UK social housing, without losing the flexibility that made spreadsheets attractive in the first place.
At a glance
- One source of truth for tenancies, properties, rent and maintenance — no more reconciling workbooks.
- Built-in audit trail: who changed what, when, and why — impossible to reconstruct from Excel history.
- Reports and regulator returns come out of the system, not out of a weekend of copy-paste.
Feature comparison
CHICS vs Spreadsheets, side by side
Based on publicly available information about Spreadsheets (Excel / Google Sheets) at the time of writing. We review this page periodically — if you spot something that's changed, please let us know.
| Feature | CHICS | Spreadsheets |
|---|---|---|
| Single source of truth for tenants, properties & repairs | Yes | Not included as standard |
| Rent accounting with housing benefit & UC support | Yes | Manual |
| Arrears tracking and automated chase workflows | Yes | Manual |
| Repairs logging, scheduling and contractor dispatch | Yes | Manual |
| Compliance registers (gas, fire, EPC, asbestos) | Yes | Manual |
| Full audit trail of every change | Yes | Not included as standard |
| Role-based access & GDPR-safe data handling | Yes | Limited |
| Concurrent multi-user editing without breaking formulas | Yes | Not included as standard |
| Regulator returns (RSH, SHR, Welsh Government) | Yes | Manual |
| Backups, disaster recovery & UK hosting | Yes | Not included as standard |
| Tenant / contractor self-service portals | Yes | Not included as standard |
Why teams switch to CHICS
Built for UK social housing, not retrofitted
- Stop reconciling workbooks
- When the tenancy sheet and the rent sheet disagree, someone has to decide which one is right. In CHICS a tenancy and its rent account are the same record — they can't drift apart.
- An audit trail you can defend
- If a tenant disputes an arrears balance, you need to show how you got there. CHICS records every posting, adjustment and note against the tenancy. Excel's version history doesn't come close.
- Safer with your data
- Spreadsheets on shared drives are a GDPR accident waiting to happen. CHICS gives you role-based access, encrypted UK hosting, and a backup/restore story that actually works.
- Regulator returns in minutes, not weekends
- RSH performance returns, Welsh Government HARP data, Scottish Housing Regulator returns — we build the reporting to match. Your team stops losing weekends to reformatting.
- Repairs that don't fall through the cracks
- A spreadsheet can't chase a contractor or flag an overdue gas safety check. CHICS will — and it ties the repair back to the tenancy, the unit and the compliance record.
- Grows with you
- Most teams only move off Excel because it broke. CHICS scales from a 30-home co-op to a mid-sized housing association without you needing to re-platform again in three years.
Frequently asked questions
- We're a small co-op and our spreadsheets mostly work. Is CHICS overkill?
Probably not — our smallest customers are under 50 homes. The pricing scales down and we only turn on the modules you need. Most teams tell us the unlock isn't any single feature, it's stopping the weekly reconciliation tax that Excel quietly charges.
- Can you import our existing spreadsheets?
Yes — that's one of the most common starting points for our migrations. We'll review your tenant, property, rent and repair workbooks, map the columns, and load clean data into CHICS. You'll get a chance to sign off before go-live.
- What about the ad-hoc reports I've built in Excel?
CHICS has a built-in report designer and a SQL-backed data export, so anything you can currently cobble together with a pivot table or VLOOKUP, you can rebuild — usually more reliably. You can also keep exporting to Excel for the handful of reports you'd rather keep there.
- How long does it take to move off spreadsheets?
A small co-op or TMO coming off Excel is typically live in 6–10 weeks. The timeline is usually set by how much historic rent account data you want to bring across, not by the software itself.
- Will we lose the flexibility of Excel?
Honestly, a little — and that's the point. You trade the ability to type anything anywhere for guardrails that stop your data contradicting itself. Where flexibility genuinely matters (ad-hoc reporting, custom fields, bulk edits) CHICS supports it.
Ready to see CHICS in action?
Book a 30-minute walkthrough with our team. We'll show you exactly how CHICS would work for your portfolio — no slide deck, no jargon.