This is a free Excel workbook for tracking rental income and expenses across up to ten residential properties. Six tabs and 52 columns: you type into two of them, fill one in once, and the other three calculate. Every expense is categorised to its IRS Schedule E line as you enter it, so a year of rows adds up to the form instead of to a pile that still needs sorting.
That last part is the whole design. Most rental bookkeeping goes wrong in the same place: the numbers are fine, the receipts are in a folder, and then in March someone has to decide which of 340 transactions was a repair and which was an improvement, which part of the mortgage payment was interest, and what the land was worth when the property was bought. That work is not hard. It is just impossible to do accurately nine months after the fact.
Six tabs. Two you type into, one you set up once, and three that calculate.
The Properties tab is the setup: one row per property, with purchase price and land value. It works out the depreciable basis and the annual depreciation from those two numbers. Every dropdown on every other tab reads its property list from here, which is the small thing that stops "123 Main" and "123 Main St" becoming two properties in your summary.
The Income and Expenses tabs are the daily work, 300 and 500 pre-formatted rows respectively. Income rows carry a category, a payment method and a tenant. Expense rows carry a payee, a description, a receipt reference and, most importantly, a Schedule E line.
The Monthly Summary, Schedule E Summary and Short-Term Rental tabs are calculated. Nothing is typed into the first two. The monthly tab gives gross income, operating expenses, net operating income, interest, cash flow and an expense ratio, by month and by property. If those terms are new, net operating income is the number that commercial property valuation is built on, and the workbook calculates it the same way a broker would.
Every column, formula and dropdown is listed further down this page.
A landlord with one to ten residential units in the United States who files Schedule E and does the books themselves. That is the whole audience.
It is not for a commercial portfolio, where the recovery period is 39 years rather than 27.5 and the lease structures matter more than the transaction log. It is not a substitute for accounting software once you are running a business with employees and a bank feed. And it is not for a Canadian property, for the reasons in the questions below.
This is the one judgement call the spreadsheet cannot make for you, and it is the distinction that changes what you owe.
A repair keeps the property in the condition it was already in, and it deducts in full in the year you pay it. An improvement does one of three things the IRS calls out in the tangible property regulations: it betters the property, restores it, or adapts it to a new use. An improvement is capitalised and depreciated over years instead.
Replacing a broken tap is a repair. Replacing every tap, fitting and surface in the bathroom in the same month is a remodel, and a remodel is an improvement.
Put a number on it. A $9,000 bathroom, treated as a repair, deducts in full this year and lands on line 14. The same $9,000, treated as an improvement, puts nothing on line 14 and recovers over years instead, at a rate that depends on the asset class. Same invoice, $9,000 of difference in this year's deductible total.
The Expenses tab handles this with a dropdown option that sits outside the Schedule E line list: Capital improvement (not line 5-19). Choosing it records the spend, keeps it out of line 14, and keeps it out of your operating expense ratio, where it would otherwise make a perfectly normal month look terrible. What it does not do is calculate the depreciation on that improvement, because that depends on the asset class and the date it was placed in service. That part belongs with your accountant.
Residential rental property in the US depreciates over 27.5 years, straight line. Land does not depreciate at all, ever, because it does not wear out.
So the basis you depreciate is the purchase price minus the value of the land, which is why there is a Land Value column next to Purchase Price on the Properties tab, and why the workbook will not calculate anything until you fill it. A common shortcut is to use the land-to-improvement ratio from the property tax assessment. It is a defensible starting point, and it is also the kind of figure worth having an accountant look at once rather than guessing at for 27 years.
Worked through with the row the workbook ships with: a $615,000 purchase carrying $92,000 of land gives a depreciable basis of $523,000, and $523,000 over 27.5 years is $19,018.18 a year. Move the land value to $150,000 and the annual figure falls to $16,909.09. A single column moves the deduction by more than $2,000 a year for 27 years, which is why the workbook will not calculate until you fill it.
The 27.5 divisor sits in a visible cell, so a commercial property can be changed to 39 without editing a formula.
If you use the property yourself, two thresholds matter, and the Properties tab has a column for each.
Personal use of more than 14 days, or more than 10% of the days it was rented at fair market value, moves the property into the dwelling-unit rules. Expenses stop being fully deductible and have to be allocated between rental and personal use. Publication 527 has the detail.
Tracking Fair Rental Days and Personal Use Days as you go costs nothing. Reconstructing them from a calendar in April is where people quietly guess.
It does not import from your bank, calculate depreciation on improvements, handle payroll, produce a balance sheet, or file anything. It does not know your marginal rate, it cannot tell you whether your rental losses are deductible this year, and it will not warn you when you are about to cross a threshold.
It is a transaction log with the tax form's own categories built into the dropdowns. That is a narrower promise than most rental spreadsheets make, and it is the part that still holds up in April.