We’ve built a property management tool for small landlords

Reply to the comment left by amarni at 13/04/2026 – 18:27
Thank you — and the Gulliver’s Travels reference is painfully apt.

On accounting: yes, for landlord property finances, Harthing does handle that. From day one you can record income and expenses categorised against HMRC MTD categories, and once we have HMRC recognition — which we’ve applied for — you’ll be able to file your quarterly returns directly from the platform. For a landlord with a few properties and no other business income, that may well be all you need.

Where it stops is if you have other income streams, run a business alongside your properties, or need things like invoicing and VAT. That’s where Xero or QuickBooks come in, and we’re working on integrating with both so the two systems talk to each other rather than you running them separately.

On early access: I should update where we are on this, as the response has been far beyond what we expected. Our first 50 early access places — with 12 months’ free access — have now been claimed. If you sign up before 12 May you’ll still get the full beta free (you’re helping us build it, so of course you’re not paying to test it) plus three months free on any plan when pricing goes live, and a say in what we build next.

William

I’ve read every comment and response about your new tool and am feeling more worried and lost than ever – the whole RRA thing (not to mention MTD) and what it requires of me scares the s**t out of me. I am terrified of ending up with huge fines and a criminal record because of some minor error or omission.
We have had our little portfolio of 4 properties since 2006.
I have devised all of the record keeping systems we use as needed and as we’ve gone along (as in cobbled together some ExCel sheets that run alongside actual files and folders, plus those on my pc.) We share GCS and EPCs etc in Dropbox with our tenants – altho’ I doubt any of them ever look at anything we send them. I can answer 2 of your initial questions with a yes (#s 1 & 3), but we are in our mid 70s, try our best to keep up with technology and not to be dinosaurs. and, to be perfectly honest we are scared witless and would ditch it all and sell up a heartbeat, if we didn’t have good tenants who have been with us for many, many years.
I didn’t even understand a lot of what people were asking you, or much of the terminology you and they used – so how would I ever understand the tool you are producing or know what to ask it to do for me?
If your tool stores and evidences every detail about every property, its every transaction and our responses to tenant issues then I can definitely see that inputting data to evidence that would be doable (probably) and useful going forward, but surely it would involve a huge amount of time and effort to input all of the past data to populate the thing in the first place?
Can anyone out there PLEASE tell me anything that will reassure me and prevent yet more sleepless nights spent wondering how on God’s green earth this is ever all going to get done?

Reply to the comment left by Denise G at 15/04/2026 – 18:43
Denise, please don’t lose sleep over this. You are exactly the person we built Harthing for.

You’ve got 4 properties, good long-term tenants, and you’ve been doing this properly since 2006 — that’s clear from the fact that you can find your gas cert in under two minutes and you already know about the 31 May deadline. You’re ahead of most landlords I’ve spoken to. You are not the problem the regulations are trying to solve.

On the terminology in this thread — that’s my fault, not yours. If you can’t understand what we’re talking about, we’re talking wrong. The whole point of Harthing is that you shouldn’t need to understand the technology. You just use it.

On populating past data — this is specifically what we’ve built the AI for. You don’t have to type everything in. You take your gas certs, your EPCs, your tenancy agreements — the ones in your folders, on your PC, in Dropbox — and drag and drop them into Harthing. The AI reads them, pulls out the dates, the names, the expiry information, and fills everything in for you. You check it looks right and confirm. That’s it. No retyping. No data entry project. What it doesn’t do is pop up and try and have a conversation with you, it’s all in the background: we just think it’s a useful tool, nothing more.

We’re three people in our 50s who got fed up with exactly the same thing you’re describing. Neil is building the platform. I’m an accountant. None of us are trying to build something clever — we’re trying to build something that makes this manageable for people like you and like us.

Please do think about signing up before 12 May — the beta is completely free because you’d be helping us get it right, and you’ll get three months free on the full product when it launches. And honestly, if you find any of it confusing when you try it, I want to hear about it directly from you, because that means we’ve got something wrong. The info@harthing email on the website goes straight to my inbox as well.

Just do make sure you post the tenant information sheet to your tenants before the May 31 deadline though; there’s also instructions about that on the website in the section called The Record (link at the bottom if you’re on your phone), and a link to the download for the sheet.

William

Reply to the comment left by Denise G at 15/04/2026 – 18:43
I would make two points:
1. You say ‘we’, so I assume properties are jointly owned, in which case form a partnership. Partnerships are exempt from MTD ITSA.
2. If you are in your 70s and your estate is likely to have an IHT liability I would suggest selling up. It is far easier to carry out effective tax planning with cash than it is with property.

As you will have noticed, property is also a target for tax and regulation by successive governments, it is best left to the young (and even then, there are plenty of better long term investments), there is little attraction for anyone else.