Track rent, expenses, and taxes for your rental units — in one file you own
Owning one to four units puts you in an awkward middle. A blank spreadsheet is free, but you build every formula from scratch and still dread tax time. Property-management software is powerful, but it’s built — and priced — for portfolios of hundreds of doors. The Small-Landlord (1-4 Unit) Income & Expense Workbook is the tool that actually fits: a structured, already-computed system you own outright, that tracks the whole rental and hands you tax-ready numbers, with no monthly fee and no lock-in.
It works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. Prefer Sheets? The bundle includes a one-click “Make a copy” link to a ready-made native Google Sheet — no clunky import.
See who’s paid, who’s late, and who still owes
The Rent Ledger is the heart of it. Log each payment and it looks up the rent owed from your Setup tab, works out the balance and how many days late the payment was, and flags every row Paid, Late, Partial, or Unpaid in plain color. One glance down the column tells you who’s current — and rolled up on the Dashboard, it becomes your collection rate, the quiet early-warning number that catches a paying problem before it becomes an eviction.
Every cost on the right Schedule-E line
The Expense Log puts each operating cost — mortgage interest, insurance, utilities, property tax, management fees, HOA dues, routine upkeep — on the Schedule-E category it belongs on, split by unit. It handles the detail people miss: only the interest on your mortgage is deductible, not the principal. At year end the Dashboard rolls it all into a Schedule-E summary that reads across to the form.
Repairs vs. improvements — the distinction that changes your taxes
A repair keeps the property working and is deducted in full this year. An improvement betters or extends it and is capitalized and recovered slowly through depreciation. Getting that line wrong is one of the most common small-landlord mistakes. The Maintenance & CapEx log has you tag each job, then estimates the annual depreciation on your improvements and folds repairs and depreciation onto the right tax lines automatically.
Never miss a renewal — and protect every deposit
The Leases & Deposits tab records each lease once and counts down to the end date, flagging the ones expiring soon so a renewal never sneaks up on you. It also keeps a clean record of every security deposit and where it’s held — the number most likely to become a dispute at move-out, and the one a clear record protects you on.
What each property really earns
Rent collected isn’t profit, and profit isn’t the return on what you put in. The Dashboard separates all three: cash flow (what actually lands in your pocket after the mortgage), the cap rate (the yield, to compare properties), and the cash-on-cash return (what your invested cash earns). It even shows cash flow and taxable income side by side — because a property can put money in your pocket and still show a paper loss at tax time.
Own it, don’t rent it
Your rental history, your leases, your numbers, and your tax records should be yours, forever, in a file you can open anywhere — not a subscription that raises its price every year and holds your records hostage. That’s the whole idea behind an Ardent Workshop workbook: the structure and the math of a real system, in a spreadsheet you keep. If you ever scale past a handful of units, you’ll know exactly which numbers to hand to whatever comes next.
Try it first: the free Rental Cash-Flow Calculator nets one unit in under a minute — a taste of the full workbook.
A business and record-keeping reference, not licensed tax, accounting, or legal advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative; landlord-tenant and tax rules differ by state and year and change. Confirm how they apply to you with a tax professional, an attorney, or your tax authority.
