Your First Week on TenantSync: Import Your Portfolio, Connect Your Bank, Go Compliant

Every lettings business that has ever tried to leave the spreadsheet has the same story. Someone signs up on a quiet afternoon with genuine intent. They start typing in properties. Around the fourth one they hit a field they don't have to hand — an Eircode, a BER rating, a tenant's PPS number — and they park it "until I have an hour." The hour never comes. Six weeks later the subscription is cancelled and the verdict is "we tried software, it didn't suit us."

What actually happened is that the software asked for a complete record before it gave anything back. That's a design failure, not a discipline failure — and it's the specific thing this week is arranged to avoid.

Why software setups stall — and the order that fixes it

Most onboarding runs records first: enter every property, every unit, every tenant, every lease, and then — at the end, if you get there — the product starts being useful. The trouble is that the payoff sits behind the most tedious part of the work, and nobody is motivated by a payoff they haven't felt yet.

The fix isn't a shorter form. It's inverting the order: make one unit genuinely work before you enter the second one.

TenantSync ships two onboarding tracks side by side for exactly this reason. Quick Start gets a single unit live and tracking in a handful of minutes, with the tenancy record built for you in the background. Full Setup is the complete eight-step path — properties, units, tenants, portal onboarding, leases, documents, bank, compliance — and you work through it at your own pace afterwards, on top of something that's already running. Nothing you do in the Quick Start is thrown away or re-entered when you go deeper.

Here's the whole week at a glance. It's a plan, not a rule — if your portfolio is one house you'll be finished on Tuesday, and if you're an agency migrating a managed book, day 2 is the one that deserves real time.

Before you start: the four things worth having to hand

You do not need these to sign up — the whole point of day 1 is that you need almost nothing. But having them nearby turns days 2 to 5 from a scavenger hunt into an afternoon.

Day 1 — one unit live in ten minutes

Sign up at tenantsync.ie/register. The 14-day trial starts without card details, on any plan, so nothing you do today is a financial commitment.

Add one property

Go to Properties → New Property. A name, the address and the monthly rent are plenty; skip anything you don't have to hand, because BER, facilities and photos can be filled in any time. When the property saves, TenantSync creates a default unit inside it automatically — which means renting out a single house is genuinely a one-step start. An apartment block is the same start plus one Add Unit per flat, so each can be tracked on its own.

Press "Start tracking"

Open the unit and press Start tracking. This is the step that makes the difference, and it's worth understanding what it does: TenantSync quietly builds the tenancy record that powers rent detection and RTB compliance, so you skip the tenant and lease forms entirely for now. You can optionally add the name that will appear on the tenant's bank transfer, which helps the matching.

You're then handed a short payment reference — something like TS-4F2A. Send it to your tenant with a one-line message: please add this reference to your rent transfer. It becomes the strongest signal used to match their payment to the right unit.

Turn on the two things that matter

• Mark the tenancy RTB compliant. On the compliance view, tap it and optionally add your RTB registration number and the date you registered. Be clear about what this is: it records your own confirmation that the tenancy is registered. It is fully editable and removable — and it does not file anything with the RTB on your behalf.
• Connect your bank for automatic rent detection. That's day 3 below, and it's the step that turns the unit's status into Rent paid, Awaiting or Overdue without anyone ticking a box.

That's day 1. One live unit, rent detection armed, a compliance status you can set in a tap, and a reference in your tenant's hands. No tenant record was required. No lease was uploaded. Nothing you enter later will duplicate it — and pressing Start tracking again on a unit that already has a live tenancy simply returns the existing one untouched, so there's no way to accidentally create two.

Day 2 — bring the rest of the portfolio in

If you have one or two properties, skip this and go straight to day 3; adding them by hand is faster than preparing a file. If you have twenty, or two hundred, this is the day that decides whether the migration happens at all.

Upload the file you already have

TenantSync imports property records from a CSV or Excel file — .csv, .xls or .xlsx, up to 10MB — including exports from Letman. The parser reads the columns a lettings export normally carries: property reference, name, address, city, county, Eircode, property type, bedrooms, bathrooms, area, monthly rent, purchase details, condition, description and manager contact details.

Use the dry run — this is the part people skip

Before you import for real, switch on validate only. The file is parsed and every problem is reported back to you, and nothing is written. You fix the spreadsheet, run it again, and only then import. Two more switches decide what happens on a second pass:

• Skip duplicates — anything already in TenantSync is left exactly as it is.
• Update existing — records you've already imported are refreshed from the new file instead of being duplicated.

