Landlord Software for a Limited Company UK: Does It Work?

Does landlord software work for a limited company?

Yes. LandlordOS is built to handle both personal and limited company ownership. Every property in your portfolio has a "Held in a limited company" setting, and switching it on changes how that property's finances are treated without changing anything about how you manage the property day to day.

The operational side of landlord software, the part that saves the most time, is identical whether a property sits in your own name or in a company. That includes:

Put simply: LandlordOS treats "who owns this property" as a setting on the property, not as a different product. A landlord with three properties personally and two in a company works in exactly one account, sees one dashboard, and asks Ace one set of questions, but the numbers behind the scenes are kept in the right bucket for each property.

How does tax differ for company-held properties?

Company-held property income is charged to Corporation Tax and reported through Companies House annual accounts. It does not go through Making Tax Digital for Income Tax or personal Self Assessment. LandlordOS automatically excludes company-held properties from your personal MTD and Self Assessment figures, so a company property never inflates your personal tax numbers by mistake.

Two separate tax regimes, one landlord

An individual who owns rental property personally is taxed on the profit through Income Tax and Self Assessment, and since 6 April 2026 that also means quarterly digital updates under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax once qualifying property income passes £50,000 (dropping to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028). None of that applies to a limited company. A company's rental profit is calculated separately and charged to Corporation Tax, reported once a year through the company's own accounts filed at Companies House and its own Corporation Tax return filed with HMRC.

These two regimes do not overlap, and they should not be mixed in one set of figures. That is the single most important thing landlord software needs to get right for a company landlord: keep the two pots of money completely separate.

How LandlordOS keeps the two pots separate

Every transaction in LandlordOS is tied to a property, and every property carries the "Held in a limited company" flag. When your personal MTD figures or personal Self Assessment summary are calculated, LandlordOS applies the company exclusion first, before any other filter such as ownership share, so a company-held property's income and expenses never leak into your personal numbers. The reverse is also true: personal property income never appears in a company-held property's profit and loss.

Practically, this means:

1. You record income and expenses against each property exactly as you normally would, uploading bank statements, receipts and invoices the same way for every property.
2. LandlordOS tags each transaction to its property, and the property's ownership setting determines which side of the tax line it sits on.
3. Your personal MTD quarterly figures and Self Assessment summary include only personally-held properties.
4. Each company-held property has its own clean profit and loss, ready to hand to your accountant for Corporation Tax and Companies House purposes.

What this does not include

LandlordOS does not calculate Corporation Tax itself, does not produce a CT600 return, and does not prepare or file statutory Companies House accounts. Those are jobs for your accountant or company secretarial software, and they involve company-wide considerations, such as other income the company might have, capital allowances and prior-year losses, that sit outside what any single property management tool can see. What LandlordOS gives your accountant is a clean, per-property starting point rather than a shoebox of receipts.

A worked example (illustrative only, not tax advice)

To make the separation concrete, take a landlord with one personal buy-to-let earning £14,000 a year in rent, and one company-held buy-to-let earning £12,000 a year in rent through their limited company. Neither figure touches the other:

1. The £14,000 personal property income is recorded in LandlordOS against that property, flagged as personal, and flows into the landlord's personal Self Assessment summary. If their total personal qualifying property income across all personal properties exceeds £50,000, it also flows into their MTD quarterly updates. Below that threshold, it is Self Assessment only.
2. The £12,000 company property income is recorded against the company-held property, flagged accordingly, and never appears in the personal MTD or Self Assessment summary at all.
3. At year end, the landlord's accountant uses the personal figure for the Self Assessment return, and uses the company property's profit and loss (rent minus allowable expenses, with mortgage interest deducted in full rather than restricted to a 20% credit) as part of the company's Corporation Tax computation and Companies House accounts.

Two separate figures, two separate filings, calculated correctly because the property record, not a manual spreadsheet tab, decided which bucket each transaction belonged in from the moment it was recorded. The actual numbers, allowable expenses, and reliefs that apply to your situation will differ, so treat this only as an illustration of the mechanism, not as a calculation to rely on.

What records should a company landlord keep in LandlordOS?

The same records any landlord needs, kept at property level: rent received, allowable expenses with supporting receipts or invoices, mortgage or loan interest statements, and every compliance certificate. For a company-held property, your accountant will also want a clean split between capital expenditure (which is generally not deductible against rental profit the same way as revenue expenses) and day-to-day running costs.

