Look closely at how many properties are run and you'll find a notebook, a phone full of M-Pesa messages, and a caretaker who remembers who paid what. It works, until it doesn't. A payment gets missed. A water bill is disputed and nobody can prove the reading. A repair gets paid for twice. When the landlord asks what happened, the honest answer is "let me check."
None of that comes from carelessness. People are doing their best with the tools they have, and most software wasn't built with their day in mind.
We didn't set out to start a company around this. We set out to fix it for one operation: match the payments automatically, record the meter readings with a photo, and keep a trail of every repair and every item that left the store. That small fix became Rently.
It also taught us how we like to work. We spend time understanding how the operation actually runs before we write any code. We choose tools that fit the problem rather than the ones that are fashionable. And we stay around after launch, because software only proves itself once real people use it every day.
We're still a small team, and we'd rather say so plainly. If you have a process held together by notebooks, spreadsheets and goodwill, we'd like to hear about it.