Track what you putinto your home.Starting today.
A roof, a remodel, a new heating system — work that qualifies may raise your home’s adjusted basis and reduce the gain that’s taxable when you sell. HomeBasisLedger keeps every project and its paperwork in one place.
- Log every improvement — free
- Keep each receipt with its work
- Reminders so nothing gets missed
- One-click export for your tax pro
Free to start, no card required. Pro from $1.95/month; rentals $9.95/month, with Pro included.
HomeBasisLedger provides recordkeeping tools, not tax advice.
What your ledger holds
- Roof replacement 2019$18,400
- Kitchen remodel 2021$31,200
- HVAC system 2023$9,800
- + 2 more improvements$30,600
Every project, with its date and cost, in one running total — the record your adjusted basis is worked out from. Free on every account.
What it does
Log every improvement
FreeDescription, cost, date, and category — a roof, a remodel, a new furnace. Each one recorded while you still remember what it cost.
Save the receipt
ProAttach a photo or the invoice to the improvement it belongs to — kept in private storage, reachable only through short-lived links. The proof is ready the day your tax professional asks for it.
Plan your tax strategy
ProHome Coach follow-ups keep your record complete year after year, and a one-click export hands your tax professional a clean summary — so when you sell, the strategy is already in place, not a last-minute scramble.
Easy as 1.2.3
- 1
Sign up & add home info
Create your account, then add your home's purchase price and date — that's your starting basis.
- 2
Log improvements
The five minutes after the contractor leaves beats fifteen years of memory.
- 3
Send it to your tax professional
No printing — just an easy electronic transfer. The record is already built by the time it matters.
The paper trail is the whole game
A roof in 2014. The kitchen in 2019. The HVAC last spring. Work that qualifies may add to your basis, and a higher basis can mean a smaller taxable gain. Good records help you support the costs included in your adjusted basis — an improvement you can’t document is an adjustment you can’t support.
The work is not hard. It is just spread over two decades — and a shoebox, a drawer, or a dead email account quietly loses the very proof you’ll need most, right when it matters.
So keep it somewhere it can’t go missing. Every receipt and record in one place, safely stored and backed up — and at your fingertips from any phone or laptop, wherever you are the day it finally counts.
25.9%
of US homes have gained at least $250,000 since they were last bought — the exclusion a single filer gets.
8%
have gained more than $500,000 — the exclusion a married couple gets.
Redfin arrived at those figures by comparing what a home is worth today against what it last sold for. Which means they count no improvements at all — as their own note puts it, the analysis “does not account for how home improvement costs and other offsets can potentially reduce a homeowner’s capital gains tax burden.”
That caveat is the entire point. Improvements are what pull you back under the line — and homeowners need reliable records to support the costs they claim.
Source: Redfin, “Eliminating Tax on Home Sellers’ Capital Gains Would Have Mixed Results for the Housing Market,” August 2025. Figures describe price appreciation, not tax owed.
How does Basis work?
First, what “basis” means. Your basis is what your home has cost you — the price you paid, plus some of your closing costs, plus qualifying improvements, less anything that reduces it. Your adjusted basis is one of the figures used to calculate gainwhen you sell. Generally, a higher adjusted basis can mean a smaller gain — but exclusions, selling expenses and other rules may also affect the result. The full version is a five-minute read.
Try it with your own numbers. A rough estimate, not tax advice — but it shows the shape of the difference records make.
Keeping your records could save about $13,500
on this sale — the same house and the same money spent, the only difference being whether the improvements could be shown.
Receipts lost
- Adjusted basis
- $400,000
- Gain on sale
- $380,000
- Taxable gain
- $130,000
- Estimated tax at 15%
- $19,500
Receipts keptwith HomeBasisLedger
- Adjusted basis
- $490,000
- Gain on sale
- $290,000
- Taxable gain
- $40,000
- Estimated tax at 15%
- $6,000
A simplified estimate: it uses the capital-gains exclusion ($250,000 single, $500,000 married) and one flat rate, and ignores closing costs, depreciation, state tax, and the finer bracket rules. If your gain falls entirely within the exclusion, tracking improvements may not change the federal tax on that sale — but you cannot know which side of that line you will end up on until you sell, and years later, recovering invoices can be difficult or impossible. How basis works.