In practice, that means uploading or logging, per property:

• Rent received: matched to the correct tenancy, so arrears and payment history stay accurate even if the property later changes hands between personal and company ownership.
• Revenue expenses: letting agent fees (if any), insurance, ground rent and service charges, repairs and maintenance, accountancy fees for that property, and mortgage interest (recorded in full for a company-held property, since the 20% restriction only applies to individuals).
• Capital expenditure: costs like an extension or a full rewire that improve the property rather than simply maintaining it. These are treated differently for tax purposes, and your accountant will want them flagged separately rather than lumped in with routine repairs.
• Compliance certificates: gas safety, EICR, EPC, and any licence, stored against the property regardless of who owns it, because these are evidence of the landlord meeting their legal duties, not tax documents.

Because LandlordOS ties every one of these to the property rather than to a generic "company" or "personal" ledger, a landlord who later restructures, moving a property from personal to company ownership, or the reverse, does not lose the historical record; it simply stays attached to whichever ownership applied at the time.

Can I manage personal and company properties in one account?

Yes. Most landlords who incorporate do so gradually, buying new properties through a company while keeping older ones personally held, often because moving an existing property into a company can trigger Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty Land Tax. LandlordOS is built for exactly this mixed situation: one login, one dashboard, properties tagged individually.

What a mixed portfolio looks like in practice

Say you own four properties. Two were bought in your own name a decade ago. Two were bought more recently through a limited company you set up for that purpose. In LandlordOS, all four sit in the same account, on the same properties list, with the same compliance tracker running across all of them. The only difference is a label: two properties show as personally held, two show as company-held.

When you open your finances, the totals reflect that split automatically. Your personal MTD summary and Self Assessment export cover only the two personal properties. Each company-held property has its own profit and loss, and if your company owns several properties, you can view them together as the company's combined position or individually per property.

Why this matters for accuracy

The alternative, running two separate spreadsheets or two separate software accounts, one for personal properties and one for the company, is where mistakes creep in: a company expense accidentally claimed against personal tax, or a personal repair cost double-counted in the company accounts. Keeping everything in one account with ownership tagged at property level removes that risk, because the exclusion happens automatically every time a report is generated rather than depending on you remembering to filter correctly.

Changing a property's ownership setting later

If a property later moves from personal ownership into a company, or a company sells a property to you personally, update the property's ownership setting in LandlordOS from the date the legal transfer completes. Historical transactions stay attached to the ownership structure that applied at the time they occurred, which matters because a change in legal ownership is a significant event with its own tax consequences (potentially Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty Land Tax) that should be planned with an accountant before it happens, not worked out after the fact from the software.

Common mistakes landlords make with a mixed portfolio

Most of the errors that show up in mixed personal-and-company portfolios trace back to the same root cause: two ownership structures being tracked in one mental model instead of two clearly separated ones. The most common patterns:

• Paying a company expense from a personal account, or vice versa. If a landlord pays for a company property's boiler repair out of their personal current account rather than the company's own bank account, the expense still belongs to the company for accounting purposes, but it now needs to be recorded as a director's loan to the company rather than simply logged as a business expense. Keeping separate bank accounts per structure, and logging every transaction against the correct property in LandlordOS from that account, avoids this entirely.
• Assuming the MTD threshold includes company income. A landlord with £45,000 of personal rental income and £60,000 flowing through their company is not automatically over the £50,000 MTD threshold; only the personal £45,000 counts, because MTD for Income Tax is a personal-tax regime. LandlordOS calculates the threshold using personal properties only, so this mistake cannot creep in through the software, but it is a common misunderstanding when working things out manually.
• Treating the company's confirmation statement and accounts as optional in a quiet year. Companies House filings are due annually regardless of whether the company traded, made a profit, or even owned a property for the full year. A newly incorporated SPV that has not yet completed on a purchase still has a confirmation statement deadline.
• Forgetting that a director's own time is not a deductible company expense. Landlords who self-manage a company-held property sometimes look to pay themselves a management fee from the company for their own time. Whether this is permitted, and how it should be structured (salary, dividend, or something else), is an accountant question, not a bookkeeping one.
• Migrating from a spreadsheet without checking every property's ownership tag. When importing historical data, it is easy to bulk-upload transactions and forget that two of the twelve rows belong to the company-held property rather than a personal one. Checking the ownership setting on every property before the first report is generated catches this in seconds.

