Doorstop
Doorstop support
Last updated 15 September 2026.
Doorstop keeps each rental unit's income and expenses apart all year and puts every cost on a numbered Schedule E line the day you photograph it, so January is a document you hand over rather than a weekend you lose.
Why a receipt landed on that line
When you photograph a receipt, an invoice or a statement, Doorstop reads the vendor, the amount and the date, and proposes the Schedule E line that a cost of that description usually sits on: advertising, auto and travel, cleaning and maintenance, commissions, insurance, legal, management, mortgage interest, repairs, supplies, taxes, utilities and the rest of lines 5 through 19.
It is a proposal, not a determination. You can change the line on any transaction, and the line you choose is the one that is used. Nothing about your return depends on the app agreeing with you.
If no line was determined, the transaction is not quietly dropped. It is counted and reported separately, so you can see there is something still to decide.
The repair or improvement question
A repair comes off this year's income. An improvement is added to your basis and depreciated over 27.5 years. The difference is large, and it turns on whether the work bettered, restored or adapted the property, which is a fact no receipt contains.
So Doorstop asks you instead of deciding. Two independent things can raise the question: the reader's own flag on the document, and a local keyword check. Both are deliberately eager, because asking unnecessarily costs one tap and not asking costs a wrong return.
Until you answer, that amount stays out of your totals. That is not a bug. An unanswered capital question is genuinely undetermined, and folding it into a total would state something nobody has decided yet.
Why my totals say they left things out
Three kinds of transaction are reported separately rather than folded in:
- anything with no Schedule E line determined yet,
- any capital question you have not answered,
- anything you answered as capital.
The screen and the export both name how many, with a count. A tax document that quietly omits eleven receipts is worse than one that names them, because your preparer cannot ask about what they cannot see.
Deposits are not rent
A security deposit is held in its own column, apart from rent. A deposit is not income when you take it, and it is income in the year you keep any part of it. Books that add it to rent on receipt are wrong from the moment the money arrives, and unpicking that later is worse than keeping it apart now.
Leases
Photograph a lease and the term, the rent and the deposit are read off it. Check them against the document: a lease is the record your figures rest on, and a misread term propagates into everything after it.
Units
Every receipt, rent payment, lease and deposit belongs to a specific unit, and Schedule E is filed per property. Books that pool several units into one pile have to be unpicked before anything can be filed, so Doorstop never pools them in the first place.
What Doorstop does not do
- It calculates no tax and no depreciation. Depreciation depends on basis, placed-in-service date and method, and being confidently wrong there is expensive in both directions.
- It is not a preparer and not tax advice, and it files nothing. It produces working papers for whoever does file.
- United States, federal Schedule E. No state schedules.
- No bank connection and no statement import in this version. Nothing reaches your books that you did not photograph or type.
An internet connection is required.
The export
You can export working papers for any year and hand them to whoever files your return. Export before you delete anything. These records are the substantiation behind a filed return, and they are the thing you would be asked for if the return were ever examined.
Subscriptions
Doorstop is sold as a subscription billed per unit through your Apple ID. The current price and billing period are shown on the purchase screen inside the app, which reads them from the App Store for your country rather than repeating a figure from a web page.
Managing or cancelling
A subscription bought through the App Store is managed on your device, not by us: Settings › your name › Subscriptions. Cancelling there stops the renewal and leaves the current period running to its end. We cannot cancel it for you and cannot see your payment details.
Restoring a purchase
If you reinstall the app or move to a new device, use Restore Purchases on the subscription screen. It asks the App Store what the Apple ID already owns. If a restore does not find a subscription you believe you have, check that you are signed in with the same Apple ID that bought it before writing in, because that is the cause almost every time.
Refunds
Apple is the merchant of record, so refunds are requested from Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue one.
Your records, and your tenants'
Scans go to private storage that only your account can read, and each unit's papers are scoped to you. A lease holds your tenant's details, so it is treated as carefully as your own.
You can delete your account from inside the app. Doing so removes the stored scans with it, and it will not delete anything if it cannot remove them, because an account record deleted while the documents behind it survive is the worst of both outcomes. Export first.
Privacy
The full policy is at carrierpress.com/doorstop/privacy, and it names the three services involved: storage and accounts, the document reader that turns a photograph into a vendor, an amount and a date, and the subscription processor.
Contact
One person reads that, so a reply may take a few days.
Doorstop is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.