How to track rental income and expenses for taxes

The arithmetic on a rental year is simple. The problem is that nobody writes the numbers down while they happen, so by April they are scattered between the bank app and a stack of receipts, with the rest in your memory. Reconstructing a year from statements takes an afternoon, and any deduction you cannot back up is one you will not take.

What the return wants is boring and specific. Rental income and expenses go on Schedule E, and the expenses fall into the same handful of lines every year: mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, utilities, management fees, advertising, legal and professional, supplies, travel. If your record already groups spending the way the form does, filing is copying numbers across. If it does not, you sort a year of transactions before you can start.

The job is to write each dollar down once, when it happens, in the right category, with each property kept separate. The week you pay the plumber, while you still know what the check covered, rather than the following April when you do not.

Free software will do this by connecting to your bank. If you are fine handing an app your bank login and working inside it, use it. The other way is a spreadsheet you own: you type each entry once, it sorts and totals the year, nothing connects to anything, and the file stays on your machine. You pay once and it is yours.

That is what the Landlord Income and Expense Tracker is. Twelve expense categories that match how a return groups them, up to ten properties each in its own column, one year per file so last year stays closed. It does not file your taxes and it does not replace your accountant. It hands whoever prepares your return a clean year instead of a shoebox. If you want to run the numbers on a property rather than record them, that math lives on the free calculators page instead.