Rental Accounting Platform Setup with Baselane

Go to baselane.com and click Sign up. Baselane is a financial technology company, not a bank itself, banking services run through a partner bank, so the signup flow includes standard identity verification like any account that touches real money.

1. Enter your email and create your account.
2. Complete identity verification with your personal information.
3. Add your business entity information if you hold properties under an LLC or other entity.

What you should see: A dashboard prompting you to open your first account once verification completes. Troubleshooting: Identity verification can take longer if your name, address, or entity details don't match exactly across the documents you provide. Have a government ID and a recent utility or mortgage statement handy.

This is the core structural decision. Instead of one bank account holding all your rental income and expenses, Baselane lets you open a separate sub-account for each property, so income and expenses sort themselves by building automatically as they happen.

1. From your dashboard, open the option to add a new account.
2. Create one sub-account per property you own.
3. Label each clearly with the property address or a nickname you'll recognize instantly on a bank statement.

What you should see: A list of accounts in your dashboard, one per property, each showing a zero or starting balance. Troubleshooting: If you're mid-lease and rent is currently landing in a personal or old business account, don't try to move everything at once. Get the new accounts open first, then redirect rent collection at the next natural point (a lease renewal or a new tenant).

Set up automatic rent collection tied to each property's sub-account, so rent lands directly where it belongs instead of you manually transferring it later.

1. Open the rent collection setup for a specific property's account.
2. Invite the tenant to pay online, or set up the payment method you already have on file with them.
3. Set the due date and any late fee rules you want applied automatically.

What you should see: A tenant listed against that property's account with a rent amount and due date, and reminders set to go out automatically. Troubleshooting: Tenants who are used to paying by check or app transfer may need a nudge to switch. Give it at least one billing cycle of reminders before assuming a tenant won't adopt online payment.

Baselane's Auto-tag assistant uses AI to categorize every transaction the moment it comes in, tagging it to the right property and tax category. You can also set up Advanced tagging rules for anything recurring that the AI doesn't handle the way you want by default, like a specific vendor you use across all your properties.

1. Confirm Auto-tag assistant is turned on for your accounts.
2. Review the first few weeks of tagged transactions to check the categories match how you actually think about your expenses.
3. Add an Advanced tagging rule for any recurring vendor or expense type that keeps getting miscategorized.

What you should see: Transactions appearing in your feed already labeled with a property and expense category, rather than sitting uncategorized. Troubleshooting: A transaction tagged to the wrong property usually means the sub-account structure needs a small fix, like a shared expense (landscaping across two properties, for instance) that needs to be split manually rather than auto-tagged.

When it's time for taxes, Baselane can generate a tax package with ledgers, receipts, and statements per entity and property, along with a Schedule E-formatted report pulling together the categorized transactions from the whole year.

1. Open the tax preparation or reporting section.
2. Generate the tax package for the year and the entity you need.
3. Review the Schedule E report against your own memory of the year. Does anything look missing or duplicated?

What you should see: A downloadable package with per-property income and expense totals, matched to Schedule E categories. Troubleshooting: If a category total looks wrong, check for a transaction that was tagged to the wrong property in Step 4 rather than assuming the report itself is broken.