Not sure what counts?
The line between a capital improvement and a repair decides whether work may add to your basis, and it has real gray areas. We wrote these because the confident answers elsewhere usually skip the part where it depends.
Own a rental? Here is what you get
The same ledger, plus the side a landlord needs: what came in, what went out and which line it belongs on, and one file a year to hand your tax professional.
Expenses, on the form’s own lines
- 5 Advertising$240
- 7 Cleaning and maintenance$535
- 9 Insurance$1,840
- 10 Legal and other professional fees$310
- 11 Management fees$2,112
- every other line, including the empty ones
Rent in, deposits kept apart
Improvements, by recovery period
- Roof replacement 27.5 yr$14,800
- Driveway resurfaced 15 yr$3,900
- Replacement refrigerator 5 yr$760
Recorded, never calculated. Which class an item belongs to is your tax professional’s call — this keeps the answer where they can use it.
Figures are an example, not a real property. See a full sample year →
Simple pricing
Nothing to lose — start free with one home and test-drive the system. Upgrade when you’re ready for more tools: receipts, properties, reminders, & export options. Own a rental? Investor covers the landlord side and includes Pro.
Free
Start your home’s record
$0
- One property
- Unlimited improvements
- Running totals and category breakdown
Pro
Everything, ready for closing day
- Unlimited properties
- Unlimited improvements
- Running totals and category breakdown
- Upload receipt images
- Home Coach follow-ups
- Easy export to forward to your tax professional
Start free, upgrade anytime.
Investor
For rental and investment property
- Everything in Pro, included
- Rent received and deposits held
- Expenses on their Schedule E lines
- A file for any year with activity
- Improvements sorted by depreciation class
No separate Pro subscription needed. See a sample year.
What you’re trusting us with
You’re about to put your home’s financial history somewhere. Here is exactly what that means, and what we will and won’t do with it.
Records, not advice
We keep and organize your documents. What qualifies as an improvement, and what you may owe, is a judgment for you and your tax professional — we say so on every report and every article.
Your receipts stay private
Receipt images live in private storage — never a public URL, and every link expires within the hour. Only you can see them. If a professional sponsors your Pro account, they can see the improvements you log; nobody else can, and we never sell or share your records.
You can take it all with you
Download the full record as a spreadsheet, or everything at once — the spreadsheet plus every receipt image — in a single file. No request, no waiting, no lock-in.
A real company behind it
HomeBasisLedger is built and run by Home Express Group LLC. Questions reach a person through the support button on every page — not a ticket queue that never answers.
The full detail is in our privacy policy — including every service provider we use and how to have your data deleted — and our terms.
What homeowners say
I love home basis. I am recently updating my house and storing my improvements with receipts is easy😁
its an easy way to track improvements and receipts for your home. The ability to take pictures of receipts from your phone make it convienent.
The HomeBasisLedger website is an easy to use tool for homeowners - especially if they are renovating/improving their home. The app is easy to enter your original home purchase and upload your settlement statement. This tool is extremely valuable to track your renovations/improvements as well as upload all your receipts/invoices along the way. As a CPA, when someone sells their home we ask our clients to send us the records of acquisition & improvements made which most never have this information available. The HomeBasisLedger eliminates the guess work & delays as the homeowner can simply send their cost basis report and receipts with a click of a button. The reports sent are exactly what any CPA needs to properly report the home cost basis to the IRS and lower or eliminate any tax liability. I would highly recommend this app.
Start your home’s record
The best time to log an improvement is the day it happens. The second best is now, while you can still find the invoice.