Everything the app does, in the order you'll probably need it. Nothing here takes long - most of it is one screen and a button.
The Ledger keeps your rental books straight: what came in, what went out, which property it belonged to, and a set of reports your accountant will recognize. It works on your phone, it works with no signal, and you can take everything with you whenever you like.
Seven steps, in order. Each one says where the button is. A printable copy of this walkthrough with screenshots: Getting Started (PDF) · for your tenants: The tenant portal (PDF).
receipts+…@in.thepropertyledger.app. Forward a receipt, a policy, a tax bill, a 1098.
The bell says what it looks like and asks: File it or Read & apply.| Home | This month, how it's going, what needs you. The setup line and the rename note live here. |
|---|---|
| Money | Entries (every dollar), Numbers (the graphs), Loans, Trips. Files you imported sit in a fold at the foot of Entries. |
| Tenants | Collect rent online, the rent card (paid / due / late / on its way), your leases, the tenant portal's messages and reports. |
| Try a change | Raise the rent, a vacancy, a refinance, sell vs hold - on your real books, before you do it. |
| Tax time | Your year, what you can write off (Schedule E), For your CPA. |
| Documents | Every paper, shelved by kind: leases, insurance, tax bills, mortgage papers, the house itself. |
| + Add | Rent I received, a bill I paid, Drop a file, a drive. Drop a file takes anything, one file or many - receipts, statements, 1098s, tax bills, leases, spreadsheets - works out what each one is, and asks before anything is saved. On a computer you can also drag files onto the app: every box that takes a file lights up while you drag, and an open window takes the file on its own box or button. A lease is added under Tenants → + Add a lease. On a phone the + is the gold one in the bar. |
| The bell | Papers that arrived by email, and the few things waiting for you. |
| The avatar | Account, your private email-in address, sharing, theme, sign out. On a phone the bar's More holds Tax time, Try a change and Documents. |
Sign up with an email and a password. We'll send a link to confirm the address - you can carry on without clicking it, but do click it eventually, because it's how you get back in if you forget your password.
On a new account you'll be asked what brings you in. Pick whichever is closest and you'll get a short plan for the first ten minutes. If you'd rather look around before adding your own, choose Look around first - it fills the app with two realistic properties, two years of entries, receipts and tenants, all of which you can poke at and delete in one click.
Add it to your phone's home screen and it behaves like a normal app - including working on a property with no signal.
Start with the address, then say which door the place came through: bought to rent, my home first (you give the first day it was a rental, and only the months from then on go on Schedule E), or in a spreadsheet (the import makes the properties from the addresses it finds).
Then drop your papers on one screen - the closing statement, the latest mortgage statement, a recent property tax bill, the lease, the insurance page, last year's Form 1098 if you have it. Each file is sorted by what it is and read for you; a figure the app is sure of goes straight in. The screen then leads with what tied out across your papers - the loan on the closing statement matching the statement, the tax bill's land split making your yearly write-off, the lease setting the rent card - then asks only what it could not settle: a photo it could not name, a paper for another of your places, a figure that disagrees with one on file, a page that was hard to read. Every paper stays one folded line, with its figures beside the page when you open it. What a paper put in stays if you go on; close the walk instead and it asks whether to keep it or throw it away, and the same paper dropped a second time is caught wherever it was filed. A question never holds you up; skipped, it waits in Drop a file. Anything a paper did not answer is asked on the screens after; anything it did is stepped over, and the step count shrinks to match. The last screen shows your numbers - what you owe, equity at cost, this year's interest so far with its source, and the investor figures once rent and bills repeat.
Everything can still be typed under Edit property, and Property details says what is still missing with a way back into the setup.
A cover photo is purely for your benefit: it makes the right property obvious at a glance when you've got several.
The Money tab is the heart of it. + Add entry, choose money in or money out, pick the property, fill in the date, amount and category.
The categories aren't arbitrary - they line up with the lines on a Schedule E, which is why the reports at the end can be handed straight to an accountant.