Day 3 — connect the bank (about two minutes)

This is the step that converts TenantSync from a nicer filing cabinet into something that tells you things you didn't know. Until the bank is connected, you're recording rent. After it, rent records itself and arrears announce themselves.

What actually happens

1. Go to Open Banking → Connect Bank Account.
2. A secure window opens. Search for your bank and select it — AIB, Bank of Ireland, PTSB, EBS, Revolut, N26 and more are supported.
3. You're taken to your own bank's login page — not a TenantSync form — to approve the connection. Your bank asks you to confirm read-only access.
4. You're redirected back, and TenantSync begins reading recent transactions and matching incoming payments to tenancies. You can review any match and correct it if it got one wrong.

One piece of housekeeping to expect: bank access tokens expire after a set period, typically 90 days. That's a security rule set by your bank, not by TenantSync. You'll get a reminder before it lapses, and re-authorising takes under two minutes. Diary it if you like — but the reminder is the point.

Once payments are flowing, the arrears position stops being a thing you calculate. Every unit carries its own status, partial payments are visible as partial rather than missing, and — if you have HAP tenancies where the council payment and the tenant top-up arrive separately — both sides land against one balance instead of two spreadsheets. Our guide to bank-confirmed arrears alerts goes deeper on the matching itself.

Day 4 — switch on the compliance dashboard

By now the platform knows your properties and can see your money. Day 4 is where it starts knowing your dates — which, in an Irish lettings business, is where the actual risk lives.

The three cards at the top

Open RTB Compliance and you get three summary cards — Compliant, Upcoming and Overdue — and beneath them a timeline of every tracked obligation across every property. Each one is colour-coded, and the colours mean something specific:

What appears without you adding it

When you create a lease, TenantSync automatically generates the RTB registration compliance item, with the deadline calculated as the tenancy start date plus 30 days. You don't add it, and you can't forget to. Part 4 dates are created the same way from the lease. This is the pay-off for having got the start dates right on day 2.

What you add yourself

Everything with an expiry date that isn't derived from a tenancy: BER certificate, gas safety check, electrical certificate, insurance renewal. Add the item, set the due date and type, and it escalates through the colours on its own and reminds you before it lapses. If a local-authority inspection is a live possibility for any of your units, our minimum-standards prep guide covers what an inspector actually asks for.

The rent review tracker

The same dashboard holds the rent review side: when you're legally permitted to increase the rent on each tenancy, and what the maximum legal increase is. Since 1 March 2026 the national rent cap limits an increase to 2% or inflation, whichever is lower — a ceiling, not an entitlement — and getting it wrong makes the increase invalid and disputable. Doing that arithmetic against a stored tenancy record beats doing it from memory at a kitchen table.

The dashboard's real job isn't showing you what's red. It's making sure nothing is red that you didn't know about.

Day 5 — leases and documents

The lease wizard, in five steps

Property → unit → tenant(s) → lease details → review. The lease details step is where the substance is: fixed term or periodic, start date (and end date if fixed), rent and deposit, payment frequency from weekly through to yearly, any extra charges like parking or pet fees, and an RPZ-exempt toggle for the narrow cases that qualify.

Then a genuinely useful fork at the review step:

• You already have a signed lease — paper or PDF. Attach it, and it's stored against the tenancy.
• You don't have one yet — leave the upload blank, and TenantSync generates a compliant Irish tenancy agreement from the details you just entered. A draft opens for you to read and edit, then save and download as a PDF.

That second path is the one that quietly saves self-managing landlords from the worst document risk in Irish lettings: a generic lease downloaded from a search result that was written for another jurisdiction.

Documents that expire

Upload files from a property's Documents tab or from Document Storage — PDF, JPEG or PNG, up to 5MB each. Give each one a name, a category (insurance, lease agreement, and so on) and — the important field — an expiry date. Documents with expiry dates turn orange and then red as the date approaches and generate reminders, which is what turns a folder of certificates into a system that tells you something.

Day 6 — tenants, your team, and your phone

Enrich, don't re-enter

Now add the real tenant details — name, email, phone, and optionally date of birth, PPS number and address. If you began with the Quick Start, this enriches the tenancy you already created rather than creating a second one. Double-check the email address, because it's the one used for the portal invitation.

The tenant portal

From the tenant profile, Onboard Tenant sends an invitation to create their own login. The subject and body are pre-filled and editable, and you can preview before sending. From their portal a tenant sees only their own lease, rent records and maintenance requests — never anything belonging to another tenancy — and can log in via browser or the mobile apps.

