Rental Houses: rental property tracking in Kemback

Rental Houses is a Kemback add-on for people who own a few homes they rent out. Your rental money is already in Kemback with the rest of your accounts. Rental Houses says which home each dollar belongs to, keeps track of rooms, bookings, rent, deposits and mortgages, has your leases signed in Kemback, and has the year’s Schedule E lines ready when tax season comes.

It’s a paid add-on, billed per household: one member subscribes, and everyone in that household gets it, for as many homes as you have. See pricing.

Homes

Add each home you rent out, with its address, purchase date and price, and notes.
A home is a whole house, which you can let whole, by the room, or both. Separate units within a building, such as the two sides of a duplex, aren’t supported yet.
Archive a home you’ve sold, and its history stays in your reports.

Rooms and whole-home terms

Rooms. Give each room you let its name, its beds by type (twin, full, queen or king), a private or shared bathroom, whether it’s furnished, its size and amenities, and its price per day, week or month.
The whole home. Give the home its bedrooms and bathrooms, its own prices per day, week and month, your house rules, and how your tenants pay you.
Each room shows as available, booked or off market, worked out from its bookings, so it’s never out of date.

Bookings and the availability calendar

A booking is the whole home or one room, for one or more tenants, from a start date to an end date or month to month, at a price per day, week or month, with a security deposit and any one-time fees.
No double booking. A room can’t be booked twice for the same days, and a whole-home booking takes every room. Kemback tells you which booking is in the way.
The availability calendar shows the whole home and each room by date, so you can see at a glance what’s free.
A rent schedule for each booking, monthly, weekly or daily, with a partial first or last period prorated to the cent.
Each home’s report shows each room’s occupancy and income for the year.

Assign money to homes

An account’s default home. If an account is used for one home, new transactions imported or synced into it are tagged to that home automatically. You can tag earlier transactions too, after a preview.
Split a bill across homes. One insurance bill for three houses? Split it evenly, by percentage or by exact amounts. Kemback works out the parts to the cent, so they always add up to the whole.
Rules can set the home, the way they set a category.
Every dollar lands on one home or none, so the totals for each home add up to the whole.

Reports for each home, and for all of them

Income, expenses and net for the year, month by month and year to date.
For one home or all of them, with a table comparing your homes side by side.

Schedule E at year end

Rental income and expense categories map to the lines of IRS Schedule E, Part I, and you can map your own categories too.
See each home’s Schedule E lines for the year, download them as a CSV file, or open a printable page for you or your tax preparer.
Depreciation is entered by hand, for each home and year.

Kemback organises your own records by Schedule E line. It isn’t tax, legal or financial advice: check the figures, and ask a tax professional about what you can deduct.

Rent, and late-rent alerts

Each lease says how much rent is due, on which day of the month, and how many days’ grace it allows.
Kemback matches deposits to each month’s rent, and shows every month as paid, partial, late or upcoming.
Choose the Rent late alert, and Kemback tells you when a month’s rent is still unpaid after its grace days, by email or push notification (or by text message or WhatsApp, with Plus). A Lease ending alert reminds you before a lease runs out.

Recording rent and deposits

Kemback does not process payments: your tenants pay you directly, by Zelle, bank transfer, check or cash, as they always have. Kemback keeps the record.

Record each payment of rent, a fee or a deposit, with its date, how it was paid and a reference such as a check number. Kemback never asks for your tenants’ card or bank details.
Match a recorded payment to the deposit in your linked bank account, and that money is tagged to the home.
Each booking’s statement shows every charge as paid, due, partial or late.
A security deposit is held, not earned. Kemback keeps it out of your income, records deductions with their reasons and refunds, and never lets you deduct or refund more than you hold.
Turn on rent reminders for a booking, and Kemback emails the tenant a few days before rent is due, and again if it’s overdue.

Mortgages, split into principal, interest and escrow

Enter a home’s mortgage: lender, rate, term, first payment and escrow. Kemback works out the amortization schedule.
Each matching payment is split into interest, escrow (taxes and insurance) and principal. Principal isn’t an expense, and when you name the loan’s account, its balance comes down.

Tenants and leases

Keep each lease’s start and end dates, rent, due day and grace days, and the security deposit you hold.
Keep each tenant’s name, email, phone number and notes. Only your household’s members can see them; they’re in your data export, and they’re deleted with the household. Our privacy policy explains how we handle them.

Lease templates and e-signing

Templates. Write your lease templates in Markdown, with merge fields for the tenant’s name, the address, the room, the dates, the rent, the deposit and your house rules. Every edit saves a new version.
Two starter templates, for a furnished room and for a whole home, get you going. They’re samples, not legal advice: check your state and local laws.
One lease per booking. Kemback fills in the template and freezes the lease’s text with a fingerprint (SHA-256) of the exact words.
Signed in Kemback. Each tenant, and you, reads the lease, types their full name and agrees to sign electronically (under the ESIGN Act and UETA). Each signature records who signed, when, from which IP address and browser, and the fingerprint of the text they signed.
Edits void signatures. If the lease is changed after someone signs, their signature is voided and everyone signs again.
The signed PDF. When everyone has signed, each signer can download a signed PDF with a certificate page listing every signature.

The free tenant portal

Invite each tenant by email to their tenant portal. Tenants use a normal Kemback account, free: they don’t need Rental Houses or a paid plan.
There they see their own bookings, read, sign and download their leases, see what they owe and when with your payment instructions, and see the payments you’ve recorded, with receipts.
They never see anything else of your household: not your accounts, your transactions, your reports or your other tenants.
If a tenant deletes their Kemback account, you keep the booking, the details you entered and the signed lease.

On the web, iPhone, Mac and Android

Switch Rental Houses on in your household’s Settings → Modules, and a Rental Houses section appears in the app on every device. You buy the add-on on the web. Switching it off hides the section without deleting anything.

If nobody in the household has the add-on any more, everything stays readable and exportable, but read-only, until someone subscribes again.

Rental Houses is billed per household, monthly or yearly, with no limit on homes: see pricing. Our terms apply.