You don't have to rekey your portfolio or lose your history to switch. TenantSync imports directly from a Letman CSV export or your spreadsheets — properties, tenancies, tenants and finances — into a staging area separate from your live data, where every record is validated and deduplicated before anything is committed. The raw files are retained and the import is retryable, so it's a controlled process, not a one-shot gamble, and concierge onboarding does the heavy lifting with you. Your tenancy dates and compliance history come across intact and immediately feed the RTB, PSRA and rent workflows built for Irish agencies. Start free — 14-day trial, no card required, imports included.
There's a particular kind of agency principal this is written for: the one who already knows their setup is holding them back. The spreadsheet that takes a day to reconcile. The platform that was never built for RTB Form 1 or the national rent cap. The nagging sense that one missed date across a client portfolio is a serious problem waiting to happen. They know all this — and they still don't move, because the migration itself looks worse than the pain of staying.
That instinct is rational. A bad migration is worse than standing still. But it's also avoidable, and the reasons it usually goes wrong are specific and fixable. Once you see how a proper import works — staged, validated, reversible — the cliff turns out to be a ramp.
A note on fairness
This isn't a hit piece on Letman — it's a capable, established lettings platform, and plenty of agencies run happily on it. The argument here is narrower: for an Irish agency whose core risk is Irish statutory compliance, a platform built around RTB and PSRA law fits differently from one that treats them as configuration. Where we compare, we compare on that Irish-specific fit.
Why the fear of migration keeps agencies stuck
The switching decision is rarely about features. Most principals can list exactly what they'd gain. It stalls on risk — three fears, specifically:
- "We'll have to rekey everything." The mental image is a temp typing hundreds of tenancies into a new system for weeks, introducing errors as they go. If that were the only way, staying put would be sensible.
- "We'll lose our history." Years of tenancy dates, rent records and compliance evidence feel irreplaceable — because they are. Losing the registration date on a tenancy isn't an inconvenience; it's a compliance gap.
- "We'll be down while we do it." An agency can't stop managing properties for a fortnight to change systems. A big-bang cutover that risks a gap in service is a non-starter.
Every one of these is a real risk of a bad migration — a manual, all-at-once, unvalidated one. None of them is inherent to switching. The whole design of a good import is to neutralise these three specific fears, which is exactly what the rest of this guide is about.
Agencies don't stay on outgrown software because they love it. They stay because the imagined cost of leaving is a manual rekey, a lost history and a fortnight of downtime. Remove those three and the decision changes overnight.
What actually breaks about spreadsheets at scale
For agencies still on spreadsheets, it's worth naming why they stop working — because they don't fail loudly, they fail quietly, right when you can least afford it. A spreadsheet is a brilliant tool for a handful of tenancies and a dangerous one for a few hundred:
| At scale, a spreadsheet… | Why it hurts an agency |
|---|---|
| Doesn't remind you | An RTB renewal or rent-review date in a cell never pings anyone — it waits to be opened, and a busy quarter is exactly when it won't be. |
| Doesn't reconcile | It can't match incoming rent to the right tenancy and landlord, so client-money reconciliation is a manual month-end scramble — and a PSRA exposure. |
| Doesn't keep an audit trail | A cell that was overwritten leaves no history. When a dispute or inspection asks "what changed and when?", there's no answer. |
| Breaks with people | Version conflicts, a formula someone dragged wrong, the one person who "knows the sheet" on holiday — fragility grows with every tenancy and every staff member. |
The tell is that the spreadsheet feels fine until the day it doesn't — a missed registration, a client account that won't tie out, a number no one can explain. By then the cost of the tool is far higher than the cost of replacing it. Our guides to bulk RTB compliance and client-money and per-landlord reporting cover what a system does that a sheet can't.
Where a non-Irish platform leaves you exposed
Letman and other general or UK-built platforms solve the universal parts of lettings well — properties, tenancies, workflows. The gap for an Irish agency isn't quality; it's jurisdiction. The highest-stakes parts of your job are defined by Irish law, and a platform not built around that law makes them your manual problem again:
| What an Irish agency needs | General / UK-built platform | TenantSync (Irish-built) |
|---|---|---|
| RTB registration & Form 1 | Not native — tracked and filed manually alongside the tool. | Form 1 draft-to-finalise workflow and 30-day / renewal deadline tracking across the portfolio. |
| National rent cap (2% or CPI) | No Irish rent-cap logic; you calculate and risk the error. | National Rent Cap calculator and Section 12 notice generation, per tenancy. |
| PSRA client money | Generic accounting, not the Client Moneys Regulations workflow. | Per-landlord client-money ledgers, monthly reconciliation and a six-year inspection pack. |
| Irish Open Banking | Limited or no PSD2 links to Irish banks. | AIB, Bank of Ireland, PTSB, EBS, Revolut and N26, auto-matching rent to tenancy. |
None of this makes a general platform "bad" — it makes it a poor fit for the part of an Irish agency's work that carries the most liability. The question isn't whether Letman is a good product; it's whether the compliance that can cost you a client or a licence should be native to your system or bolted on beside it.
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What "no lost tenancy history" really requires
"We won't lose your data" is easy to say. What makes it true is the architecture of the import — specifically, that your data doesn't go straight into your live system and hope for the best. Three things have to be true:
- A staging area. Imported records land in a staging area separate from your live data first. Nothing touches your working portfolio until you've seen it, so a bad file can never silently corrupt live records.
- Validation before commit. The importer checks records and flags issues by severity — a missing date, a malformed field — so problems surface in staging and get fixed before they become live, not after.
