When people imagine self-managing rental property, they picture tenant calls and the occasional repair. That's part of it, but it's not the part that actually takes time. The part that takes time is administrative, and it's almost entirely invisible from the outside.
It's remembering which lease renews when, and deciding whether to offer a renewal before the tenant asks. It's reconciling that the rent you expected actually landed, every month, for every unit. It's keeping some kind of record so that if a tenant disputes something eight months from now, you're not reconstructing it from memory. It's noticing that one property has had three maintenance requests this quarter and wondering if that's a pattern worth looking into.
None of that is visible to anyone else. Nobody sees the hour you spend making sure your records are straight before tax season. Nobody sees you double checking that a security deposit got returned correctly. It's real work and it's mostly invisible, which is exactly why it's the work that gets skipped when you're busy.
The value of good software here isn't doing the work for you. It's making the invisible work visible enough that it doesn't require willpower to keep up with. A due date you can see is a due date you handle. A due date that only exists in your head is a due date you handle late, if at all.
Being your own property manager is mostly bookkeeping and follow- through with occasional tenant interaction mixed in, not the other way around.