Your team and your branches

An agency adds team members and, where the business runs across more than one office, branches — so the managed book is scoped the way the business is actually organised rather than as one undifferentiated pile. Seats are included in the plan price rather than billed as an add-on: 1 user on Starter, 3 on the €99 Professional plan, 5 and 10 on the tiers above, unlimited on Enterprise.

Install the apps

Last thing on day 6, install TenantSync on your phone from the App Store or Google Play. This isn't a nice-to-have for a lettings business: the moments that matter — a tenant reporting a fault, a viewing where you're asked what the rent can go to, a certificate you need to produce — happen away from a desk. Logging a repair with photos from the unit itself is a different activity from typing it up later, and only one of the two reliably happens.

Day 7 — judge the trial on evidence, not on feel

At the end of the first week, the temptation is to ask "do I like it?" That's a bad question, because liking software has almost no relationship to whether it will still be in use in six months. Ask three concrete ones instead:

1. Has a real rent payment matched itself to a unit, without you entering anything? This is the load-bearing one. If yes, the manual reconciliation job is finished for as long as the connection is live.
2. Does the compliance dashboard hold at least one date you were previously carrying in your head? An RTB registration deadline, a certificate expiry, a rent-review window. One is enough — it proves the mechanism, and the mechanism scales to all of them.
3. Can you retrieve a lease or a certificate from your phone in under ten seconds? Try it standing up, away from your desk. That's the condition you'll actually need it in.

Three yeses and the setup has done its job; the only remaining decision is which plan the portfolio needs. A no on any of them is diagnostic rather than fatal — usually it points at one specific unfinished step (the bank isn't connected, or no lease has been created yet so no compliance items exist), and that step is an hour of work, not a verdict on the software.

For letting agents and agencies: onboard in the right order

Everything above holds for an agency, but the sequencing changes, because you're not setting up a portfolio — you're migrating an operation that has to keep running while you do it.

• Start with one branch or one client, not the biggest one. Get a single slice of the book to a live compliance dashboard and treat it as the reference implementation. Everything else gets copied from something that already works, which is far faster than debugging a full migration in flight.
• Import, never rekey. A managed book entered by hand is a book with typos in the tenancy dates, and tenancy dates are the field that carries legal consequence. Export from Letman or your spreadsheet, run the validate-only pass, fix the file, then import.
• Sequence the dates before the documents. Tenancy start dates generate the RTB registration deadlines and rent-review windows automatically. Documents are valuable but inert — they don't create obligations. Load the dates first and you get a working risk picture within days; load the documents first and you get a tidy archive with no alarm on it.
• Add PSRA obligations in the same pass. Your licence renewal, Letters of Engagement and Professional Indemnity Insurance expiry belong on the same dashboard as the tenancy dates. They're the obligations that decide whether you can trade at all, and they're the easiest to leave for later precisely because they're annual.
• Decide who owns the bank connection. Rent reconciliation only works if someone re-authorises when the bank's token expires. Make that one named person's job on day 3, not a diffuse team responsibility that lapses in a quiet week.

Agencies migrating a managed book can take concierge onboarding rather than running the import themselves — worth taking, if only because the person doing it has migrated a book before and you haven't.

What TenantSync doesn't do — worth knowing on day 1, not day 30

Onboarding goes badly when the product's boundaries are discovered late. Four of them, stated plainly:

Which plan you land on

You don't have to decide this in week one — the trial is full access for 14 days on any plan, without a card — but it's useful to know where you're heading.

Between tiers, or only need one part of it? Portfolios of roughly 10–30 units, and businesses that only want rent tracking, are common enough that custom offers exist — ask rather than paying for a tier you don't need. There are no setup fees, no per-property charges, no percentage of rent collected and no long-term contracts on any plan.

How to get started

1. Start the trial at tenantsync.ie/register — 14 days, no card.
2. Add one property with a name, address and monthly rent. The default unit appears on its own.
3. Press Start tracking on that unit and send the payment reference to your tenant.
4. Import the rest from your spreadsheet or Letman export — validate-only first, then for real.
5. Connect your bank via Open Banking, on your bank's own screen, in about two minutes.
6. Create your leases so the RTB registration deadlines generate themselves from the tenancy start dates.
7. Load the certificates with expiry dates, then install the iOS or Android app.

Seven steps, seven days, and none of them requires the previous one to be perfect. That's the whole trick — the spreadsheet only wins when the alternative demands everything before it gives anything.

Frequently asked questions