How does ExpenseBot track rental property expenses per property?

Landlords filing IRS Schedule E or CRA T776 don't have a "rental" expense — they have a per-property expense. The tax form demands one column per address, and if you own three units you need three tidy piles. Every generic tracker lumps everything under a single "Rental" category, which means at tax time you (or your accountant) spend hours re-sorting receipts by address. ExpenseBot's Rental Property tracker is designed to make that re-sorting step vanish.

The three pieces

1. First-class property setup. In Settings → "Set up ExpenseBot for what you track" → Rental Property you add each rental with its full street address, country (US or Canada), purchase date, and rental percentage (100% for a pure rental, less for a house hack where you live in part of the building). Setup takes about two minutes per property. That's the only manual configuration — after that, address detection is automatic.

2. Deterministic address matching. When a receipt comes in referencing a property address (invoice from a plumber, HOA bill, property-tax notice), ExpenseBot matches it by exact street number plus street name — no AI guesswork, no fuzzy "close enough" matches that might put a Home Depot run on the wrong property. Same-street addresses (123 Main vs 125 Main) are disambiguated by the unit number.

3. Country-branched output. At tax time you click once and get the right form for your country:

• USA Schedule E — receipts routed to lines 3a (rents received), 5 through 19 (advertising, cleaning, insurance, legal, management fees, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities, etc.), and 26 (depreciation)
• Canada T776 — lines 8141, 8521, 8690, 8710, 9369, and 9946, matching the CRA statement of real estate rentals

What the flow looks like

• Day 1: Add your properties — two minutes each
• Throughout the year: Forward bills and receipts like you always have. The property tag is applied automatically.
• Tax time: One click produces a per-property Schedule E or T776 with every receipt attached

Edge cases handled

• House hacks — set a rental percentage (e.g., 60%) and ExpenseBot prorates shared expenses automatically
• Mid-year purchase or sale — activeStart and activeEnd dates keep expenses from bleeding into the wrong year
• Security deposits — excluded upstream from income (IRS treats deposits as liabilities until forfeited)
• Deleted properties — historical receipts stay attached, so a sold property still shows up on that year's return

What's still manual

Two line items can't be automated from receipts alone:

• Mortgage interest — pulled from your annual Form 1098 (USA) or mortgage statement (Canada)
• Depreciation — 27.5-year residential or 39-year commercial, and you need a land/building allocation. See IRS Publication 527 for the full methodology.

Not for

• Realtors — use the Realtor Expense Tracker instead (different tax form, different workflow)
• House flippers — flips go on Schedule D (capital gains), not Schedule E
• Large multifamily operators — you probably need full property-management software (AppFolio, Buildium) with tenant ledgers, lease tracking, and bank-account-per-property

Learn more

• Schedule E rental landing page
• The one tax form that trips up DIY landlords

Correct the source and rerun

The report is built from the selected tax year, your property setup, property assignments, rental income, and expense details. Correct expenses in Review expenses and rent payments in Review income, then return to the report and run Preview again. A generated spreadsheet is a snapshot, so generate a new one after corrections.