Tenarize now posts your rent and costs straight into FreeAgent

Tenarize can now send rent, late-payment interest, maintenance costs and any deposit you keep at the end of a tenancy into your own FreeAgent books, once a night, with every entry attached to the property it came from. You connect FreeAgent from your profile page, say which of your own categories each kind of money belongs in, match your properties to the ones in FreeAgent, and then leave it alone. It costs nothing on top of your subscription.

This is the first direct accounting integration Tenarize has had. What follows is what it sends, what it deliberately does not send, and how it sits with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax.

Why FreeAgent, and only FreeAgent

There is exactly one integration and it is FreeAgent. There is nothing for Xero or QuickBooks yet, and the CSV exports remain the answer for those.

The reason it went first is per-property accounting. What a landlord actually wants from a set of books is not a single rental figure — it is the profit and loss on each property, so you can see which one is carrying the portfolio and which one has quietly eaten a year of rent in repairs. FreeAgent has a properties resource built into it, and on a landlord account every invoice and bill has to be attached to one. The split this feature exists to produce is a first-class idea there, rather than something reconstructed afterwards out of tags and notes.

It is also, for a lot of small landlords, already sitting there unused. FreeAgent comes free with a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank business current account, and with a Mettle account used at least once a month. That is their offer rather than ours, so check it against your own bank.

What gets sent

Each night, always attributed to the right property:

• Rent you have collected, as an invoice.
• Late-payment interest, separately from the rent. It is taxable, but it is not rent, and your accountant will want to see the difference rather than have it folded in.
• Maintenance costs, as a bill, with the supplier's invoice attached where you have uploaded one. The document travels with the entry, so the evidence is in the books rather than in a folder you have to go and find.
• Any deposit you keep at the end of a tenancy, if you have chosen a category for it.

That last one is the only part of a deposit that ever moves.

What it deliberately does not send

This is the more important list, because every item on it is a way the numbers could otherwise be wrong.

It never marks anything as paid. Rent is a direct charge on your own Stripe account, so the payout lands in your bank and your FreeAgent bank feed already shows it arriving. If Tenarize asserted the payment from this end as well, every pound of rent would be counted twice. Invoices arrive as receivables for you to reconcile, exactly as they would from any other source.

It never sends the deposit. A deposit is your tenant's money sitting in a protection scheme. It is a liability, not turnover, and pushing it across as income would overstate your rental income by several weeks of rent per tenancy. Only the portion you actually retain at the end is a taxable receipt, and even that posts to its own category rather than to rent — it is compensation for damage or arrears, and only your accountant can say which code it belongs under. Choose no category for it and retentions are not sent at all.

It never sends a payment still in flight. Bacs can fail days after it looks like it has succeeded, so nothing is posted until it has actually settled.

It never edits or deletes anything already posted. If a payment is later refunded or reversed by the bank, Tenarize sends a credit note rather than quietly rewriting the original invoice. The correction stays visible in your books instead of the history disappearing, which is what you want if anyone ever asks you to explain a figure. FreeAgent takes the same view, incidentally — it will not let a sent invoice be deleted either.

None of this is bookkeeping. Tenarize posts entries into your books; you or your accountant still reconcile them. Anything describing this as balancing your books for you is describing something it does not do.

How this relates to Making Tax Digital

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started on 6 April 2026 for qualifying income over £50,000. That threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and to £20,000 in April 2028.

The part worth being careful about is what counts. Qualifying income is gross rent, before expenses. So four properties at £1,100 a month is £52,800 — already inside the mandate, on a portfolio small enough to sit in the £15-a-month Starter tier. This is not a large-portfolio problem arriving later. For a lot of people reading this, it started in April.

What the rules require is that figures are not re-keyed by hand between the record and the return. They do not require that the figures travelled over an API. That is why Tenarize has offered rent and expense CSVs with UK tax year presets since well before this — a downloaded CSV imported into accounting software is a valid digital link, and it always was.

What the FreeAgent connection adds is that nobody has to remember to do it. A CSV export is something you do four times a year and forget once. A nightly push is something that has already happened.

The one setting worth thinking about

When you set up the mapping, Tenarize asks whether you are on the cash basis or the accrual basis. It is a two-second choice with a real consequence, so it is worth understanding rather than guessing at.

On the cash basis, income is recognised when the money is received. On the accrual basis, when it fell due. Bacs takes several days to settle, so a rent payment started on 2 April and settling on 9 April falls in different tax years depending on which basis you are on. Tenarize dates each entry accordingly, which means that around 5 April this setting is doing real work.

If you do not know which basis you are on, your accountant does, and it is the one question in the setup screen worth asking them before you answer it.

What you need before you connect

You need a FreeAgent unincorporated landlord account. Not a sole trader account, and not a limited company one.

FreeAgent fixes the account type when the account is created and it cannot be changed afterwards — their own setup wizard says so under the field. A sole trader account cannot hold property income at all, so if you already have one, the answer is a second FreeAgent account rather than a setting to go and change.

That is less awkward than it sounds. If you are self-employed as well as a landlord you were always going to need both, because the two income streams are reported separately under Making Tax Digital anyway. FreeAgent's own guidance says the same thing. Connect the landlord one.

Connect an account of the wrong type and Tenarize refuses it and names the type it found, rather than half-working. It also checks up front that your FreeAgent user has enough access to create both invoices and bills — a landlord whose permissions covered income but not expenses would otherwise get their rent syncing and their costs silently not, which understates costs and overstates taxable profit.

Setting it up

1. Open Your profile in Tenarize and find the accounting card.
2. Connect FreeAgent and approve the access request.
3. Choose which of your own FreeAgent categories rent, late-payment interest and maintenance costs post to, and optionally one for a retained deposit.
4. Match each of your properties to the corresponding property in FreeAgent.
5. Pick your accounting basis.

The card is deliberately blunt about being half-finished until all of that is done. It starts syncing only once the categories are chosen and at least one property is matched, and until then it says so rather than showing a reassuring tick.

Where to check this yourself

• Find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax — GOV.UK, for the thresholds, the dates and what counts as qualifying income
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK, on whose money a deposit actually is
• Can Tenarize send rent and costs straight to my accounts? — the help centre version of this post
• Making Tax Digital for Income Tax — including the CSV route, if you are not on FreeAgent

Not official sources, and worth reading as the third-party pages they are: FreeAgent on free accounts with a NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle business account, and on running a landlord account alongside a sole trader one.

Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, with the first month free. The FreeAgent connection is included at every tier, and the help centre is free to read either way.