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 Property 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 recognise. It works on your phone, it works with no signal, and you can take everything with you whenever you like.
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 have a look around first, choose Explore a demo property — it fills the app with a realistic example 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.
Add a property with just a name and address if that's all you have. Everything else is optional and can wait.
When you're ready, open Purchase & loan details and fill in what you know. The purchase price and land value let the app work out depreciation. The loan amount, rate and term let it track your balance and split every mortgage payment into interest and principal for you. The market value gives you a cap rate.
A cover photo is purely for your benefit: it makes the right property obvious at a glance when you've got several.
The Transactions 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 and the mortgage, and they post themselves. If you don't open the app for three months, the missing months appear the next time you do. They're also what the cashflow projection is built from.
Returned a part? Log it as an expense and tick 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 opens a new entry already set to Expense with today's date and your current property filled in, cursor in the amount box.
You can go one step further and skip the app entirely. If you've added The
Property 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 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 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 Import from bank on the Transactions 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 Leases tab with the tenant, rent, deposit and dates. Attach the signed lease as a PDF or a photo if you have one.
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 coloured 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.
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. Reports has a Download full backup button that gives you everything in one file, and separate CSV exports for transactions, 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 Property Ledger organises 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.