Expense & Mileage Tracking for Real Estate Agents

After each showing or open house, enter the miles driven and purpose in ExpenseBot. It takes 10 seconds. ExpenseBot automatically calculates the deduction at the current standard mileage rate.

Yes. Enable Gmail auto-scan and ExpenseBot scans your inbox overnight to find receipts from MLS fees, Zillow ads, DocuSign, staging companies, photographers, and other vendors. No forwarding rules needed.

Common business expenses include mileage for showings and appointments, MLS fees, marketing materials, staging costs, photography, signage, client meals, home office costs, continuing education, professional dues, and business insurance. ExpenseBot organizes the records and applies supported category defaults; review the result and confirm tax treatment with your tax professional.

At year-end, ExpenseBot summarizes the records in your Google Sheet, including business expenses and reviewed mileage entries. US self-employed agents can use the Schedule C-oriented view; Canadian agents choose whether they are self-employed or commissioned so ExpenseBot does not assume the wrong form. Review the result with your accountant before filing.

Your final receipt files and durable expense records are stored in your own Google Drive, where you retain control. ExpenseBot uses limited service metadata and temporary processing as described in the Privacy Policy, and you can revoke Google access anytime.

Open-house spend is all marketing expense: catering, signage, flyers, refreshments, balloons, staging touch-ups, professional photography touch-ups. Snap a photo of the receipt as you're packing up — ExpenseBot's AI extracts vendor, amount, date, and categorizes it as 'Marketing - Open House.' For online orders (catering platforms, sign-printing sites, Costco receipts via email), Gmail auto-scan picks them up overnight without you lifting a finger. Tag each expense with the property address so your per-listing P&L tells you which open houses actually pencil out.

ExpenseBot can turn Google Calendar events with property addresses into mileage candidates without always-on GPS. You review each candidate before it enters the mileage log, confirm its business purpose, and choose whether the trip was round-trip. This keeps the log useful without silently treating every Calendar event as deductible travel.

Tag by brokerage name: 'Tag: KellerWilliams' on expenses associated with one, 'Tag: ReMax' on the other. Filter the Google Sheet by tag and you get separate P&Ls per brokerage — crucial if you're being paid under a 1099 from one and a W-2 from the other, or if you have different commission-split structures. ExpenseBot also handles multiple Google accounts if you keep them fully separate, but the tag-per-brokerage approach is usually cleaner because receipts in one Gmail sometimes relate to the other brokerage's work.

Common Schedule C groups for a self-employed US agent include mileage, MLS dues, E&O insurance, continuing education and license renewal, home office costs, marketing, client gifts, business meals, broker desk fees, brokerage splits, and software subscriptions. For 2026, mileage uses a split rate: 72.5¢/mile for miles driven Jan 1–Jun 30, 2026 and 76¢/mile from Jul 1. ExpenseBot suggests supported groups and builds a complete Business P&L from all non-personal expenses; review classifications and tax treatment with your tax professional.

Real estate agents can write off the ordinary costs of running the practice: showing and client mileage, broker desk fees and commission splits, MLS and association dues, lockbox fees, E&O and business insurance, marketing (signage, flyers, online ads), listing photography, staging, home office for exclusive business use, continuing education and license renewal, CRM and transaction software, and the business-use share of phone and internet. Two categories are capped instead of fully deductible: client gifts at $25 per recipient per year (IRS Pub 463) and business meals at 50%, with entertainment not deductible at all. What decides whether a write-off survives review is rarely eligibility — it is whether a record exists showing the amount, date, place and business purpose, made at or near the time of the expense. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.

Partly. The IRS caps business gift deductions at $25 per recipient per year under IRC §274(b), so a $150 closing gift to one client yields a $25 deduction, not $150. The cap is per person per year, not per transaction — three $20 gifts to the same client over a year total $60 spent and $25 deductible. Branded items costing $4 or less with your name permanently imprinted, and promotional material for general distribution, fall outside the cap. Gifts to a married couple generally count as one recipient. The record that matters is the recipient's name and business relationship alongside the receipt, because that is the detail auditors ask for and the one most realtors never wrote down. ExpenseBot's Realtor Gift Limit Checker report totals gift spend per recipient and flags anyone over the limit before you file. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.

Yes — driving between showings, to listing appointments, to closings, to the brokerage office when it is not your principal place of business, and to continuing-education classes is deductible business mileage. Commuting from home to a fixed office is not. You choose either the standard mileage rate or actual vehicle expenses, and cannot claim both for the same vehicle in the same year. For 2026 the standard rate is split by trip date: 72.5¢/mile for miles driven Jan 1–Jun 30, 2026 and 76¢/mile from Jul 1, so a full-year claim needs each half totalled separately. The requirement realtors most often miss is contemporaneous records — IRC §274(d) requires the log be made at or near the time of the trip, so a mileage log reconstructed at filing time does not qualify. ExpenseBot imports showings from Google Calendar as trips, fills distance from Google Maps, and applies the rate matching each trip's date. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.

Yes. When income tracking is enabled, supported brokerage settlement, deposit, and e-transfer emails can be recorded in the Income tab beside your expense records. The Business P&L includes all business expenses. If you want a listing-level view, you can optionally use the one Tag column for a client or property, but that replaces the Realtor expense-group tag on those rows.

ExpenseBot imports trips directly from Google Calendar — if your showing has an address, mileage is calculated automatically. No GPS app running in background draining your battery. Plus mileage and expenses are in one place, not separate apps.