How to choose landlord software: six checks you can run yourself

Most guidance on choosing landlord software compares features. Features are the easy part, and they are also the part a provider can simply claim. The harder question, and the one that actually protects you, is whether the company behind the product is what it says it is. Four of the six checks below take about five minutes on public registers. HMRC recognition, FCA authorisation for any bank connection, the legal entity and its data protection registration, and what happens to your records if the product closes. The remaining two cover who is accountable when the software answers a legal question, and how much weight to put on awards, reviews and press coverage. None of them require you to trust the marketing.

Why there are suddenly so many landlord apps

Two pieces of legislation created a large, dated, addressable market at the same time. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax went live on 6 April 2026 for landlords with qualifying income above £50,000, and the threshold falls to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 in April 2028. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 commenced on 1 May 2026 and made the evidence trail behind a tenancy far more consequential. Between them they pushed several hundred thousand self-managing landlords towards software on a known timetable.

That is a genuine market, and new entrants are a reasonable response to it. What has changed is how quickly a product can be built and, more to the point, how quickly a convincing website can be built around one. A landing page, a feature grid, a set of testimonials and thirty comparison articles can now be produced in days. The website is no longer evidence of the company.

This matters more for landlord software than for most categories, because of what you hand over. Your tax records, which HMRC can ask to see for years. Your tenants' names, right to rent documents and payment histories, for which you are the data controller. In many cases read access to your bank account. If the provider turns out to be one person and a domain name, those are your problems, not theirs.

Check one: is it on HMRC's recognised software list?

"MTD-ready", "MTD-compatible" and "built for Making Tax Digital" are marketing phrases with no legal status. "Recognised" is the one that counts, and it is a matter of public record. HMRC publishes the list at Choose the right software for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax on GOV.UK, alongside a finder that filters by the income sources you actually have.

The distinction is not academic. If you are inside MTD, quarterly updates must reach HMRC through the API of recognised software, on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May, followed by a final declaration by 31 January. Logging into the government website and typing figures in is not an option that exists any more. Software that cannot submit is not a compliance tool, whatever it says on the homepage.

Read the product's own page on the HMRC list rather than stopping at its presence there. Recognition is granted per income source and per return item, and each is marked as ready, in development, or not included. For a comparison of the products that are recognised and what each covers, our guide to the best MTD software for landlords goes through them individually, and the Making Tax Digital hub sets out the rules themselves.

One further point worth holding on to. HMRC recognition confirms that a product can talk to HMRC's systems correctly. It is not a quality rating, a security assessment or an endorsement, and HMRC does not rank the list. It is a floor, not a recommendation.

Check two: is the bank connection covered by FCA authorisation?

Any product that reads your bank transactions is providing an account information service, and that activity is regulated. Under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, a firm must either be authorised by the FCA as a payment institution or registered as an account information service provider before it can connect to UK bank accounts. Registered providers must also hold professional indemnity insurance. The FCA's guidance on account information services sets out both routes.

Many landlord platforms do not hold that permission directly. They connect through an authorised provider such as Plaid or TrueLayer, acting as that firm's agent, which is entirely legitimate. What should worry you is a product that reads your bank data and appears nowhere in that chain, because it suggests either screen scraping or credentials being handled somewhere they should not be.

You can check this yourself on the FCA Register, and a well-run provider will make it easy by naming its authorised partner and quoting a firm reference number in its terms or on its security page. If a product advertises bank feeds and no regulated entity is named anywhere on the site, that absence is the finding. Our explainer on how open banking works with August covers what the connection does and does not permit, and the open banking entry defines the underlying framework.

Check three: is there a named UK company behind it?

Find the company number and look it up on Companies House. Check the incorporation date, whether accounts have been filed, and where the registered office is. A recently incorporated company is not a problem in itself, and every good product started somewhere. What you are looking for is the mismatch: a company incorporated four months ago whose website claims thousands of users and years of testing.

Registered office addresses deserve a moment. A virtual office in central London is a normal arrangement for an early-stage company and proves nothing on its own. It becomes informative when it is the only address on the site, there are no named founders, and the support channel is a web form.

Then check the Information Commissioner's Office register. Any organisation processing personal data in the UK must pay the data protection fee unless it is exempt, and the ICO publishes who has. This is the check landlords most often skip and the one with the most direct consequence, because you are the data controller for your tenants' personal data and the software is your processor. UK GDPR requires a written contract between the two of you. If a provider cannot produce a data processing agreement, name its sub-processors, or tell you which country your data sits in, you are the one carrying that exposure, not them.

In the course of helping landlords move across from spreadsheets and from other platforms, the question we are asked least often is where the data will live and who else can see it. It is usually the question their tenants would want asked first.

