How to use your income & expense spreadsheet

What you’ve got

One workbook, four tabs, one property. It mirrors how a landlord actually thinks — money in, money out, grouped by job — and it fills in your Schedule E for you. Own more than one property? Duplicate the file (or the tabs) per property.

The 60-second setup

1. 1Open it. Double-click in Excel, or upload to Google Sheets (File > Import > Upload). The formulas carry over.
2. 2Set your property. On the Income and Expenses tabs, replace the sample rows with your property’s address.
3. 3Set the year. On the Schedule E tab, type the tax year into the blue cell at the top of a column. That column now reports that year.
4. 4Start logging. Add a row to Income each time money lands, and a row to Expenses each time you spend. That’s the whole job.

How the Schedule E tab fills itself

You never type a total. The Schedule E tab watches two things: the Category you pick on the Income tab (Rent, Late Fee, Pet Rent…) and the Schedule E Category you pick on the Expenses tab (Repairs, Insurance, Utilities…). It adds up each one for whatever year is in the column header, then subtracts expenses from rents to give you your net. Change the year, get a different year.

More years: the workbook starts with 2026–2028. To add 2029, copy the last year column one column to the right and change the year in row 4.

The one habit that makes it work: use the dropdowns

Both log tabs have dropdown menus for their category columns. Always pick from the dropdown — don’t retype a category by hand. The Schedule E tab matches on exact spelling, so “Repairs” counts and “repairs” won’t. Two seconds of clicking saves a tax-season headache.

Jobs: the repair-vs-capital superpower

Some spending is a repair (deduct it all this year) and some is a capital improvement (a new roof, a remodel — deducted over years). The receipt alone can’t tell you which. The job it belonged to can.

1. 1Add each project to the Jobs tab: Date Opened, then a Job # named J001, J002, J003… (Doortrackr’s naming — it makes a later switch to the app painless), plus the unit and a description.
2. 2On the Expenses tab, type that Job # into the Job # column for every related receipt (e.g. J001) — that’s what keeps each project’s receipts grouped.
3. 3At tax time, all the receipts for the kitchen remodel are already grouped — so you and your accountant can see at a glance what’s a repair and what’s a capital improvement.

A few honest notes

• Excel & Google Sheets both work. The category dropdowns and formulas carry over. One note: in Google Sheets the Job # column is plain text (just type your J001, J002…); in Excel it may also offer a dropdown.
• Dates: enter them as YYYY-MM-DD (2026-07-01). The year math reads the date — a date typed as plain text just won’t count toward a year.
• It’s one property. Duplicate the file per property so each Schedule E stays clean.
• It’s a spreadsheet. It won’t remind you at the hardware store, and it won’t catch the Venmo payment you’ll forget by April. When you want it to remember for you — that’s literally why we built Doortrackr.