Rental Income Tracker — Methodology Handbook

The Rental Income Tracker is the landlord's books: one place to record every rental property, the rent it earns, the money it costs to run, and the returns it produces. This handbook explains what it tracks and — importantly — exactly how every number on the dashboard is calculated, so you can trust the figures and reproduce them yourself.

This is a public handbook. It describes what the tracker does and how the math works. It intentionally contains no internal implementation detail.

What it tracks

The tracker has two building blocks:

• Properties — one card per rental unit. A property holds its name and address, type (single-family, condo, multi-family, vacation rental, …), occupancy status, expected monthly rent, mortgage payment, purchase price, current value, the tenant, and the lease start/end dates.
• Transactions — one row per money movement, tied to a property. Income covers rent, deposits, late fees, pet fees and parking. Expenses cover the mortgage, property tax, insurance, repairs, maintenance, management fees, utilities, HOA dues, legal costs, advertising and supplies.

Everything else — cash flow, cap rate, occupancy, net operating income — is derived from those two inputs. You never type a metric in; you record what happened and the tracker does the arithmetic.

The three tabs

Dashboard

A portfolio-wide rollup:

• Net cash flow (last 12 months) — total income minus total expenses across every property over the trailing twelve months, with the monthly average shown beside it.
• Monthly cash-flow chart — income vs. expense bars for the last 12 months.
• KPIs — property count, occupancy rate, monthly rent roll, portfolio value, blended cap rate and trailing-12-month income.
• Expense breakdown — where the money went over the last 12 months, by category.

Properties

A card per unit showing its monthly rent, per-property cash flow, current value and cap rate, plus the tenant and a lease countdown. From here you can log rent for that unit in one tap, edit it, or remove it.

Transactions

The full ledger of rent and expenses, filterable by period (this month, year to date, last 12 months, all time), by type (income / expense) and by property.

How the metrics are calculated

All money math uses positive amounts; whether a transaction adds or subtracts is determined by its type (income vs. expense).

Monthly rent roll

The sum of monthly rent across every property whose status is occupied. Vacant and listed units are excluded — the rent roll reflects rent you can actually expect to collect this month.

Occupancy rate

occupied properties ÷ total properties × 100. A three-door portfolio with two occupied units shows 67%.

Net cash flow

income − expenses over the selected window. On the dashboard the window is the trailing 12 months. Cash flow includes all expenses, mortgage included — it's the real money left in your pocket.

Net operating income (NOI)

annual operating income − annual operating expenses. Operating expenses exclude the mortgage (debt service is financing, not an operating cost). When a property has no logged income yet, NOI falls back to monthly rent × 12 minus its operating expenses, so a freshly added unit still shows a sensible figure.

Cap rate

annual NOI ÷ property value × 100, where property value is the current value (or the purchase price if no current value is set). Cap rate answers "what unleveraged yield does this property produce?" A blended portfolio cap rate is the sum of every property's annual NOI divided by the sum of their values.

Per-property monthly cash flow

The average monthly net (income − expenses) over the trailing 12 months of that property's transactions. With no transactions yet, it falls back to monthly rent − mortgage payment.

Lease countdown

Days between today and the lease end date. Inside 45 days it turns amber; past the end date it turns red, so upcoming renewals never sneak up on you.

Free vs. Pro

• Free — up to two properties, unlimited transactions, all metrics, and CSV export.
• Pro — unlimited properties plus AI portfolio insights.

Exporting your own data to CSV is always free, on every plan. Deleting a property or transaction is a soft-delete — it's recoverable and never a hard wipe.

Tax time

Income and expenses are categorised as you enter them, so at year end you export two clean CSVs — properties and transactions — and hand them to your accountant or import them into your tax software. Categories map directly to the buckets a Schedule E (or your local equivalent) expects.

Roadmap

Planned additions: image upload to auto-fill a property or a batch of expenses from a statement, AI portfolio insights ("which unit is dragging your returns?"), and mortgage/amortization links to the existing calculators.