Societly vs running it on spreadsheets

This is the comparison that actually matters to most Indian housing societies, and almost nobody writes it honestly, because the people writing it are all selling the alternative. We are too. So let us start with the part that is against our interest.

When the spreadsheet is the right answer

It is free, and it does not expire. No per-unit fee, no annual renewal, no vendor who might change their pricing after you have moved everything across.

Everybody already knows how to use it. There is no onboarding, no training, and no committee member who refuses to install another app. That is a real advantage and software vendors consistently undervalue it.

It bends to whatever you do. Every society has one strange rule — a grandfathered rate for the ground-floor shops, a levy split that follows an old agreement, a rebate somebody's uncle negotiated in 2009. A spreadsheet absorbs all of it in an afternoon. Software makes you find the setting, and sometimes the setting does not exist.

There is no lock-in. The file is yours. Nobody can hold it hostage, raise the price on it, or shut the service down.

If your society is fifteen flats, everyone pays the same amount on the same day, your treasurer is organised, and nobody is in arrears — the spreadsheet is genuinely fine. You do not have a software problem. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Where the spreadsheet actually breaks

It rarely breaks on the maths. It breaks on the things around the maths.

Handover

This is the real one. The spreadsheet lives on one person's laptop, in a folder structure only they understand, with formulas only they remember writing. When that person moves out, resigns, or simply gets tired — and in a volunteer committee, all three happen — the next treasurer inherits a file they cannot fully audit and did not design.

Most societies do not discover this gradually. They discover it in one week, usually in the middle of a billing cycle.

Chasing arrears

Tracking who has not paid is easy in a spreadsheet. Chasing them is not. It means a person deciding to send an awkward WhatsApp message to a neighbour they will see in the lift tomorrow, and it means doing it every month. In practice it does not get done consistently, which is why arrears in spreadsheet-run societies tend to accumulate quietly rather than spike visibly.

Automated reminders remove the interpersonal cost entirely. Nobody has to be the person who asked. That single change is, in our experience, the most reliable financial improvement a society sees when it moves off Excel — more than any reporting feature.

Receipts and the audit trail

A spreadsheet records that a payment happened. It does not prove it. There is no receipt the resident can produce two years later, no timestamped record of who edited what, and no way to reconstruct a disputed entry beyond "the file says so". At audit, and in any dispute that turns serious, that difference matters. See accounts and audit for a Karnataka association for what an auditor will actually ask you to produce.

Everything that is not billing

The spreadsheet solves billing. It does not solve the visitor register at the gate, the complaint that was raised in a WhatsApp group and forgotten, the clubhouse booking that two families both think they have, the staff attendance register, or the notice nobody can prove was circulated. Those live in a paper register and three WhatsApp groups, and they are where most of the committee's actual time goes.

Concurrency

Two committee members editing the same file is a merge conflict waiting to happen. Google Sheets solves the mechanics but not the permissions: anyone with the link can usually see every flat's dues, which is a resident-privacy problem most societies have not thought about.

The honest middle position

You do not have to choose all at once, and the sensible order is not the one a vendor would pick for you.

Keep the spreadsheet as your working ledger if you like it, and move the things it was never good at first — the gate register, complaints, notices. Those cost you nothing to move and give the committee back the most time.

Move billing when one of these becomes true:

• arrears are being carried for more than two cycles
• the treasurer is the only person who understands the file
• a committee handover is coming within the year
• residents are asking for receipts you cannot easily produce

If none of those are true, stay where you are.

What switching actually involves

The fear is that switching means re-typing everything. It does not. You can import members, units and outstanding balances directly from the spreadsheet you already keep — including the single combined workbook most societies maintain, with one sheet per register. Moving your society's data off spreadsheets walks through the process and what to clean up first.

Two things worth insisting on with any vendor, not just us:

Your data must stay exportable. If you cannot get members, units and billing history back out in a standard format, you have swapped a file you own for a dependency you do not. Ask before you migrate, not after.

The money must settle into the society's own bank account. On Societly it does, and we take no commission on maintenance — we earn from the subscription only. This is the question to put to every vendor you evaluate.

The cost, plainly

Under 25 units, Societly is free, so the comparison against a spreadsheet is not financial — it is whether the software is worth the change in habit. Above that, it is ₹15 per unit per month on Growth, excluding GST. For a 60-unit society that is ₹900 a month, or about ₹15 per flat.

Whether that is worth it depends almost entirely on your arrears. A society carrying ₹80,000 in old dues that starts collecting them because reminders now go out automatically has paid for the software several times over in the first quarter. A society with no arrears and a happy treasurer is buying convenience, which is a fair thing to buy but a smaller one.

Illustrative figures — substitute your own unit count and arrears position.

In short

• Spreadsheets are free, flexible and genuinely adequate for a small, punctual,

well-run society. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

• They break on handover, arrears chasing, receipts and everything that is not

billing.

• Move the non-billing registers first; they cost nothing and save the most time.
• Move billing when arrears, a handover, or a single-point-of-failure treasurer

makes the risk concrete.

• Whatever you choose, keep your data exportable and your money settling into

your own bank account.

Related reading

• Moving your society's data off spreadsheets
• How to choose society management software: a committee's checklist
• What apartment management software costs in India
• Your first year on the committee