Check four: what happens to your records if the product closes?

This is the check that separates a tool from a system of record, and it is the one almost nobody runs before signing up.

Your obligations outlast any subscription. HMRC's compliance manual is explicit that letting property counts as carrying on a business for record-keeping purposes, and records must be kept until at least the fifth anniversary of the 31 January following the tax year in question, or longer if an enquiry is open. Records for the 2026-27 tax year therefore need to survive until at least 31 January 2033. HMRC can charge a penalty of up to £3,000 for failing to keep adequate records. The tenancy side is similar in spirit, because the evidence trail the Renters' Rights Act relies on has to be available when a dispute arrives, which may be years after the tenancy ended. Our guide to enforcement and implementation under the Act covers what that trail needs to contain.

So the question to put to any provider is narrow and answerable. Can you export everything, including documents and their metadata, in a format you can read without their software? Where is that backup held, and how often? What notice would you get if the service closed? Most platforms will let you export a CSV of transactions. Far fewer will export your document library with the expiry dates and the tenancy each certificate belongs to, and that is precisely the part you cannot reconstruct from a bank statement.

We publish our own backup and recovery policy and a list of authorised sub-processors for this reason. Whether or not you use August, ask every provider on your shortlist for the equivalent, and treat the ease of getting an answer as part of the answer.

Check five: who is accountable for what the AI tells you?

Nearly every landlord platform now offers an AI assistant, and several are marketed on the strength of one. The useful question is not whether a product has AI, but which of two quite different jobs it is doing, because they carry very different risks.

The first job is reading and extracting. Pulling the parties, dates, rent and terms out of a tenancy agreement, taking the expiry date off a gas safety certificate, categorising a bank transaction, drafting a message. This is what the technology is genuinely good at, and it is checkable, because the source document is sitting in front of you and you can see whether the extracted date matches the certificate.

The second job is answering questions about the law. Ask a chatbot about a Section 8 ground, a deposit deadline or the notice required for a rent increase and it will answer confidently either way. When that answer is wrong, the possession claim fails or the deposit penalty lands on you. The software carries no liability, and the disclaimer will say so.

The test, then, is whether a product keeps you in the loop on the first job and stays honest about the limits of the second. On extraction, does it show you what it found and let you approve, edit or reject each item before it writes to your records, or does it populate them silently? A silent write is a record you never checked, and it is your record that HMRC or a tribunal will eventually look at. On legal answers, is the guidance dated so you can tell whether it predates the Renters' Rights Act commencing on 1 May 2026, does it cite the provision it relies on, and does the product state plainly where its answers stop?

August Intelligence is built along that split. Document scanning reads tenancy agreements, gas safety certificates, EPCs and EICRs, including photographs and scans rather than only digital files, and extracts the parties, dates, terms, rent amounts and expiry dates. Every suggestion is then presented for you to approve, edit or reject before anything is saved, and compliance reminders work the same way. August offers to create one and you confirm it. Questions about your own portfolio are answered from your stored data. General landlording questions are answered from model knowledge, and we treat those as a starting point rather than an answer, which is why our guidance on legal and financial decisions is to take professional advice. Any product implying its chatbot removes that need is selling you a risk transfer that has not actually happened.

Check six: what awards, reviews and press coverage actually prove

These are the signals most landlords look at first, which is why they sit last here. Every one of them can be manufactured, and none of them substitutes for the checks above. They are still worth reading, provided you read them for what they are.

Awards vary enormously, and the badge alone tells you almost nothing, because the word covers everything from a judged submission assessed by an industry panel to a public vote to a paid listing in a directory that calls itself an award. What matters is what was actually assessed and by whom. Verify the claim on the awarding body's own site rather than on the provider's, since a badge is only an image file, and check three things while you are there. Whether it was a shortlisting or a win, which year it was, and what the category was actually judging. A 2022 win in a category that no longer exists is being presented in the present tense on a lot of websites. August has been shortlisted for and won several industry awards, and the same test applies to ours.

Reviews are more informative, but not in the way the star rating suggests. Look at the distribution and the timing rather than the average. Twenty five-star reviews inside a single week is itself a finding. A trust profile is built over time. Read whether reviewers describe specific workflows they use, because a genuine review of landlord software mentions bank reconciliation or certificate expiry, and a fabricated one might mention how intuitive the interface is. App Store and Play Store ratings are materially harder to manufacture than testimonials on a marketing page, and carry a visible review count you can weigh. Ours are collected on our reviews page, and the same test applies to them.