Start typing a name you've paid before and the app fills in the type, category and the amount you paid last time. It also tidies the spelling, so "ace plumbing" and "Ace Plumbing LLC" count as the same vendor when it comes to 1099s. Anything you type yourself always wins - the app never overwrites you.
Choose Mortgage / note payment and it fills in your usual payment from the loan details, then splits interest and principal behind the scenes.
Tick This repeats on rent, the mortgage or any regular bill, and the app reminds you each time one is due - under Needs you, with Record it, which opens the entry filled in. Nothing goes into your books until you save it, or a line from your bank statement covers it. Repeating entries are also what the cashflow projection is built from.
Returned a part? Log it as an expense and check This was a refund or return. It comes off that category rather than adding to it, so your repair spending stays honest.
There are two buttons pinned to the bottom right of every screen: + Expense and ⊕ Trip. They're there because those are the two things people do most, and both used to mean finding the right tab first. Tapping + Expense asks for the receipt first - Camera, Photos or Files - and the scan fills in the amount, date and vendor from the photo. No receipt (a mortgage payment, HOA dues)? Tap “No receipt - I’ll type it in” and you're in the form with today's date and your property already set.
You can go one step further and skip the app entirely. If you've added The Ledger to your home screen, add a second icon that jumps straight to logging a trip: open
thepropertyledger.app/?add=trip in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home
Screen, and name it “Log a trip”. Tapping that icon goes from locked phone to
mileage form with nothing in between. The same works with ?add=expense, and with
?add=receipt, which opens the camera ready to shoot a receipt. On Android you
don't need extra icons - press and hold the app icon and the same three shortcuts appear.
These get their own categories, and they work differently from everything else in the app: we record them, we don't rule on them. Meals and entertainment are kept out of every deduction figure the app calculates, and handed to your accountant as a separate schedule for them to classify.
That's deliberate. Most of what the tax-return view does is mechanical - splitting a mortgage payment into interest and principal, spreading a purchase price over 27.5 years. Whether a particular lunch counts as an ordinary and necessary expense of your rental is not mechanical. It depends on facts we don't have, Schedule E has no line for meals, and the percentage Congress allows has changed more than once. We'd rather hand your CPA a complete record than a confident guess.
So pick either category and three extra boxes appear: where, who was there, and the business purpose. To support a meal deduction the IRS asks for five things - the amount, the date, the place, the business purpose, and the business relationship of everyone present. Your receipt proves the first two. The other three exist only in your memory, and a card statement can't reconstruct them in April. That's the usual reason a meal deduction gets disallowed: not that the meal was fake, but that nobody wrote down why it happened.
You can always save without them - you're often standing outside a restaurant when you log it. Anything incomplete shows up under Meals missing details in Reports until you fill it in.
In the tax-return view you'll see a For your CPA to determine box below the totals showing what you spent, plus what the customary 50% limit would come to as a reference point. Because none of it is counted, your estimated income is stated a little high rather than a little low - the safer direction to be wrong in. The CPA package carries the full schedule: every meal, all five details, gaps flagged.
The search box takes anything - a vendor, a word from the description, or just the amount.
Typing 84.17 finds the entry for $84.17. You can also filter by category, date
range, or whether a receipt is attached.
Inside any expense, tap Snap it. Sorted. and choose Camera, Photos or Files. Photograph the receipt, or attach a PDF invoice.
The app reads it for you. A moment after it attaches, the vendor, amount, date and description fill themselves in, and it picks a category. Check it before you save - it's good, not infallible, and it leaves anything it can't read blank rather than guessing.
Photos are shrunk automatically, usually from about 3 MB down to under 50 KB, while staying readable. Tap the thumbnail to check before saving. If you'd rather keep more detail, the Stored size buttons let you.
PDFs are kept exactly as they arrived so the text stays selectable and searchable. iPhone photos in HEIC format work fine - the app converts them on your device.
