A landlord's year is mostly in the bank account: rent arriving each month, the letting agent's fees, the mortgage, repairs, insurance. When the tax return or the accountant asks for the year's figures, they are in a pile of statement PDFs.
This guide turns those PDFs into the year's rental income and expenses.
Keep the property in one account if you can
It is far easier to total a year when the rent goes into one account and the property's costs leave from it. If yours are mixed with personal spending, the steps below still work: you mark the personal rows and leave them out.
1. Get the year's statements
The tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April. Download every statement with any days in it, as PDFs, from your online banking.
2. Convert them, with full dates
Upload each statement to BankPDFtoXLS. Page one converts free, with no email and no card, so you can check the columns first. From your list of statements, download the Xero / QuickBooks file: one row per transaction, the date in full and one signed amount, money in positive.
| Date | Description | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 01/05/2024 | FPI A TENANT RENT FLAT 2 | 950.00 |
| 03/05/2024 | FPO LETTING AGENT FEES MAY | -114.00 |
| 05/05/2024 | DD LANDLORD INSURANCE | -28.40 |
| 18/05/2024 | FPO PLUMBER INVOICE 2231 | -165.00 |
The rows above are an example, not a real statement.
Paste every file into one sheet in Excel, under one header row, and keep the rows from 6 April to 5 April with Data > Filter, then Date Filters > Between on the Date column.
3. Mark each row
Add a Category column and give each row one word. Rent, Agent, Repairs, Insurance, Mortgage, Personal, for example. With more than one property, add a Property column too, so each can be totalled on its own.
Mortgage payments need care: only the interest counts towards the tax calculation, and in a different way from other costs, so keep them in their own category and take the interest figure from your lender's annual statement.
4. Total it
Select the data, then Insert > PivotTable, and drag Category (and Property) to Rows and Amount to Values. Rent is your rental income for the year. The expense categories come out negative because they left the account; use them without the minus sign.
Which expenses are allowable, and how finance costs are treated, is on GOV.UK's pages for landlords, or for your accountant.
Making Tax Digital
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax asks landlords and sole traders over its income threshold to keep digital records and send HMRC an update every quarter, from software that works with it. GOV.UK says when it applies to you.
The same file you download here imports into accounting software. Xero and QuickBooks both read it as it is: import it into Xero or into QuickBooks. That covers months you only have as PDFs, from before the bank feed or for an account the feed does not reach.
Check the year adds up
- Each statement's Excel download has a Ledger column that checks every
balance against the row before it. Filter it for
breakand compare those rows with the PDF. - The year's amounts added together should equal the account's balance on 5 April less its balance on 6 April.
Keep the PDFs from your bank as well as the spreadsheet: the PDF is the record.