- Matching, not duplicating. Fuzzy address and name normalisation deduplicates as it imports, so a property that appears three ways across your files becomes one clean record rather than three conflicting ones.
And because the raw files are retained and the import is a tracked job you can retry, the whole thing is auditable and repeatable. That's the difference between "we imported your data and hoped" and "we staged it, validated it, and you signed off on it." The second is what lets an agency trust its history survived the move.
Staging is the whole trick
The reason a good migration isn't scary is that you get to see the result before it's real. Staging turns an irreversible leap into a reviewable draft — you validate the imported portfolio against what you know, correct anything flagged, and only then commit. Nothing about your live book changes until you say so.
How the migration actually works
Here's the sequence, end to end. None of it involves retyping a tenancy:
From old system to live in five steps
- Export. Pull your properties, tenancies, tenants and finances out of Letman as CSV, or gather your spreadsheets.
- Import to staging. Upload the files; TenantSync parses them into a staging area as a tracked import job, separate from live data.
- Validate & match. Issues are flagged by severity and records are deduplicated with fuzzy address and name matching.
- Review & commit. You review the staged portfolio, fix anything flagged, and commit — with the raw files retained and the job retryable.
- Go live. Concierge onboarding does the heavy lifting with you, and your RTB, PSRA and rent workflows run on the imported book.
The word doing the most work there is concierge. You're not handed a CSV template and left to it — the onboarding team does the heavy lifting of getting your export mapped, staged and validated, so the agency's job is to review and approve rather than to operate the importer. That's what turns "migration" from a project you dread into a handful of review sessions.
The switching-cost objection, answered
Put the two costs side by side, because that's the decision. On one side, the cost of switching: a staged import the concierge team runs with you, a few review sessions, a short ramp. On the other, the cost of not switching — and it's the one agencies systematically under-count:
The switching cost is a one-off you can see and control. The cost of staying is recurring, compounding and — in the compliance case — potentially catastrophic. Framed honestly, the risk was never in moving; it was in staying on a system you've already outgrown because moving felt harder than it is. Our inquiry-handling and onboarding guides show what that headroom is for.
Get the switching checklist — and a migration you can trust
Start a free 14-day trial or book a demo, and we'll run your Letman export or spreadsheet through a staged, validated import so you can see your own portfolio in TenantSync before you commit to anything.
The switching checklist
If you're evaluating a move, this is the standing list that separates a safe migration from a risky one — ask it of any platform you consider:
Switching-software checklist
- Direct import, not manual rekeying — from Letman CSV and from spreadsheets.
- A staging area separate from live data, so nothing commits until you approve it.
- Validation by severity, so data issues surface before they go live.
- Deduplication via fuzzy address and name matching, so records don't multiply.
- Retained, retryable jobs, so the import is auditable and repeatable, not one-shot.
- Tenancy history preserved — dates and compliance records carry across, not reconstructed.
- Concierge onboarding, so the vendor does the heavy lifting with you.
- Irish-native compliance waiting on the other side — RTB, national rent cap, PSRA client money.
Frequently asked questions
Can I migrate from Letman to TenantSync without losing data?
Yes. TenantSync imports directly from a Letman CSV export — properties, tenancies, tenants and finances — so there's no manual re-keying. The import runs into a staging area first, separate from your live data, where records are validated and matched before anything is committed, and the raw files are retained so the job is auditable and can be retried. That combination is what lets an agency move its whole portfolio across without losing tenancy history.
How does the Letman migration actually work?
You export your data from Letman as CSV (or gather your spreadsheets), upload the files, and TenantSync parses them into a staging area as an import job. The importer flags validation issues by severity and uses fuzzy address and name matching to deduplicate records, so problems surface before they reach live data. You review the staged portfolio, fix anything flagged, and commit — and import jobs can be listed, retried, synced or cancelled, so it's a controlled, repeatable process. Concierge onboarding does the heavy lifting with you.
Is TenantSync a good Letman alternative for Irish agencies?
It's built specifically for the Irish market, which is the main difference. Where a general or UK-built platform treats Irish rules as configuration, TenantSync is built around them: the RTB Form 1 workflow, the national rent cap (2% or CPI) calculator and Section 12 notices, PSRA client-money reconciliation and inspection packs, and Open Banking with Irish banks. For an agency whose core risk is Irish statutory compliance across many landlord clients, that native fit is the reason to switch — and the direct Letman import removes the usual reason not to.
How long does it take to migrate a letting agency?
It depends on the size and tidiness of your data, but the staged approach means you're not down for days. Because the import runs into a staging area you can validate before committing, and because concierge onboarding does the heavy lifting with you, most agencies are up and running quickly rather than facing a big-bang cutover. The staging, validation and retry steps make the timeline predictable and low-risk rather than a leap of faith.
What if my data is in spreadsheets, not Letman?
Spreadsheets are supported the same way. TenantSync imports from CSV, so whether your portfolio lives in a Letman export or in the spreadsheets you've run the agency on, the files go through the same staged, validated import — parsed into a staging area, checked for issues, deduplicated with fuzzy matching, then committed. If anything, moving off spreadsheets is the more urgent switch, because a spreadsheet doesn't remind you of a deadline, reconcile a client account or keep an audit trail.
Will I lose my RTB or compliance history when I switch?
No — preserving that history is the whole point of a proper migration. The tenancy records you import carry their dates and details across, so registration and renewal timelines, Part 4 anchors and rent-review history come with them rather than being reconstructed. Once imported, that history feeds TenantSync's bulk RTB compliance dashboard and PSRA client-money and inspection workflows, so you're not starting your compliance record over — you're continuing it on a system that watches it for you.