This rental income and expense tracker is one Excel workbook that keeps the money diary in two logs and answers any month you pick: income, expenses, net cash flow and margin, a Schedule E-style breakdown, the mortgage interest/principal split preserved, per-property year figures, NOI and cap rate from your own entries. One .xlsx download, yours to keep and reuse.
Illustrative example — the workbook itself is a clean spreadsheet.
It is first light at a small goods depot in September, and the month's money is being loaded: rent and fees onto September's wagon, the mortgage crate split at the points into the siding's nine bays. Type into the cards under the scene — the lanterns change colour, the bays stack, the platform signs and the year ledger re-read the depot, exactly the way the Summary reads the same entries in the workbook.
Rental money rarely sits in one tidy place. Rent sits in a bank feed, receipts in a drawer, the mortgage statement in an email, and the running total in a grid re-added at every question. The entries exist — the month's answer doesn't. Ask what a property netted and the adding starts over. The mortgage goes in as one lump, fine until tax time needs the interest/principal split, which must then be rebuilt from statements. A rental income and expense tracker should end that reconstruction, not organise it.
This workbook is two logs and a Summary. Add each property once, then record income and expenses as they happen; every row keys its own month from its date. Pick a month on the Summary and it answers from those same entries: four cards, the change against last month, a six-month strip, the nine-line breakdown, a per-property year table and the investment block.
The scenes and interactive elements here are illustrations, made only to introduce the product and show what it does. The product itself is the Excel workbook described here; the illustrations are not part of the file you receive.
The Income Log takes every receipt — Rent, Late Fee or Other Income — and stamps each row with its month key and a running entry ID, in plain sight. The Expense Log keys its rows in a helper column kept out of view. Every Summary figure matches on those keys, so a month's answer is a picker change, not a rebuild; Recent Income lists the month's first eight entries in entry order, preserved by the IDs.
Interest is deductible; principal is no expense at all — it builds equity. A Mortgage row takes the full payment in Amount, then Interest and Principal in their own columns; the breakdown totals those columns — the Interest column is its Interest line, the Principal column its Principal line, whichever rows the figures were typed on — while the payment's own Amount never becomes a breakdown line. The split is captured at entry, not reconstructed a year later.
The Summary opens on the Settings default month (October 2026) and follows its selector. Four cards answer the month: Rental Income, Expenses (full mortgage payments included), Net Cash Flow and Margin — 0.0% when a month has no income, never blank. Under each, a change line compares with the previous month: arrows and whole percents for income, expenses and net, percentage points for margin, and a plain “—” whenever the previous base is zero, not a divide-by-zero. The figures colour by sign — green positive, red negative. No charts.
The table shows Income, Expenses and Net for the register's first ten properties, in order, plus a Total for those ten. “Year to date” is the selected month's whole calendar year, later months included. The match is exact, nothing trims it, and there is no warning anywhere: a name with a trailing space or a typo is silently left out of that property's row, though it still counts portfolio-wide. Rename a property and its older log rows are orphaned until corrected; two rows sharing one name pool their entries. The defence: pick names from the dropdown, don't retype them.
NOI YTD is the year's income minus its operating expenses — operating meaning everything except the Mortgage category, whose whole payment, interest and principal alike, is excluded, never just the principal. Gross Rent YTD counts only Rent-type income. Cap Rate is that NOI divided by one property value typed on the Summary; it ships blank, so rate and verdict (against the 8% Settings target) stay blank until entered. A typed vacancy figure (shipped at 0) turns NOI into Effective NOI; Cash Flow YTD is the year's income minus all its expenses.
Eight sheets, in the file's grouping. TRACK: Properties (75 rows), the Income Log (3,000 rows) and the Expense Log (3,000 rows, Notes field included). VIEWS & SETUP: the Summary, Settings, Lists and Guide. START HERE fronts it: golden rule (type only in yellow cells), five steps, four headline cards read live from the Summary. On Properties the name is the working part — it feeds both dropdowns and the per-property matching; Units, Purchase Price and Monthly Rent are register facts nothing calculates from. Lists ships the 96 month keys (2023–2030) behind the selector, and the Guide explains every sheet in five sections, including the warning that breakdown and Expenses card are different views.