Press coverage needs one distinction. Editorial or commercial. LandlordZONE, Property118 and Landlord Today all carry sponsored articles and partner content alongside journalism, and a provider quoting a logo rarely tells you which it bought. Open the article. A named journalist writing about a company is meaningful. A piece under a partnership or promotion label is advertising, which is legitimate but proves only that an invoice was paid. August runs organic, but not paid press outreach into these titles, so this caution is one we are inside rather than above.

Property118 is worth a search for a separate reason. Its forums are where landlords discuss products bluntly and at length, and an active provider with no organic mention anywhere across a community that size is telling you something about how many customers it really has.

What "free" tends to mean

Free tiers are normal and often sensible, and August offers one. The thing to establish is which of the three kinds you are looking at, because they behave very differently over time.

A permanent free tier capped by property count is a straightforward commercial decision, and you can plan around it. A free trial is time-limited and clearly labelled. "Free during early access" is the one that needs a question, because it means pricing has not been set. That is a legitimate stage for a company to be in, but a landlord choosing a system of record on that basis is choosing a product whose future cost is unknown and whose migration path is untested. Ask what the price will be, when it takes effect, and what happens to your data if you decline it. Our comparison of free landlord software in the UK sets out what each free tier currently includes and where the walls sit.

How to read a comparison table that ranks its own publisher first

A large share of the landlord software comparisons now ranking in Google are published by landlord software companies. That includes ours. The roundup of property management software for UK landlords on this site names August, and you should read it with that in mind.

The useful distinction is not between vendor content and independent content, because genuinely independent reviews of this category barely exist. It is between comparisons that disclose the interest and comparisons that pose as neutral. Three things tend to separate them. Whether the publisher is named as a participant rather than presented as the assessor. Whether the criteria and weightings are stated before the verdict rather than derived from it. And whether the claims about rivals are dated, checkable and defensible, or written in the present tense with no reference point, which is how a comparison quietly becomes wrong when a competitor ships the feature it was marked down for.

Testing claims deserve the same scepticism. A page that says a platform was tested with live data over two weeks is making a factual claim, and it is worth holding that claim against the company's own stated history. If a product launched in beta three months ago and the comparison describes a longer evaluation than the product has existed, the comparison was not written from testing.

Release cadence is the same kind of evidence and easier to check. Most providers publish release notes, and both the App Store and Google Play show the date of the last update alongside a summary of what changed. Read a few months of them rather than just the latest. Steady shipping of new capability tells you a team is funded and working on the product. Nothing but bug fixes tells you it is being maintained rather than developed. Months of silence, or notes that say only "performance improvements and bug fixes" every time, tell you something you want to know before you commit records you need to keep for years. We publish ours for the mobile app and the web app, but also check their app store and play store for this information too.

The verification routine

Run these in order on any product before you migrate anything into it:

1. Search the product name on HMRC's recognised software list on GOV.UK, and open its individual product page to see which income sources are marked ready.

2. Search the company on the FCA Register if it offers bank feeds, or find the authorised provider it names as its open banking partner.

3. Look up the company number on Companies House and check the incorporation date against the claims on the website.

4. Search the ICO register for the company's data protection registration, and ask for a copy of the data processing agreement.

5. Ask what happens to your documents and records if you leave or the company closes, and ask for it in writing.

6. Read the AI disclaimer before you rely on anything the AI tells you about the law.

7. Verify any award at the awarding body rather than on the provider's own site, open any press coverage to see whether it is editorial or sponsored, and read the review distribution rather than the average.

Any provider worth using will answer all seven without hesitation, and most will have the answers published already. The ones that cannot are telling you something useful.

If you would like to see how August answers them, our security page sets out the technical position and our pricing is published in full, including the free tier.

Frequently asked questions

Does HMRC recognition mean the software is safe? 

No. Recognition confirms only that the product can keep digital records and submit to HMRC's systems correctly. It says nothing about the company's security, financial stability or data handling, and HMRC does not rank or endorse products on the list. Treat it as a minimum requirement rather than a recommendation.

Is it safe to connect my bank account to landlord software? 

It is, provided the connection runs through a firm authorised or registered with the FCA under the Payment Services Regulations 2017. That permission means read-only access with your explicit consent, no ability to move money, and no sharing of your banking credentials with the app. Check that the provider either holds the permission itself or names the authorised partner it works through.

What should I do if my landlord software provider goes out of business? 

Export everything immediately, including transactions, documents and compliance dates, and check your records against your bank statements before access ends. Your record-keeping obligations to HMRC continue regardless, so the practical protection is to export periodically while the service is running rather than relying on being able to do it in a hurry.

Can I rely on an AI assistant for legal questions about a tenancy? 

Not for anything with consequences. AI is well suited to reading documents, categorising expenses and drafting communications. For possession grounds, deposit deadlines or a contested notice, verify the answer against the legislation or take advice, because the liability for acting on a wrong answer sits with you.