Income & Expense Tracker: Lite
Log your bookings and drop each expense into one of 14 ready-made categories. The sheet totals the month for you, so you can see whether the property actually made money.
Payout emails and a drawer of receipts don't add up to books
If your "books" are a pile of platform payout emails and a receipts drawer, every January costs you a weekend and probably real money in missed deductions.
This is the simplest tracker that still works: one sheet for booking income, one for expenses with tax-friendly categories, and a dashboard that totals your months automatically. Five minutes a week and you always know whether the property is actually making money.
Written by Eric, who founded a vacation rental company in 2004 and spent close to a decade deep cleaning rentals somebody else had already called clean.
What is inside: all 5 parts
This is the complete contents list, not a highlights reel. Every line below is a part of the file that is already written and already laid out. The calculations are already in the cells. You type numbers, not formulas, in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice.
- Booking income log (dates, nights, platform, payout)
- Expense log with 14 pre-set categories that map to common tax deductions
- Auto-calculating monthly summary: income, expenses, net
- Year-to-date dashboard with occupancy-friendly per-night stats
- Works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice
What it replaces
the work it removes- A blank document and every decision inside it. Somebody has to work out what belongs in each of those 5 parts, write the wording, and lay it out, 5 times over. That is the part already done.
- A generic small-business template with the word "property" pasted over it. It was written against one problem: Payout emails and a drawer of receipts don't add up to books.
- Version chasing. If the file gets revised, the new one is a free re-download, not a second purchase.
- A subscription. It is an XLSX file you keep. Nothing logs in, nothing syncs, and nothing stops working when a card expires.
When this one is not for you
said plainly- If what you want is software that runs itself, this isn't it and never claimed to be. It's an XLSX file you open, edit, and own. No app, nothing to log into.
- Already have a version of this written down, with a team that follows it? Keep it. Swapping a working system for a stranger's is a downgrade.
- The writing is done. Filling in your codes, your local numbers and your house rules is still on you.
- Judge it on this file. It is one of the 9 free ones for exactly that reason. If the writing is not good, do not spend anything on the other 26.
Free, and complete. There is no locked half of this file.
What it does not do is cover the rest of the job. The other 26 toolkits are the paid half of the library. That is $49 USD once, for all of them, nothing renewing. Read this one first: if it is not worth your time, none of the rest will be either. All 9 free files · what's in the pass.
Three more that sit next to this one
Same category first, meaning Money, Pricing & Taxes, then the library's featured picks if the shelf runs short. Free ones download without an account; Pro ones come with the $49 USD All-Access Pass.
EXCEL ProSTR Financial Command Center
One workbook logs bookings, expenses and mileage, sorts 22 categories onto the lines of Schedule E (the US tax form rental income goes on), and totals what you cleared each month.
EXCEL ProPricing & Seasonality Worksheet
Build a nightly rate out of your real costs and five comparable listings nearby, then raise it for busy seasons, weekends and local events. It also sets your own last-minute discount rules, with no subscription tool.
EXCEL ProRental Property Deal Analyzer
Enter the price, the loan and what comparable rentals nearby earn. It returns three revenue scenarios, the real monthly costs, your yearly return on cash, and how full you must stay to break even.