None of these are software bugs to fix; they are process habits, and the fix in every case is the same: pay company expenses from company money, personal expenses from personal money, and let the property's ownership setting in LandlordOS do the sorting from there.

Do compliance rules change when a company owns the property?

No. Gas safety certificates, EICR electrical checks every five years, a valid EPC, smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, deposit protection within 30 days and licensing where it applies are duties on the landlord, and they apply identically whether the landlord is an individual or a limited company. LandlordOS tracks every one of these the same way for every property, regardless of who owns it.

This is worth stating plainly because it is a common point of confusion: incorporating does not create a lighter compliance regime. If anything, a company structure can add an extra layer, because the company itself has its own duties as a legal entity (filing confirmation statements and accounts with Companies House, keeping statutory registers) on top of, not instead of, the landlord compliance obligations that attach to the property.

In LandlordOS, the compliance tracker runs off the property record, not the ownership record. Every property, personal or company-held, gets the same certificate reminders at 90, 60 and 30 days before expiry, the same document storage for certificates, and the same summary tiles showing what is outstanding across your whole portfolio. Ace, the AI assistant, answers compliance questions the same way for a company-held property as for a personal one, because the underlying legal obligation does not change.

What about Section 24 and mortgage interest?

The Section 24 mortgage interest restriction applies to individual landlords, not to companies. Individuals can only claim a 20% basic-rate tax credit on their mortgage interest and other finance costs rather than deducting them in full. A limited company deducts finance costs as a normal, fully allowable business expense before Corporation Tax is calculated. This is the tax difference most often cited as a reason landlords consider incorporating, and it is a genuine structural difference, not marketing.

LandlordOS records mortgage interest and other finance costs for every property, personal or company-held, and applies the correct treatment when it feeds those figures into your reports: full deduction against company profit for company-held properties, and the finance-cost figures needed for your Self Assessment return (where the 20% credit calculation happens) for personal properties. Whether incorporation is worthwhile for you overall depends on your income level, how much of your profit you actually withdraw versus reinvest, your growth plans and your exit strategy, and that calculation should always be done with an accountant who can see your full financial picture. Nothing on this page, or anywhere in LandlordOS, is personalised tax advice.

What LandlordOS does not do for company landlords

Honesty about the boundary matters. LandlordOS does not file Corporation Tax returns, does not file Companies House annual accounts or confirmation statements, does not act as a registered company secretary, and does not give personalised tax or incorporation advice. It is property management and record-keeping software, not company accounting software.

Specifically, a company landlord using LandlordOS still needs, from elsewhere:

• Corporation Tax return (CT600): filed annually with HMRC, calculating tax on the company's total profit, which may include income beyond the rental properties. Use an accountant or dedicated Corporation Tax software.
• Companies House annual accounts: statutory accounts filed each year, plus a confirmation statement. Use an accountant or company secretarial software.
• Payroll, if the company pays directors a salary: LandlordOS does not run payroll.
• Dividend paperwork, if profit is extracted as dividends: LandlordOS does not produce dividend vouchers or board minutes.
• Broader company tax planning: capital allowances, group structures, other trading income if the company does anything beyond property. These sit outside what a per-property record-keeping tool can see.

What LandlordOS does provide is the input those processes need: a clean, categorised, per-property profit and loss for every company-held property, exportable for your accountant, with the certificates, tenancy records and rent history that back up the figures.

How do accountants fit in?

An accountant handles the filings and the advice that landlord software deliberately does not attempt: Corporation Tax returns, Companies House accounts, incorporation decisions and anything requiring judgement about your specific circumstances. LandlordOS handles the daily record-keeping so the accountant is not starting from a shoebox of receipts.

The typical division of labour

Many company landlords settle into a rhythm: LandlordOS is the system of record throughout the year, and at year-end (or quarterly, for the personal side if MTD applies) the accountant pulls the property-level figures to prepare the statutory filings. This tends to be cheaper than an accountant re-entering transactions from scratch, because the categorisation work is already done.

Can a company landlord use MTD software at all?