Export a CSV from your bank's website and hand it to Add from your bank on the Money tab. The app reads most bank formats as they come, works out which column is which, and suggests a category for each row. You approve what becomes an entry.
The file never leaves your device. It's read in your browser. And we never ask for your bank login - not now, not ever without you explicitly choosing it.
The more useful mode if you've already been entering things by hand. Switch to Check against bank and it compares the statement against your books and sorts every line into four piles: already there, missing, worth a look, and - the one people forget - in your books but not in the statement. That last pile catches cash payments and typos.
Nothing doubles up. Anything that already matches is skipped.
Add a lease on the Tenants tab with the tenant, rent, deposit and dates. Attach the signed lease first - as a PDF or a photo - and the form fills itself: rent, deposit, dates, pet rent and other monthly charges, the late fee and grace day, a prorated first or last month. What you typed already stands; check what it read before you save - the lease opens beside the form for that.
Pets. A pet deposit is refundable, so it is held with the security deposit - one deposit, with the pet part named on the lease's row. A pet fee is yours to keep, so it is not a deposit: saving the lease charges it to the tenant once (their portal shows it, with a Pay button), and it books as Other income when paid. A lease that started more than 45 days ago is taken to have settled its fee at move-in; if it is still owed, use Charge a tenant. A renewal charges no fee again.
Once there's a lease, a rent card appears showing this month per property - paid, partly paid, due, or running late - with the last six months as colored squares so you can see a pattern at a glance.
Log it opens an entry with the outstanding amount already filled in. Remind writes a polite message and hands it to your email or texts. The app never sends anything on your behalf - you see it and press send.
When a tenancy ends, use Refund or Forfeit on the deposit. Forfeiting creates the taxable income entry for you, which is easy to forget.
Your tenant pays from the portal by bank transfer, and the money goes to your bank - The Ledger never holds it. When it lands, the entry books itself, marked bank-confirmed.
Setting up: Tenants → Collect rent online → Start collecting rent. Stripe asks who you are and which bank to pay you (choose Automatic payouts). If it sends you back with things still open, that's normal - it checks in the background, and the card says Ready when it's done. Then a table: a row per place, in two groups - by bank transfer (ACH): on or off, and who pays Stripe's fee on each transfer (0.8%, at most $5); by debit or credit card: on or off, and who pays the card fee (2.9% + 30¢). Under each choice the card shows the fee in dollars on that place's rent. The fees are Stripe's; The Ledger adds nothing.
What the tenant sees: the deposit the moment the lease exists; the first month from 60 days before it starts, prorated if the lease says so; then each month from the 1st, with late fees after your grace day and any late fee still owed carried forward. The late fee can be flat or tiered - an amount on the first late day, then so much per day, up to a cap - set on the lease (the reader picks it up from the PDF). On time means the day the tenant taps Pay, as a check is dated the day it is handed over; a transfer started inside the grace period carries no fee even if it clears after. If your lease counts the day funds are received instead, the app is the more lenient of the two and the fee is yours to add by hand. A statement every month, a reminder three days before the 1st, a past-due note the day after the grace day. Their bank is saved after the first payment, so the next is one tap.
What you see: the rent row says On its way while the transfer clears (up to four business days), then Paid; the entry is dated the day they paid. You get an email and a push when it lands, and if it bounces or is disputed - the entry comes back out and you're told. Waive a late fee for a month from the rent row. Turn Accept online payments off on a lease during an eviction; the portal shows no Pay button.
A one-off charge: something broken that's on the tenant, a lost key, a repair the lease puts on them. Charge a tenant on the Leases card (or Charge on the rent row): what for, how much, a due date and a note. It emails the tenant, sits on their portal with its own Pay button and on the statement until paid, and books as Tenant reimbursement (a pet fee from the lease, as Other income) - or Mark paid when they pay you another way.
