Rental property accounting
- Deposit to return
- $1,150
- Total deductions
- $300
- Still owed to you if deductions exceed the deposit
- -$1,150
Every figure on this site comes from the numbers you enter and the method printed beside them: your rent, your months, your notice period, your deposit, your rooms and items. Where a guide names a published document it names the document and the date it was read. This site publishes no state tenancy law, no legal advice and no template that pretends to be either.
Rental property accounting for a small landlord is not accounting in the professional sense; it is keeping the year's figures in a form somebody can file from. Rent received per property, expenses per property, the dates, and enough of a trail that a number can be explained a year later. Most landlords do this in a spreadsheet built in the first year and patched every year since, and it works until a property is bought, sold or refinanced, at which point the patched spreadsheet is the reason the return is late.
Open the Landlord security deposit return letter Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Keep the figures per property, not per bank account
Rental income and expenses are reported per property, so a record organised by bank account has to be taken apart every year to answer the question the return asks. Recording rent against the tenancy, and the tenancy against the unit, means the per property view exists all year rather than being reconstructed each spring.
Record what was charged as well as what arrived
A bank feed shows receipts. It cannot show that a tenant paid two months in December for January, or that one month never arrived. Charging rent in the record and matching payments to it is what makes arrears visible during the year rather than at the end, and it is the difference between a ledger and a statement.
Keep the documents with the figures
The expense a return most often loses is the one with no paperwork attached. Filing the invoice, the notice or the inspection against the tenancy it belongs to means the trail exists where the number is, which is where anybody checking will look.
Ask us about Rental property accounting
Tell us how many units you have, how the rent is tracked today, and what happens at the end of a tenancy.
What a landlord asks before running the Rental property accounting
What does rental property accounting need to produce? Income and expenses per property for the tax year, with dates and a trail behind each figure. IRS Topic 414 and Publication 527 set out what is reported for residential rental property; how you keep the record is yours, provided it supports what you file.
Do I need accounting software as well? Many landlords with a handful of units do not. The ledger gives income per property and the expenses can live beside it. Once there are staff, entities or a portfolio, an accountant will usually want proper books, and the ledger feeds them.
Is a rental property excel spreadsheet good enough? It is where almost everyone starts and it is genuinely fine for one or two units. What breaks it is arrears, part payments and mid-year tenancy changes, because each of those turns a row into a calculation somebody has to remember to redo.
Can I export for my accountant? Yes, always, including on the way out. A record you cannot take with you is a record you are renting, and rental income is exactly the kind of thing you may need to show years later.
Tenantvo Pro
Keeping the ledger between tenancies
Upgrading turns the documents into a record. The tenancy you wrote a reference for is a tenancy in the ledger, with the payments that made the reference true; the notice you served has a date and sits against the unit; the inspection checklist is filed with the tenancy it opened or closed. Export is always available, so the ledger is yours whether or not you stay.
- Take the worked document away as a file for your records.
- Issue paperwork with your name on it and without ours.
- Keep the document you worked and open it again at the end of the tenancy.
- Put your own name on the notice and the reference.
- Export every tenancy and its documents in one go, including on the way out.
- Send the notice or the reference from the record it came from.
- Connect your own Stripe account if you take rent by card.
- Connect the bookkeeping you file the return from.
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