It's Monday morning. Your landlord at 15 Oak Street calls to say a tenant complained about a gas leak smell over the weekend. The gas engineer came out, everything's fine - just a false alarm. But while you're on the phone, the landlord asks: "When is the gas safety certificate due for renewal, anyway?"
You put them on hold. Open your certificates spreadsheet. Search for Oak Street. The row's there, but the "last updated" date is from eight months ago. Is that current? You open another tab, search your emails for "Oak Street gas safety", find a PDF from the engineer... and realise the certificate expired three weeks ago.
This happens more often than anyone wants to admit. Certificate compliance is one of those tasks that's easy to track when you have five properties and nearly impossible when you have fifty or two hundred. Spreadsheets get outdated. Emails get lost. And suddenly you're explaining to a landlord why their property has been let without a valid gas safety certificate.
We've built a solution.
The Problem: Tracking Certificates Is Tedious and Error-Prone
If you're managing a typical portfolio of 100-200 properties, you're dealing with:
- Gas safety certificates for every property with gas supply (annual renewal)
- EPC certificates that expire every 10 years (but often need checking for rental minimum ratings)
- EICR certificates every 5 years for rental properties
- Plus any additional local licensing requirements
That's potentially 400-600 certificates to track, each with different expiry dates, different properties, different landlords expecting you to stay on top of it.
Most agencies handle this with:
Spreadsheets - Manually updated, frequently outdated, no alerts for approaching expiries. You only find out a certificate expired when something goes wrong.
Calendar reminders - Better than nothing, but who sets them up for every certificate? And what happens when the person who set the reminder leaves?
External compliance software - Often expensive, another system to log into, another place where data gets out of sync.
Memory and luck - We all know how that ends.
The Solution: A Property-Centric Compliance Dashboard
We've completely redesigned the certificates page in LetAdmin. Instead of showing a list of certificates, we now show a property-centric compliance view.
Open the dashboard and you see every managed property in your portfolio with its certificate status displayed clearly:
Visual Status at a Glance
Each property shows coloured badges for each certificate type:
- Green - Certificate is valid with plenty of time remaining
- Amber - Certificate expires within 30 days (time to book the renewal)
- Red - Certificate has expired (action required immediately)
- Grey - No certificate on file (either missing or never uploaded)
For properties without gas supply, the gas safety row shows "No Gas Supply" instead of triggering a false compliance warning.
Sorted by Urgency
The list is automatically sorted so problems appear at the top:
- Expired certificates first (red badges) - these need immediate attention
- Expiring soon next (amber badges) - book these renewals now
- Valid certificates - no action needed
- No gas supply at the bottom - not applicable
You don't need to scroll through 150 properties to find the three that need attention. They're right at the top.
Filter by Certificate Type
Looking specifically for EICRs approaching expiry? Gas safety certs that need renewal? Click the filter to see only what you need.
One-Click Actions
Each property row has action buttons:
- View - Open the certificate to check details or download
- Renew - Create a new certificate record (for when you receive the updated cert)
- Add - Upload a certificate for properties that don't have one on file
No navigating through property pages, no hunting for upload buttons. Everything's accessible right from the dashboard.
Real-World Example: Monday Morning Compliance Check
Before the dashboard (typical agency workflow):
- Open spreadsheet of certificate expiries
- Hope it's been kept up to date
- Sort by expiry date
- Find a few that look like they might be expiring soon
- Open each property in your software to check the actual certificate
- Discover the spreadsheet was wrong for three properties
- Panic about the one that expired last month
- Spend the next hour calling engineers and apologising to landlords
Time spent: 60-90 minutes
With LetAdmin's compliance dashboard:
- Open Certificates page
- See three properties with red "Expired" badges at the top
- See seven properties with amber "Expiring Soon" badges
- Click through each one, book renewals, log the action
- Done
Time spent: 15-20 minutes
The difference isn't just time - it's confidence. You know you've seen every property. You know nothing's fallen through the cracks because you forgot to update a spreadsheet.
Automatic Expiry Calculation
When you upload a new gas safety certificate, LetAdmin automatically calculates the expiry date (one year from the certificate date). For EICRs, it's five years. For EPCs, ten years.
You don't need to manually enter expiry dates and risk typos. Upload the certificate, and the system handles the rest.
Only Relevant Properties
The dashboard only shows properties that need certificate tracking:
- Properties with active tenancies
- Properties with upcoming tenancies
- Properties currently advertised (about to be let)
Properties that are vacant and not being marketed don't clutter your compliance view. When they become relevant again, they'll appear automatically.
What This Means for Your Agency
For a typical agency managing 150 properties, this dashboard could prevent:
- 1-2 gas safety lapses per year (each potentially costing thousands in fines and reputational damage)
- Multiple EICR oversights (especially with the five-year cycle that's easy to lose track of)
- EPC rating issues when minimum standards change
More importantly, it gives you confidence that you're on top of compliance. No more nagging worry that something might have slipped through the cracks.
We'd Love to Hear from You
How do you currently track certificate compliance across your portfolio? Spreadsheets? Calendar reminders? Another software system?
What frustrates you most about keeping on top of renewals? Is it the tracking, the reminder system, or something else entirely?
We're building LetAdmin based on real agency workflows, and your feedback shapes what we build next. Drop us a message - we'd love to hear how you manage compliance today.
LetAdmin is in active development, designed for independent letting agents and owner-operators managing 50-300 properties. If you're tired of spreadsheets and want software that actually understands how agencies work, we'd love to show you what we're building.