Rental Income Tracker — Methodology Handbook

The Rental Income Tracker is the landlord's books in one place: every property, the rent it earns, the money it costs to run, the bookings it takes, and the wealth it builds. It's a superset tracker — it works just as well for a long-term landlord collecting monthly rent as for a short-term / Airbnb host managing per-stay bookings, and it happily does both in one portfolio. This handbook explains everything it tracks and — importantly — exactly how every number is calculated, so you can trust the figures and reproduce them yourself.

What it tracks

The tracker has two building blocks, and everything else is derived from them:

• Properties — one card per rental unit. A property holds its name and address, type (single-family, condo, townhouse, multi-family, apartment, commercial, room, vacation rental, …), occupancy status (occupied / vacant / listed), expected monthly rent, mortgage payment, purchase price, current value, land value, financing (loan amount, rate, term, start date), 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; each short-term stay also carries its booking channel (Airbnb / Booking.com / VRBO / direct / other), the guest, and check-in / check-out dates. Expenses cover the mortgage, property tax, insurance, repairs, maintenance, management fees, utilities, HOA dues, legal costs, advertising and supplies.

You never type a metric in — you record what happened, and cash flow, cap rate, occupancy, ADR, equity and the rest are all calculated for you.

The six tabs

Dashboard

The portfolio-wide rollup, over a date range you choose (this month, last month, this quarter, this year, all time, or a custom range):

• Net cash flow — total income minus total expenses over the window, with the trailing-12-month average beside it, plus a cumulative income-vs-expense chart.
• Property KPIs — property count, occupancy rate, monthly rent roll, portfolio value, blended cap rate and trailing-12-month income.
• Wealth — equity, total loan balance (with loan-to-value), and appreciation since purchase.
• Short-term-rental KPIs — for hosts, occupancy, ADR, RevPAR and nights booked, plus income broken down by booking channel. These only appear when your ledger actually has bookings, so long-term-only landlords never see the clutter.
• Income by channel and where the money goes — breakdown bars for booking sources and expense categories.
• Annual profit goal — set a yearly target and a ring gauge tracks your year-to-date net against it, with a projected year-end run-rate.

Properties

A card per unit showing monthly rent, per-property cash flow, current value and cap rate, plus its equity and appreciation, tenant and lease countdown. Log rent in one tap, jump to a matching calculator to analyze the deal, attach documents, edit, or remove it. Once you have more than a few units, a status filter (All / Occupied / Vacant / Listed) keeps the view tidy.

Calendar

A month-view booking timeline — property × days — with each reservation drawn as a bar coloured by its channel, and long-term-occupied units shown as full-month bands. Hover a booking for the guest, channel, dates and nights. Navigate by month and filter to a single property. This is also where you sync your platform calendars and import bookings (below).

Transactions

The full ledger of rent, bookings and expenses, filterable by period (this month, year to date, last 12 months, a custom range or all time), by type (income / expense) and by property. Bookings show their channel, guest and nights; auto-posted rent is tagged Auto.

Taxes

A per-year tax report: gross rental income, deductible expenses, net taxable income, sales/occupancy tax collected vs. tax paid on expenses, a Schedule-E-style breakdown of deductible expenses by category, and a monthly table. It also adds the two big non-cash deductions — depreciation and a mileage log — and shows your net taxable after deductions. Export the whole report to CSV.

Compare

Rank your properties side by side — income, expenses, net, margin and cap rate over the trailing 12 months, year to date or all time — with a top-performer card and year-over-year trend bars, so you can see which unit is pulling its weight and which is dragging.

What the numbers mean

You never type a metric in — you record rent and expenses, and the tracker works out the rest. Here's what each figure means, in plain terms.

Rent roll

The total monthly rent you can expect to collect this month — the rent added up across every occupied unit. Vacant and listed units aren't counted, since they aren't earning rent right now.

Occupancy rate

The share of your units that are currently occupied. A three-door portfolio with two occupied units is 67% occupied.

Net cash flow

Your income minus your expenses over the period you're looking at. This includes all costs, the mortgage included — it's the real money left in your pocket.

Net operating income (NOI)

Your annual income minus your annual operating expenses — but the mortgage is left out, because a loan payment is financing, not a running cost. It's the profit the property itself throws off, before financing. A brand-new unit with no history yet falls back to a year of expected rent minus its operating costs.

Cap rate

The unleveraged yield a property produces: its annual NOI as a percentage of its value (current value, or purchase price if you haven't set a current value). It answers "if I paid cash, what return would this property earn?" The portfolio cap rate blends every unit's NOI against every unit's value.

Cash-on-cash return & gross yield

Cash-on-cash is your annual pre-tax cash flow measured against the actual cash you put in (your down payment). Gross yield is a year of rent measured against the property's value. Both appear on the property card once you've entered your financing, so you can see leveraged and unleveraged returns side by side.

Short-term-rental metrics

For per-stay bookings: nights is the length of each stay; ADR (average daily rate) is your room revenue divided across those nights; occupancy is booked nights out of the nights available; and RevPAR (revenue per available night) is total revenue spread over every available night. Income is also grouped by channel so you can see which platform earns you the most.