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to individuals, not to limited companies, so a company's rental income never goes through it, regardless of how much the company earns. If the same person also owns property personally and their personal qualifying property income exceeds £50,000 (falling to £30,000 from April 2027), that personal income is subject to MTD while the company's income is filed separately through Corporation Tax.

This trips landlords up more than any other point on this page. "MTD software" and "landlord software" are not the same thing, and a landlord with a company might reasonably ask whether they need MTD-specific software at all if none of their income is personal. The answer depends entirely on whether any property income remains in your own name:

1. All properties held in the company, none personally: MTD for Income Tax does not apply to you. Your company still needs Corporation Tax and Companies House filings, just not MTD.
2. Some properties personal, some in the company: MTD applies only to the personal portion, once your personal qualifying property income crosses the threshold. LandlordOS calculates that threshold using personal properties only, because company-held income is excluded first.
3. All properties held personally, none in a company: standard MTD rules apply based on your total personal property income, exactly as for any individual landlord. See our Making Tax Digital software for landlords guide for the full detail on thresholds and dates.

Whichever situation applies, LandlordOS applies the company exclusion before calculating anything else, so the MTD threshold check and quarterly submission preparation only ever look at personally-held property income.

Does the Renters' Rights Act apply to company landlords?

Yes, without exception. The Renters' Rights Act 2025 applies to residential tenancies based on the tenancy itself, not on whether the landlord is an individual or a limited company. Section 21 "no fault" evictions were abolished on 1 May 2026 for all residential landlords, personal or corporate, and every possession claim now needs documented grounds under Section 8.

This means a company landlord needs exactly the same tenancy record-keeping as a personal landlord: rent payment history, correctly served notices, communication logs, and compliance certificates, because all of it can become evidence in a Section 8 possession claim. LandlordOS's tenancy tools, notice generators and record-keeping work identically on a company-held property. If your company lets a property to a limited company tenant rather than an individual (a corporate tenancy, common for relocation lets), different rules can apply since the Renters' Rights Act protections are generally aimed at residential occupiers; check the specific tenancy type with an accountant or solicitor if this applies to you.

What about commercial units held in a company?

LandlordOS also supports commercial units as a property type, and this is common ground for company landlords, since commercial property is more often held in a corporate structure than residential buy-to-let. Compliance requirements adjust automatically to commercial duties rather than residential ones.

For a commercial property, the compliance tracker shifts from residential requirements (gas safety certificates, deposit protection) to the duties that actually apply: a fire risk assessment, an EPC (commercial EPCs have their own minimum standards, separate from residential ones), and electrical safety checks. Financial tracking, document storage and the company/personal ownership split work the same way as for residential property. If your company holds a mix of residential buy-to-lets and commercial units, both sit in the same LandlordOS account with the correct compliance rules applied per property.

Should I incorporate?

This is a decision for an accountant, not for software, and this page will not tell you the answer. What follows is a neutral summary of the factors an accountant will typically weigh, so you know what to bring to that conversation.

None of these factors can be assessed correctly from a spreadsheet or a piece of software; they depend on your full financial picture, including income from outside your property portfolio. Two landlords with an identical two-property portfolio can reach opposite conclusions once their personal income, mortgage terms and plans for the money are factored in, which is exactly why this stays an accountant's call rather than a default answer.

If you decide to incorporate some or all of your portfolio, or you already have a mixed structure, LandlordOS is built to support that decision either way without needing to switch tools or run two separate systems. New purchases can go straight into the company from day one; existing personally-held properties can stay exactly where they are until, and unless, you and your accountant decide a transfer makes sense.

Setting up a company-held property in LandlordOS

Marking a property as company-held takes a minute and does not require re-entering existing data.

1. Add the property (or open an existing one) in LandlordOS.
2. Open the property's details and set "Held in a limited company" to on.
3. Record income and expenses for that property exactly as you would for any other, by uploading bank statements, receipts and invoices, or asking Ace to log them.
4. Check your personal MTD and Self Assessment summaries: the company-held property will not appear in either, because the exclusion is automatic.
5. At year-end, or whenever your accountant needs it, export the property's profit and loss for Corporation Tax and Companies House preparation.

If you are onboarding a whole existing portfolio, including several company-held properties, uploading tenancy agreements and past bank statements lets LandlordOS extract and pre-fill property, tenant and transaction details, so you are not typing everything in by hand. See our full comparison of landlord software for how this stacks up against other tools if you are switching from an existing system.