FreeAgent Launches New AI Tool for Landlords to Capture Rental Statements

FreeAgent, the innovative accounting technology company, has launched a new feature into its landlord software, enabling landlords and accountants to harness artificial intelligence to input and reconcile data from letting agent rental statements. 

The company has introduced new rental statement capture functionality into its landlord-specific software – FreeAgent for Landlords – which will provide unincorporated landlords and their accountants and bookkeepers with a fast, simple way to capture and reconcile rental statement data into their financial accounts. 

The new feature will also help landlords more easily manage the switch to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax – the government’s strategy to digitise the UK tax system for sole traders and landlords. 

Under the legislation, anyone with qualifying income of at least £50,000 is now required to keep digital records and make quarterly updates to HMRC in addition to their annual tax submission. Those with qualifying income of £30,000 will be brought under the new rules next April, while those earning £20,000 will have to comply from April 2028. In total, around 876,000 UK landlords will be impacted by MTD for Income Tax over the coming years. 

Stewart Hurd, Chief Sales Officer at FreeAgent, said: “Our landlord solution is already one of the best products for complying with the new MTD for Income Tax rules – and this new feature will help us strengthen that position. 

“We didn’t just want to build a simple extraction tool: instead we set out to create the leading method for capturing rental statements in the whole accounting software market. By pairing capture technology with our AI-driven categorisation engine, we’ve ensured that FreeAgent doesn’t just read the ins and outs of a statement – we also categorise the transactions and match rental income and fee data to the correct properties, closing the compliance loop in the simplest way possible.

“The result is a game-changing feature that we believe will be hugely beneficial for landlords and their accountants. It will not only save them valuable time by improving their financial workflow and removing the need for painstaking manual data entry – but also ensure that they have the best possible solution for managing their financial accounts under the new MTD for Income Tax legislation.”