How to Export Your Data From Rentec Direct (Leaving Rentec Direct)

Why landlords leave, and what makes this one easier

People usually leave Rentec Direct for fit rather than failure. It was built for the traditional property manager with owners to report to, and a hands-on owner-operator can end up paying for owner statements, trust accounting, and a report catalogue they never open. Others leave because the day-to-day work has moved onto a phone, or because they have taken on room-by-room or short-term rentals the account was never shaped around.

Whatever the reason, this is one of the friendlier exits in the industry. Rentec Direct offers CSV alongside PDF on its reports rather than PDF only, and it has a genuine contact-list report, which is the file most landlords discover too late that they are missing.

1. Download the property, tenant, and owner lists

Start with the fastest one. Click Settings, then under Tools click Utilities, then click Download Active Property, Tenant, or Owner List. That gets the backbone of your portfolio out in three clicks.

Do this first because it tells you the counts everything else has to match. If it lists 42 rentals and 38 tenants, every later file should agree with those numbers or you have a filter set wrong.

• Settings
• Tools
• Utilities
• Download Active Property List
• Download Active Tenant List
• Download Active Owner List if you report to owners

2. Pull the tenant reports you actually need

Click Reports, choose the report, enter a date or report period, select the property or all properties, then click Submit. Once the report is on screen, use the icons at the top to save it as a PDF or a CSV file. Take the CSV every time. Rentec Direct's help center describes over fifty reports, and you only need a handful of them.

Rent Roll is the one to lead with, and it lets you choose which fields to include, so include everything. Tenant Contact List is the one people forget, and it is described as a consolidated list including phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses. All Tenants shows current properties, their tenants, and the matching move-in and move-out dates, which is the cleanest single picture of who lives where.

Watch the Lease Expiration report. Rentec Direct says that once a lease has been expired for a month it stops appearing there, so if you have leases that recently ran out, pull that report early rather than at the end of your move.

• Rent Roll
• Tenant Contact List
• All Tenants
• Lease Expiration
• Current Deposits
• Delinquent Tenants
• Scheduled Move-Outs

3. Download the ledgers and the money reports

Ledgers have their own shortcut. Open any ledger, click the gear icon above it, and choose Download. The CSV file lands in your downloads folder with no email step in between. That is the line-by-line history a new system needs to rebuild a resident's balance rather than just accept it.

Then work through the Financial group of reports the same way as the tenant ones. Account Ledger, the Income and Expense Statement, and the online payment reports such as Completed Online Payments give you what was charged, what was received, and how it was paid. If you file a Schedule E, the Schedule-E Assistant and the Depreciation Schedule are worth saving as records even though your new software will not read them.

• Account Ledger
• Income and Expense Statement
• Completed Online Payments
• Vendor Ledger
• Schedule-E Assistant
• Depreciation Schedule
• 1099 Tax Assistant if you pay vendors

4. Save your documents, one at a time

Rentec Direct keeps files in an Account File Library that you can reach from the Quicklinks on your Summary page, and each property, tenant, vendor, owner, and lead has its own library as well. Storage is unlimited, which is good news right up until you try to leave, because the documented way to get a file out is to right-click a line item, or use the three dots, and download it.

There is no bulk or zipped download documented, so plan for this to be the slow part. Prioritise signed leases for current residents, then any recently ended lease where a deposit is still in play, then inspection reports and anything you would want in front of you if a former resident disputed a charge.

Check this before you cancel

Rentec Direct's own cancellation article says there is no term commitment and no cancellation cost, and then gives one piece of advice in bold: export all valuable or potentially needed data before cancelling, because once the account is cancelled or closed there is a reactivation fee to get back in. Treat that as the real deadline.

Cancelling itself runs through Settings, then Your Account and Subscription under Account, then Modify Subscription, then the cancellation link inside the frequently asked questions. Do not go near that path until the folder on your own computer is complete and backed up.

• Counts match the Utilities lists
• Every current resident has an email address
• Ledger CSV files open and look right
• Signed leases downloaded
• Deposits held agree with your bank
• Folder backed up somewhere other than your laptop

Bringing the files into RentCaddie

RentCaddie has a named Rentec Direct path in its Switch to RentCaddie screen, so the guidance you see while importing matches the reports described above. Being honest about what that does and does not mean: there is no Rentec-specific column preset behind it, so RentCaddie reads your headings, works out whether each file is people, money owed, money received, or expenses, makes its best match for every column, and then asks you to confirm each one. Nothing is saved until you approve that review screen.

In practice the Rentec files land well because the headings are plain. Expect to spend a few minutes checking column matches on the first file and almost none on the rest. If a whole batch lands wrong, the import can be undone, and the undo deliberately keeps anything you have edited by hand since then rather than deleting it.

Two limits worth knowing before you start. RentCaddie reads spreadsheets only, so a report saved as a PDF has to be replaced with its CSV version. And because files are read in your browser, each one is capped at 10 MB and 5,000 rows, so a long ledger should be exported a year at a time and dropped in as several files.

• Switching property management software: what to move and what to leave behind
• Download RentCaddie's blank import workbook (Excel)

Common questions