Between repairs, supplies, insurance, and random surprises — tracking expenses for rental properties can be a whole job. I’m curious how everyone is staying organized throughout the year (especially with tax season always lurking). • Are you logging everything manually? • Saving receipts in a folder or using apps to snap and store them? • Do you tag expenses by property, or sort it all out later? • If you’re using software, what kind of system are you using — and has it made things easier? Then let’s swap ideas — what’s actually worked for you? What turned into a mess?Tools like our partner Baselane’s built-in bookkeeping can automate a lot of the heavy lifting (especially with their AI & rule-based transaction tagging launching soon), but we know every investor has their own system.Drop your methods (or horror stories) below — and if you’re curious about how other landlords are handling this, feel free to ask!

For my clients and I, we use BOX's free subscription to store everything. With the app, we can scan a receipt at lunch and throw it away after that which makes it very convenient!

For rehabbing, I think the most tedious and time-consuming part of expense tracking is itemizing receipts from places like Home Depot or Lowe's. If you're aiming for really detailed budget-vs-actual tracking for individual repair categories, breaking down receipts can be extremely tedious. For example, if you buy toilets, doors, vanities, trim, and paint all on one Home Depot receipt, those five items technically need to be categorized separately (plumbing, doors, bathrooms, woodwork, interior painting). Receipts often have 20-plus items, which can take 5 to 10 minutes to enter and break down. With 10 receipts a week, that's a few hours of tedious data entry. We've been successfully using AI to scan receipts and automatically itemize line items, then categorize costs correctly. Here's our workflow: • 1. Take a photo of the receipt from your phone and upload it to the app. This creates a backup and lets us get rid of the paper receipt. • 2. The app automatically uploads the receipt image to a project-specific receipts folder, which we can then convert to a transaction. • 3. Later that week, I can go to my project's receipts folders and "convert them to a transaction." • 4. The AI scans the receipt and enters all transaction details, including itemizing and categorizing all expenses. That workflow makes it easy to get the receipt uploaded initially, and then converted to a transaction when I'm back at my desk and ready to work on expense stuff.

Hey @David Robertson, is this the forthcoming feature/option that will be coming soon in your app? If it is, I can’t wait to have this available.

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Rene HosmanPoster

Rental Property Investor
Denver, CO

General Real Estate Investing

What’s your current system for organizing receipts and tracking property expenses?

Rene HosmanPoster

Rental Property Investor
Denver, CO

ModeratorPosted June 04, 2025 07:58

Between repairs, supplies, insurance, and random surprises — tracking expenses for rental properties can be a whole job. I’m curious how everyone is staying organized throughout the year (especially with tax season always lurking).

Are you logging everything manually?
Saving receipts in a folder or using apps to snap and store them?
Do you tag expenses by property, or sort it all out later?
If you’re using software, what kind of system are you using — and has it made things easier?

Then let’s swap ideas — what’s actually worked for you? What turned into a mess?Tools like our partner Baselane’s built-in bookkeeping can automate a lot of the heavy lifting (especially with their AI & rule-based transaction tagging launching soon), but we know every investor has their own system.Drop your methods (or horror stories) below — and if you’re curious about how other landlords are handling this, feel free to ask!

Rene Hosman

Spreadsheet

Save in a folder (digital or paper)

PM or accounting software

My CPA handles all of it

I use Baselane

Still figuring it out

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