Rental Income Settlement for 2025: What to Prepare Before February
February is the month when the rental income settlement has to be filed. Not calculated only then. And landlords who start collecting transfer confirmations and hunting for renovation invoices in mid-January lose several evenings rebuilding data that flowed calmly through their bank account all year. Working with tenanto users, we see it every year: the biggest wave of questions about missing payment confirmations comes in January, when the deadline is already close and some documents have vanished from the mailbox. Let us separate two things. Gathering and organising the data is the property owner’s job. Choosing the form of taxation and deciding how to treat particular amounts is a decision made with an accountant. Below we cover the first part: what to collect, where data is usually missing and when the matter should be handed to a specialist. You will not find specific official deadlines or tax rates here - check those in current announcements and with your accountant.
A full set of documents for the whole year: a checklist
The settlement is based on a set of documents describing each property across all twelve months. Before you sit down to the numbers, check that you have the full set:
- rental agreements together with all annexes,
- handover protocols from the start and the end of every agreement,
- rent payment confirmations for all months,
- utility and administrative fee settlements,
- invoices for renovations, repairs and furnishings,
- correspondence with the tenant about changes in amounts.
Keep deposit documents separately: confirmation that it was paid, the arrangements on returning it and the settlement at the end of the agreement. These are the papers you reach for least often of all. And in a dispute they are the ones that decide.
Organising this is simple if you stick to one rule: a folder per property, months inside it, file names starting with the date. Then your operating system search does the work for you, and an up to date record of tenant payments lets you rebuild the history without digging through your mailbox.
Tip: scanning documents as they arrive takes a few minutes a month. Recreating them in February can eat a whole weekend.
A tenant’s payment is not one amount: what has to be separated
A transfer from a tenant usually combines several different items. Rent, meaning the owner’s income, is one thing. Administrative fees paid to the housing community or cooperative and advance payments for utilities, which you pass on, work in a completely different way - the money goes through your account but ends up with the supplier. How should these amounts be treated? That depends on what the agreement says and needs to be confirmed with your accountant.
A deposit is refundable and stays that way as long as it sits untouched. The situation changes the moment something is deducted: covering damage, unpaid rent or unsettled utilities. That moment needs a date and a written basis.
The annual utility settlement from the housing community often reaches the owner’s account after the end of the period it covers. Describe additional charges and refunds by naming the settlement year, not just the booking date.
And then there are overpayments, underpayments and partial payments. Describe them right after they happen. After twelve months nobody remembers what an amount that matches no invoice was about.
The most common gaps in documentation we see among users
The same problems come back before every settlement. Almost identical every time:
- cash payments with no receipt and transfers titled simply “transfer” or “for the flat”,
- a rent increase agreed by text message, with no annex - there is no trace of when the new rate started to apply,
- renovation invoices issued to someone other than the owner of the property,
- a settlement from the housing community or cooperative viewed only in a portal whose access has expired,
- jointly owned rental property with no written split of income shares.
Each of these gaps takes a quarter of an hour to close during the year. In February it means asking the tenant, the manager or the contractor for documents from months ago. Some of them no longer reply. With increases it helps to stick to the required form and notice periods for rent, because an annex leaves a trace that a text message does not.
Tip: agree a fixed transfer title format with your tenant: “rent MM/YYYY, property address”. A description like that settles most later doubts without extra correspondence.
How to close the year and prepare a ready summary
Closing the year takes a few steps done in a set order:
- Fill in outstanding payments and mark them with the actual dates the money arrived, not the due dates from the agreement.
- Check that every property has a current agreement assigned, with the amounts that apply after any increases.
- Fill in the costs: renovations, furnishings, administrative fees, utility settlements.
- Attach scans to specific payments and agreements instead of leaving them in your mailbox.
- Put together the annual summary of payments and costs in one form your accountant will accept without follow-up questions.
Attachments kept with the items they relate to have one more advantage. Someone asks about a single transfer from a year ago? The document is one click away. Owners of a single flat can keep such documentation within the free plan for one flat, which covers one unit and one user, with no time limit. The full scope of what the app handles in rental record keeping is described separately.
When the data is enough, and when you need an accountant or a lawyer
One property, one agreement for the whole year, payments by bank transfer, no disputes with the tenant - a tidy summary is usually enough as a starting point. But things get complicated faster than many owners expect.
Plan a consultation when the case involves renting through a company, joint ownership of the property, short term letting instead of long term, renting to foreigners or selling the flat during the year. Each of these affects how income and costs are treated.
Disputes are another story entirely. A withheld deposit, mounting arrears or eviction proceedings call for a lawyer, not a spreadsheet. The app will show what came in and when. It will not replace a legal assessment.
The form of taxation and the classification of particular amounts are decisions made with an accountant. Our role ends with delivering complete, well described data.
FAQ
What should I do if I have no payment confirmations from the first months of the year?
The basic source is your bank account history for the whole year - banks provide it as a file covering a chosen period. Match it against the rental agreement and your correspondence with the tenant so you can assign amounts to specific months and items. Cash payments with no receipt are harder, because they leave no trace on the account. Discuss a case like that with your accountant before filing, instead of estimating the amounts yourself.
Summary: a plan for the coming weeks
Three steps are enough to enter February prepared: gather the documents for every month, separate the types of payment into rent, utilities, administrative fees and the deposit, and finally prepare one annual summary with described entries. February should be the collection of finished work, not the moment it starts.
Owners who keep records as they go handle the settlement in under an hour. The rest reconstruct a whole year from statements and memory. The difference does not lie in the number of flats or the complexity of the agreements, only in whether the data was written down when it came into being. We collect more practical guidance in our advice for rental property owners.
