Product spotlight: FreeAgent for Landlords

Craig Clarke
Director of Product

Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax is here, bringing significant changes for small business owners, but also for landlords. Starting with the first wave from April 2026, nearly one million unincorporated landlords and those managing rental income will be brought into the scope of MTD for Income Tax by 2028.

We know that the real challenge of MTD isn’t just about hitting submission deadlines. Overcoming the manual, disjointed bookkeeping that makes managing property finances a headache is going to be just as tall a hurdle.

That’s exactly why we built FreeAgent for Landlords - a product specifically designed to make accounting for rental income as simple as possible.

Built for landlords

We believe software should adapt to the way you work, not the other way around. Other accounting software forces you into awkward workarounds for managing rental income, like using complex tracking categories or reporting that can easily confuse rental with business activity.

So we wanted to support landlords properly. We built a dedicated FreeAgent account type just for unincorporated landlords that was tailored to their needs, unlocking the capability to manage MTD at scale.

FreeAgent for Landlords has a property-specific chart of accounts, recognising that property-related activities are quite different from business activity. This means different income sources can fit into separate reporting frameworks, which makes management reporting more intuitive and doesn’t compromise on how transactions are explained.

Combining a dedicated chart of accounts with bank feeds and AI data extraction creates a consistent, high-speed workflow that doesn’t force you to compromise on your approach.

Solving the joint ownership puzzle

Joint ownership is one of the biggest challenges in landlord accounting, and one of the areas where generic accounting software quickly starts to break down.

Rental income is often shared between spouses, family members or investment partners, with each owner needing their own share of income and costs reflected accurately for tax. In most products, that means practices are forced into manual apportionments, duplicated records, spreadsheets or complex tracking workarounds that are difficult to review and even harder to scale.

FreeAgent for Landlords takes a different approach. Ownership splits are set once at the individual property level, then FreeAgent automatically applies those splits to the relevant rental income and expenses. That means the accounts reflect the way the property is actually owned, without the practice having to recalculate each owner’s share every time transactions are processed.

This is especially powerful for practices managing MTD for Income Tax at scale. A single landlord licence can cover an entire property portfolio, including jointly owned properties, and supports MTD submissions for multiple co-owners from one account. Instead of setting up separate accounts, duplicating bookkeeping or relying on offline calculations, practices can manage the whole portfolio in one place.

By building joint ownership into the product at property level, FreeAgent helps remove one of the most common sources of admin, complexity and risk in landlord bookkeeping.

Busting the bookkeeping bottleneck

We heard from our Practice Partners that processing letting agent rental statements was a frustrating bottleneck, and an area where FreeAgent was lacking compared to competitors. Manually breaking down a single net bank payment into separate sales invoices for rent and individual bills for management fees or repairs is a disjointed and confusing workflow.

To solve this, we are leveraging AI to automatically capture, categorise and reconcile rental statements. This new feature transforms messy PDF statements into neat, digital entries in a matter of seconds. 

We didn’t just want to build an extraction tool, so we set out to build the leading tool for capturing rental statements on the market. We’ve paired new capture technology with our AI-driven categorisation engine so that it doesn’t just read the ins and outs of a statement - it also categorises the transactions and matches rental income and fee data to the correct properties, closing the compliance loop in the simplest way possible. 

All of this capability is included in the price of a landlord licence, enabling every client to benefit from this automated single-step reconciliation process and ensuring accurate and up-to-date accounts. 

Dig into rental reporting

Beyond bookkeeping, you want a clear picture of the property portfolio and to track property performance at a detailed level for faster reviews. 

We’ve updated the Show Transactions report in landlord accounts to give a more granular view of financial data and the oversight landlords need to manage property portfolios with confidence.

Moving on up with MTD

Managing MTD for landlords should be simple. With FreeAgent you’re not led into a maze of workarounds. 

With a product designed specifically to simplify accounting for rental income, the process is streamlined and it becomes significantly easier for practices to manage these clients at scale with minimal manual intervention. By uploading rental statements for automatic capture and categorisation, or by connecting bank feeds and utilising bulk bank feed reconsent, transactions flow in automatically and the bookkeeping stays current. This allows for bulk or automated quarterly filings, minimising the review work needed when it comes to the final declaration. 

With nearly one million unincorporated landlords facing MTD for Income Tax over the next three years, the challenge for practices may be big, but the opportunity is even bigger. FreeAgent for Landlords is designed to help your Practice get MTD done with zero unnecessary admin.

You can find out more about why practices choose FreeAgent for Landlords or request a free trial to see how FreeAgent can help you and your clients.