Per-property cash flow

Each unit's average monthly net (income minus expenses) over the last twelve months. With no transactions logged yet, it falls back to that unit's rent minus its 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 renewals never sneak up on you.

Getting bookings and rent in

You can always add rent and bookings by hand, but the tracker also automates it three ways:

Import bookings from a statement (AI)

On the Transactions or Calendar tab, press Import bookings and drop in an Airbnb, Booking.com or VRBO reservation list or payout report — a screenshot (PNG/JPG) or the exported PDF. The AI reads every stay it can: the guest, the booking channel, check-in and check-out, the gross amount and any occupancy tax. You review the list, deselect any rows, choose the property, and import — each stay becomes a rent-income transaction with its channel and nights. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

Sync your booking calendar (iCal)

On the Calendar tab press Sync calendar, pick the channel, and paste the platform's "Export calendar" (iCal / .ics) link, plus an optional nightly rate. We fetch the feed and turn every reservation into a booking automatically — check-in, check-out and nights come from the calendar, and the amount is estimated as rate × nights (leave it blank to fill amounts yourself). Owner- blocked dates are skipped. Re-sync any time; bookings are matched by their calendar ID, so re-syncing updates dates in place and keeps any amounts you've edited instead of duplicating rows.

Auto-post recurring rent

For long-term units, edit the property and turn on Auto-post monthly rent, then pick the day rent is due (1–28). Each month on that day the tracker records the rent as income automatically, so your cash flow, occupancy and rent roll stay current with zero data entry. Auto-posted rows are tagged Auto — treat them as expected rent and edit or delete if a payment didn't arrive. The tracker never double-posts, and auto-rent units are never nagged with a "rent not logged" reminder.

Equity & appreciation (your real-estate net worth)

Beyond cash flow, the Dashboard shows the wealth you're building: Equity (each property's value minus what you still owe, summed), Loan balance (total outstanding mortgage debt, with loan-to-value), and Appreciation (gain since purchase). Enter your financing — loan amount, rate, term and the loan start date — and we amortize the balance forward so equity grows automatically as the loan is paid down. Appreciation needs a purchase price and a current value. Every property card also shows its own equity and appreciation.

Taxes: depreciation, mileage & Schedule E

The Taxes tab turns your books into a tax-ready picture. On top of your logged expenses it adds the two biggest non-cash deductions:

• Depreciation. The building (not the land) wears out on paper, and you can deduct a slice each year — straight-line over 27.5 years for residential property, 39 for commercial, on the building's share of the purchase price. Set a land value for accuracy; leave it blank and we assume land is ~20%.
• Mileage. Driving to a rental — inspections, repairs, showings, supply runs — is deductible. Log each trip and we multiply your yearly miles by the IRS standard mileage rate.

Both feed a Net taxable after deductions figure. At year end, export the report — or your properties and transactions — to clean CSVs that map to the Schedule E buckets your accountant or tax software expects. These figures are estimates to help you plan, not tax advice.

Property documents

Every property keeps its own paperwork. Open a saved property and attach the lease, insurance policy, purchase documents, receipts or tax forms — PDF, image (a photo of a paper doc is fine) or Word, up to 15 MB each. Files are private: only you can open them, through short-lived signed links, never publicly. Tag each upload so the lease, the insurance and the receipts stay organised.

The AI assistant

The site assistant knows your rental portfolio — properties, occupancy, rent roll, cap rate, cash flow, per-unit performance, channels and ADR/occupancy/ RevPAR, upcoming check-ins, equity and net worth. Ask it things like "which unit is dragging my returns?", "what's my equity?", "who's checking in next week?" or "which property hasn't paid rent this month?" — the insights come in the chat, grounded in your real numbers, with no separate report to run.

Reminders

The assistant reaches out first when something needs you: a rent-not-logged reminder for an occupied unit with no rent recorded this month, a lease-ending heads-up within 30 days, and a guest-arriving nudge when a booking checks in within a few days. There's also a weekly email digest summarising your properties, occupancy, net cash flow and what to do next. Reminders arrive as in-app notifications and web push, and you can turn them off any time.

Analyze deals with the calculators

Each property links straight to the matching calculator with its figures pre-filled — a vacation rental opens the Airbnb Profitability calculator with its ADR and occupancy ready to go; a long-term unit opens the Mortgage calculator with the price, down payment, rate and term filled in. Model a scenario, then come back to the tracker.

Free vs. Pro

• Free — up to two properties, unlimited transactions and bookings, every metric (cash flow, cap rate, ROI, equity, appreciation, occupancy/ADR/RevPAR), the tax report, and CSV export.
• Pro — unlimited properties, AI booking import, iCal calendar sync, and AI portfolio insights in the chat.

CSV export of your own data is always free, on every plan. Deleting a property, transaction or document is a soft-delete — recoverable, never a hard wipe.

Try it

Open the Rental Income Tracker → and add your first property — it takes a minute, and a rich sample portfolio is there to explore first.