Landlord bookkeeping template
A free Excel workbook plus a ten-minute monthly routine that keeps your rental books current all year — rent ledger, categorized expense log, per-property cash flow, and a year-end checklist your accountant will not have to translate.
.xlsx · opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice · free, no watermark
Last updated September 2026
The ten-minute monthly routine
- Log the rent. On the Rent Tracker tab, type what each tenant actually paid into this month's column. The variance column flags anyone short.
- Enter the receipts. Every expense from the month onto the Expenses tab — date, property, category, vendor, amount.
- Reconcile. Compare the month's total in and out against the bank statement for the rental account. A mismatch this month takes two minutes to find; in April it takes an evening.
- Note what is open. Unpaid rent, an invoice you are waiting on, a repair that is not finished.
The year-end checklist
- Every month of rent logged for every tenant, including vacancies as zero.
- Mortgage interest pulled from the year-end 1098, not estimated from payments.
- Repairs separated from capital improvements.
- Depreciation schedule updated for any improvement placed in service this year.
- Security deposits held reconciled — they are a liability, not income.
- 1099-NEC issued to any unincorporated contractor you paid $600 or more.
- Mileage log totaled for property trips.
- Annual Summary tab exported or printed for your accountant.
Cash basis, and why it is the right choice here
Almost every individual landlord reports on the cash basis: income when received, expenses when paid. It matches how the bank account behaves, it needs no accruals, and it is what the IRS expects from a Schedule E filer. Accrual accounting exists to match revenue to the period it was earned — useful for a management company, noise for someone with four doors.
Where a spreadsheet quietly fails
Bookkeeping is backward-looking by design, and that is its limit. A workbook will never tell you a lease expires in sixty days, that a termination option notice is due next week, or that rent has not been raised in three years. Those are the misses that cost real money — far more than a miscategorized $80 receipt. PLINTH keeps the same ledger and expense log and adds the calendar: automatic alerts before every renewal and notice deadline, from $7 a month.
Landlord bookkeeping FAQs
- How do landlords do bookkeeping?
- At a small scale, on a cash basis: record income when the money arrives and expenses when you pay them. Keep a separate bank account per portfolio (not per property — one account and clean categories is enough under about ten doors), log every transaction against a property and a category, and reconcile against the bank statement once a month. That is the whole job; the tools people argue about are just where the log lives.
- Do I need accounting software as a landlord?
- Under roughly five doors, a disciplined spreadsheet beats accounting software you never open. Full accounting packages solve owner statements, trust accounting and multi-entity reporting — problems a landlord with three rentals does not have. What small landlords actually outgrow is not the bookkeeping, it is the date-keeping: lease expirations, renewal notice windows and rent increases.
- Should each rental property have its own bank account?
- One dedicated rental account separate from personal money is essential. Per-property accounts only start paying off when each property sits in its own LLC or has its own partner. What matters for the books is that every transaction is tagged to a property, which the template handles with a dropdown.
- How long do landlords need to keep records?
- Keep supporting documents for at least three years after the return's due date, and seven is the safer habit. Records tied to the property's cost basis — purchase documents, capital improvements, depreciation schedules — should be kept for as long as you own the property plus three years after you sell.
- What is the monthly bookkeeping routine?
- Log rent received, enter expense receipts, reconcile the total against the bank statement, and note anything unpaid. Ten minutes on the first of the month. The point is not perfect books, it is that nothing is reconstructed from memory eleven months later.