It ships empty of data: no sample properties, no log rows. Shipped set: Settings defaults ($, tax year 2026, default month 2026-10, target 8%), month keys, vacancy 0. Until you type, cards read $0.00, margin 0.0%, change lines “—”, breakdown zero. Currency symbol and tax year are captions only — nothing converted, no tax calculated. Protection is password-free: yellow cells take typing, formulas stay locked, and sorting, filtering, inserting and deleting rows and columns, and formatting all stay on.
The front door: the golden rule — type only in yellow cells — the five working steps, the sheet map, and four headline cards read live from the Summary. Nothing to type.
One month selector and the whole answer: four cards with change lines, a six-month strip, the nine-line breakdown, the first-ten per-property year table, Recent Income and the investment block.
The register — up to 75 rows. The name feeds both logs' dropdowns and the per-property matching; Units, Purchase Price and Monthly Rent are register facts nothing calculates from.
3,000 rows: date, property, type (Rent, Late Fee or Other Income) and amount — each row stamps its own month key and a running entry ID in plain sight.
3,000 rows across eight categories, Notes field included. A mortgage row takes the full payment in Amount, then Interest and Principal in their own columns; its month key sits in a hidden helper column.
What ships set: the currency symbol $ (a caption only), tax year 2026, default month 2026-10, and the target cap rate of 8% the cap-rate verdict reads against.
The 96 month keys — January 2023 to December 2030 — behind the Summary's month selector.
Every sheet explained in five sections, including why the expense breakdown and the Expenses card are two different views of the same entries.
Working browser calculator. Separate from the downloadable Rental Income & Expense Tracker workbook — it composes one month's money answer the way the Summary does, using the workbook's own arithmetic, and it runs entirely here, so experiments cost nothing.
One month, one answer: the four cards, the change lines against last month, and the nine-line Schedule E-style breakdown — with the Expenses figure and the Breakdown Total side by side, because they are two independent views of the same entries. This snapshot does not calculate NOI, cap rate or per-property figures — the workbook does.
Amounts are 0 or more — check the highlighted field.
Your entries stay in this tab. Nothing is stored or sent. This miniature composes one month from totals you type; the workbook builds the same answer from dated log entries — 3,000 rows in each log — and adds the per-property year table, NOI and cap rate on top.
This workbook is for landlords and small rental-portfolio owners who keep their own books — from one rental to 75 properties on the register — whose recurring job is the money diary: what came in, what went out, what the month netted, each property's year, and the portfolio's NOI and cap rate in real figures. It suits a landlord who wants that diary alone — no accounting software, no wider system.
Not for you if you need tenants, leases, rent due, late-fee calculations or deposits — that side of the diary lives in the Rent Roll & Tenant Tracker — or maintenance, mileage and deal calculators. This is the income-and-expense core only.
The workbook opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc, and its formulas calculate as you type, so you can work in whichever of the three suits you. Nothing in the workbook requires an online account, and the file lives on your own machine.
Checkout is the only purchase step: purchase the Rental Income & Expense Tracker through its Etsy listing. You pay once, and the file is yours to keep and reuse.
The .xlsx arrives instantly at checkout — no shipping, nothing posted. Nothing is shipped and there is no postal wait.
Add each property once on Properties, then log money as it happens in the Income Log and Expense Log; the Summary answers any month you pick.
The workbook is an .xlsx file that opens in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc. It is one payment on Etsy, and the downloaded file is yours to keep and reuse.
No — there is no tenant register or rent roll here; tenants, lease dates, rent due and deposits belong to the separate Rent Roll & Tenant Tracker. Late Fee is only an income type for logging money received; nothing calculates it.
Because they are two views of the same entries. The card counts each mortgage payment once, in full; the breakdown counts the split instead. When a split adds up to its payment they agree; otherwise they legitimately differ, and the workbook never forces them.
No — it is one whole-portfolio figure: NOI year to date ÷ the single property value typed on the Summary. Purchase Prices feed no calculation anywhere.
You pay once on Etsy, and the file is yours to keep and reuse.
Instant download after checkout. One payment, and the file is yours to keep.