Forward anything to your private address (avatar → Account): a receipt, a lease, an insurance page, a tax bill, a 1098, a closing statement, an HOA notice. The app takes one look, says what it is and which place it names, and asks: File it (under Documents, nothing else changes) or Read & apply (filed, then read - the figures are offered for you to confirm). Receipts keep their own File it. Nothing is filed until you say so.
Two ways, depending on whether you remember before or after.
Before: tap Start Drive on the Mileage tab and drive. It follows your route by GPS and fills in the start, the end and the miles when you stop. Keep the tab open - and be aware iPhones pause GPS when the screen locks, so it's most reliable with the screen on.
After: + Log manually, type the addresses, and press Calculate distance. That's real driving distance, not a straight line. Or just type the miles off your odometer - the field is always editable.
The IRS rate for the date of the trip is applied automatically, and each trip keeps the rate that applied when it happened.
Fill in the loan details on a property and the Loans tab tracks it from your actual logged payments - not a theoretical schedule. You get your current balance, how much principal you've knocked down, interest paid to date, and an estimated payoff date.
Payoff scenarios show what an extra $100, $250 or $500 a month would actually do. It's usually more than people expect.
Got a seller-financed or interest-only note? Type the monthly payment in yourself rather than leaving it blank, and the app will use yours instead of calculating one.
Choose a period at the top - all time, this year, a specific year or month - and everything below follows it.
One button produces the lot as a single printable document: income, deductible expenses, the depreciation schedule, your mileage log, 1099 candidates, documentation gaps and personal-use days. Choose Save as PDF as the printer and email it to your accountant. It's built from the same numbers you're looking at, so it can't disagree with the screen.
You can share a single property - a business partner, a spouse, your accountant - without giving away the rest of your portfolio.
Generate a code, decide whether they can edit or view only, and send it to them. They sign up for their own account, enter the code, and see that one property. Codes work once and expire, and you can switch off unused ones at any time.
Take access away whenever you like. Their copy stops working immediately, including the receipt images.
If someone else should own a property outright - a partner taking over, or you stepping back - use Hand over… next to their name. You'll confirm with your password, and they get an offer explaining what they'd be taking on.
Nothing changes until they accept. Either of you can call it off, and the offer lapses after two weeks. Once accepted, they manage access and can delete the property; you stay on as an editor so you keep your own history.
Take it whenever you want. Tax time → For your CPA has a Download backup button that gives you everything in one file, and separate CSV exports for entries, mileage, properties and vendors. None of that is behind a paywall and none of it ever will be.
Delete it whenever you want. Account settings has a delete button that removes your account and everything in it. Take a backup first - it's gone for good.
If you own a property you've shared with someone, deletion will stop and tell you, so their records don't disappear because of your decision. Hand those properties over or stop sharing them first.
More on how this all works in why you can trust us.
Does it work without signal?
Yes. Everything you've already loaded keeps working - adding entries, all the reports, exports, even photographing receipts. It saves up your changes and sends them when you're back. Signing in, reading receipts with AI, and anything to do with sharing need a connection.
What if two of us edit at once?
Both sets of changes are kept. The app merges entry by entry rather than letting one person overwrite the other, and it'll tell you when that's happened. If you're both looking at the same property, you'll see each other's entries appear.
Do you connect to my bank?
No. We never ask for your bank login. Importing means exporting a file from your bank yourself and handing it to the app, and that file is read on your own device.
Can I undo something?
Not from inside the app - deleting an entry deletes it. But every change is recorded in a history that nobody can edit or erase, including us, so you can always find out what happened and when.
Is this tax advice?
No. The Ledger organizes your numbers and lays them out the way a tax return expects, which saves your accountant time and saves you money. It doesn't replace them, and the depreciation and Schedule E figures are estimates for discussion, not filings.
Something's not working.
The app tells you when it can't save, rather than failing quietly. If a banner appears, read it - it usually says exactly what's wrong. Your work is kept on your device either way, and it retries by itself.