Glossary
Rental Property Terms
Plain-language definitions for the accounting and operations concepts that Estavo is built around — from Schedule E to ObligationPolicy to credit vs. debit transactions.
Schedule E
IRS Schedule E (Supplemental Income and Loss) is the tax form used to report rental property income and expenses. It has 15 fixed expense categories — advertising, auto and travel, cleaning and maintenance, commissions, insurance, legal and professional fees, management fees, mortgage interest, other interest, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities, depreciation, and other. Every rental expense must map to one of these lines to be deductible. Estavo enforces these categories at transaction entry so your Schedule E is always ready to export.
Rental Unit
A rental unit is the individual rentable space that generates income — an apartment, a vacation rental cabin, a room in a house-hack. A property can contain one or many units. In Estavo, income transactions attach to units, not to properties. This distinction matters for tax reporting: the IRS requires income and expenses to be tracked per rental activity, and a single building with two apartments is two rental activities. Single-family homes automatically create one unit. A duplex creates two.
Property
A property is the physical building or legal parcel — the address on the deed. In Estavo, a property is a container for one or more rental units. Shared costs that apply to the whole building — a master insurance policy, a mortgage on the entire structure, HOA dues — attach to the property. Income and unit-specific expenses attach to the individual units within it. This hierarchy is how Schedule E is structured: property-level costs are prorated across the units that occupy the building.
ObligationPolicy
An ObligationPolicy is a recurring financial commitment with term dates and a renewal or expiry deadline — a mortgage, an insurance policy, a utility account, an HOA fee, or a home warranty. In Estavo, each active financial obligation is stored as an ObligationPolicy with a type, term start, term end, and renewal date. The system computes urgency (Action, Urgent) from the expiry date — there is no manual alert to set. Urgency is a derived state, not a stored flag. The ObligationPolicy model replaces three separate tables that property management tools traditionally use: InsurancePolicy, UtilityAccount, and Mortgage.
Transaction
A transaction is the unified financial ledger entry in Estavo. Both income and expenses are transactions — they differ by direction: credit (money in) or debit (money out). A booking payment from Airbnb is a credit transaction. A plumbing repair is a debit transaction. Estavo does not have separate Booking and Expense entities — they are the same data structure filtered by direction. Every transaction has a Schedule E category, a unit, a date, an amount, and a status (draft or confirmed). Transactions generated by the ObligationTemplate engine start as drafts; you confirm or adjust them.
Lease Type
Each rental unit in Estavo has a lease type: short-term or long-term. This single field controls which features appear for that unit. Short-term units get booking platform fields (Airbnb, VRBO, direct), check-in and check-out dates, guest name tracking, and a Guest Welcome packet with access instructions. Long-term units get tenant contact fields, lease start and end dates, and invoice generation for monthly rent. A mixed portfolio — some vacation rentals, some year-round tenants — uses both types across different units under the same account.
Mortgage Interest
Mortgage interest is the deductible portion of a mortgage payment — specifically, the interest charged by the lender on the outstanding loan balance. It is reported on IRS Schedule E under the 'Mortgage Interest' line. It is not the same as the total mortgage payment, which also includes principal (equity repayment — not deductible) and escrow (property taxes — deductible on a separate line). Your lender issues a Form 1098 annually showing the exact interest paid. In Estavo, mortgage interest and principal are tracked separately so the right amount flows to Schedule E automatically.
Credit vs. Debit Transaction
In Estavo's transaction ledger, credit means money flowing into the rental operation (income: booking payments, rent received) and debit means money flowing out (expenses: repairs, insurance, utilities). This mirrors accounting convention but is named directionally to be clear: credit = received, debit = paid. The Money view filters by direction to show income-only or expense-only views. For Schedule E, credits become total rental income; debits are sorted by category into the expense lines.
ObligationTemplate
An ObligationTemplate is a recurring bill schedule definition — the rule that generates draft transactions on a predictable cadence. A monthly electric bill, a quarterly HOA payment, or an annual insurance premium are all ObligationTemplates. When the schedule fires, Estavo generates a draft transaction for the expected amount. You confirm (or adjust) it. This model replaces the common pattern of setting a recurring flag on individual transactions — a template is a complete schedule, not a boolean.