A receipt scanner for landlords: rental expenses per property, from the receipt up

Short answer: ReceiptIQ photographs a receipt and extracts every line item with its price, lets you file each item under a category you name after the property, and exports a PDF or CSV for one property and one date range when your rental schedule is due. It runs on your iPhone with no account and no cloud, and one subscription covers up to four devices, so a co-owner or spouse can scan too.

Why rental expenses are harder than ordinary bookkeeping

• One receipt, several properties. A hardware-store run covers a faucet for the duplex and paint for the condo. Apps that capture only merchant, date and total force you to split that receipt by hand, or lose the split entirely.
• Repairs vs. improvements. A repair is usually an expense in the year you pay it; a replacement or upgrade is often capital and treated differently. The distinction is made line by line, not per receipt, so you need the line items.
• Small, frequent, forgettable. Rental expenses are dozens of $15 to $80 receipts a year: locks, filters, cleaning supplies, mileage-related parking, a smoke detector. Thermal paper fades within months, and by tax time the pile is unreadable.
• Proof, not just totals. If a claim is questioned, the reviewer wants the receipt image tied to the amount, not a spreadsheet row.

How ReceiptIQ fits a landlord's workflow

• Every line item, categorized. Photograph the receipt; store, date, each product and each price are extracted. Prices are matched to items by their position on the receipt and checked against the printed total, so a misread line is corrected rather than silently saved.
• A category per property. Categories are yours to define. Create "12 Main St" and "Unit 4B", then file the faucet under one and the paint under the other, from the same receipt. Category budgets and monthly charts then show what each property is costing you.
• Export one property at a time. Data Export lets you pick a date range and a single category. Choose the property and the tax year, and you get a CSV for your accountant or an audit-ready PDF: a summary, a receipt index, and every receipt image on its own page.
• Recurring costs without retyping. Insurance, strata or HOA fees, and other monthly or yearly bills can be set to recur, so they land in the right property's category on schedule.
• Two people, one set of books. Family sharing syncs receipts directly between iPhones on the same network, with no server in between. A co-owner scans a receipt at the store and it shows up on your phone.
• Nothing leaves the phone unless you export it. No account to create. On iPhone 16 or newer the AI can run entirely on-device.

A setup that works

• One category per property, plus "Personal" for everything else. Keep the property names short; they become the PDF header.
• Scan at the register. The receipt is captured before it fades, and the category gets picked while you still remember what the purchase was for.
• Write the "why" in the note for anything that could be read as an improvement: "replace failed water heater, tenant reported no hot water". That note is what turns a receipt into evidence.
• Export once a year per property, PDF for your records and CSV for whoever prepares the return. Mileage and rent received are tracked elsewhere; this is the expense side.

What ReceiptIQ is not

It is not property-management software. It does not collect rent, screen tenants, or file your return. It is the piece most of those tools do badly: turning a shoebox of receipts into line items, per property, with the image attached. Whether your rental schedule is Schedule E, T776, SA105 or something else, the input it needs is the same.