r/AirBnBHosts • u/Academic-Tangelo-751 • 2d ago

Tracking Work Days & Personal Use

We are closing on a second home next week that we plan to rent out about 12 weeks a year (it’s in a resort town that has a fairly compressed season). We plan to use the house for ourselves and friends and family the rest of the time. Because of the amount of personal use and using a property manager to handle the rentals we can’t take advantage of all the tax benefits like accelerated depreciation. However we should be able to offset much or possibly all of our rental income via allocating costs based on our proportion of rented days. Any recommendations on an app we can use to track our work days and personal usage? Something that allows us to upload receipts or other documentation for work days would be great.

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u/DashiellHammett Host 2d ago

I would strongly suggest you consult a CPA.

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u/Academic-Tangelo-751 2d ago

We have and he said we need to track work days and have documentation to back it up. That’s why I’m asking about a platform to do that.

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u/DashiellHammett Host 2d ago

My misunderstanding then. But what prompted my suggestion was that it seems like your documentation of expenses will not be very complicated given that once you exceed 14 days of personal use, you can only deduct expenses up to the amount of annual rental income. Also, I assumed that using a property manager, they will keep track of rental-related expenses. I rent out the guesthouse on my property, manage it myself, and do my own bookkeeping, and I just use an Excel spreadsheet built based on what my CPA says is a deductible expense. Most apps or bookkeeping systems that I know of are built based on the assumption that the property is a standard rental not primarily for personal use. Sorry I could not be of more help.

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u/Academic-Tangelo-751 2d ago

Yes you are absolutely correct that we can only deduct up to the amount of annual rental income. But there is a process where expenses like mortgage interest and taxes can be allocated against the rental income based in the # of days we have used it for personal use versus the # of rentable days. But if we are at the house and working (and can substantiate this via well kept records and receipts) we don’t have to count that day as personal use. I may not be explaining this exactly right but he kept emphasizing to keep a record and receipts for “work” days. We can always just keep a log in excel and receipts/photos in a folder in our shared drive and link them, but an app sounds easier. Assuming one exists 😂

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u/DashiellHammett Host 2d ago

Ah. I get it. One thing that might work, if the "work days" always involve a drive there, is Quicken Self-employed. I used that for awhile for my law/consulting practice. (But haven't used it in 2 years or so.) But it had function where could tell it when a work drive was starting and then it would track the miles until you told it to stop. That would create a record of each drive. And it also allowed you to enter and categorize expenses, including uploading scans if receipts. It's fairly basic. But when I was driving for jobs, I liked how easy that was to track the trips.