Field Ledger vs REPStracker vs Track Your STR: The Hours-Only Tracker Choice

The 30-second verdict

You want hours + evidence on a native mobile app you already know and a bookkeeper handling expenses separately → REPStracker. Cross-platform (iOS, Android, macOS, visionOS, web), $29/mo, spouse + team hour capture, 14-day free trial.
You want the cheapest hours-only web option with team seats included → Track Your STR. Web-only, $29/mo (up to 10 team members), 14-day trial. Simple, focused.
You want one daily entry capturing hours, mileage, trips, expenses, guest stays, AND personal-use days → Field Ledger. Wider tool. Whole-day capture in plain English with a review-before-save discipline; per-property Schedule E CSV export.
You are pursuing Real Estate Professional Status (§469(c)(7)), not the ≤7-day STR exception → REPStracker markets to both audiences. Field Ledger and Track Your STR do not model REPS aggregation under §1.469-9(g). Talk to your CPA about which strategy applies to you.
Whatever tool you pick, none of them file your taxes and none of them make tax determinations for you. All three produce records your CPA works from. See our material-participation reference for the doctrine.

Not tax advice; general framework only. Pricing and feature descriptions reflect publicly listed information from each vendor's site and app-store listings as of August 2026. See our comparison of Field Ledger vs track750 and Field Ledger vs STR Tax Loophole Tracker for the other two named specialists in this category.

Same category, three implementations of it

REPStracker, Track Your STR, and Field Ledger all sit in the same practical bucket: software for the taxpayer who is trying to capture defensible participation records for a §469 strategy. But the three products implement that bucket differently, and they position for slightly different audiences.

REPStracker is a hours-tracking specialist that ships on iOS, Android, macOS, visionOS, and web. Its public copy pitches "two apps in one," time tracking for short-term and long-term rental real-estate investors, meaning it markets to both taxpayers pursuing Real Estate Professional Status under §469(c)(7) and taxpayers pursuing the ≤7-day STR exception. It ships evidence upload per time entry, spouse-hour and team-hour capture, a timer function, and data download; its published marketing does not describe mileage, expense, guest-stay, personal-use, or Schedule E capabilities. Trust surface includes named CPA partners (Amanda Han + Matt McFarland of Keystone CPA, Chris Picciurro, Natasha Verela) via its partners page.

Track Your STR is a hours-tracking specialist web app; there is no native iOS or Android build. Its hero headline reads "Digital Innovation + Short-Term Rentals" and its sub-headline positions the product as "The Ultimate Solution for Real Estate Professional Status," an internal positioning mismatch worth knowing, since the product name says STR but the copy targets REPS. The free tier is a 14-day trial with one team member; the paid tier is $29/mo with up to 10 team members. Its published feature scope is hours plus receipt or evidence upload plus contractor/cleaner time entry; mileage, expenses, stays, personal-use, and Schedule E export are not described on the marketing site.

Field Ledger is a wider tool in the same category. Alongside structured single-record forms and prefixed-line entries (Trip:, Expense:), Field Ledger's opt-in AI-assisted capture takes free-form prose like "Cleaned Brooklyn 2.5h. Drove from Brooklyn to Greenfield Park for a check-in. Home Depot $45 for paint." and drafts up to four record types you review before they save: an activity (2.5 hours cleaning, counted toward §469 material participation), a trip (Brooklyn to Greenfield Park with a stated business purpose), a mileage row (per §274(d) substantiation), and an expense (Home Depot, $45, supplies). Field Ledger also captures guest stays for the §1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii) average-customer-use test, personal-use days for §280A(d), and depreciable assets with suggested MACRS class-life. Per-property Schedule E CSV export at year-end. Responsive web, no native app.

The evaluation question is not "which is better," it is "which fits the specific tax strategy you are running." The rest of this article walks the shape of that decision.

§469 has three tests, not one

The STR tax loophole under §469 is a compound test, not a single hours check. Any tool that only tracks one of the three axes is a partial record.

Material participation (§1.469-5T). Hours you work in the activity, satisfying one of the tests in Reg. §1.469-5T(a) (the 100-hour prong of test (a)(3) plus the "not less than any other individual" prong, or the 500-hour test of (a)(1), or another test that fits the facts). This is what all three hours-only trackers focus on.
The average-customer-use test (§1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii)(A)). The STR exception applies only if the average period of customer use is 7 days or less (or fits another exception in that regulation). Tracked from guest-stay records; Field Ledger surfaces this as a three-tier narrative pill (under 7 / over 7 but under 30 / STR exception per-se rule not met). REPStracker's and Track Your STR's public marketing do not describe average-stay computation.
The §280A(d) personal-use threshold. Personal use above the greater of 14 days or 10% of days rented at fair rental reclassifies the property as a residence and limits deductions to gross rental income (§280A(c)(5)). This is a separate Code section applying alongside §469. Field Ledger tracks personal-use days per property with a four-state narrative pill (no-data / within / approaching / over). REPStracker's and Track Your STR's public marketing do not describe §280A tracking.

An hours-only tracker gives you a clean record on axis 1. Axes 2 and 3 still need to be tracked somewhere else, usually in a spreadsheet or a separate bookkeeping tool. That is a legitimate design choice; it is also a real gap to know about before you commit.

Side-by-side comparison

Pricing and feature descriptions reflect publicly listed information from each vendor's site and app-store listings as of August 2026 and may have changed. Where the table says a feature is "not described in public marketing" for a competitor, that reflects what is visible on their public site as of this writing; if the vendor has since added the capability, we would love to update. Email hello@getfieldledger.com.

Dimension	REPStracker	Track Your STR	Field Ledger
Positioning	"Two apps in one" (REPS + STR)	Name says STR, hero copy targets REPS	STR tax loophole, unambiguously
Regulation focus	§469(c)(7) REPS + §469 STR exception	§469(c)(7) REPS per hero copy	§469 STR exception, §1.469-1T, §280A(d), §274(d)
Platform	iOS, Android, macOS, visionOS, web	Web only (mobile-optimized browser)	Responsive web only
Price (monthly)	$29/mo (web) · $32/mo (iOS in-app)	$29/mo (10 team seats) · Custom tier available for larger portfolios	$19 Owner · $39 Operator · $79 Portfolio
Free trial	14 days	14 days, no credit card	714 days, no credit card
Material-participation hour tracking	Yes (core product)	Yes (core product)	Yes, per-property with "Reached / Below" 100h and 500h markers
Team / spouse hour capture	Yes (spouse + team in one account)	Yes (1 seat free trial, 10 seats paid)	Yes on Operator/Portfolio plans
Mileage tracking (§274(d))	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes, with stated-purpose substantiation warnings
Expense categorization	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes, per-property, mapped to Schedule E lines
Guest-stay tracking (§1.469-1T)	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes, with three-tier average-stay narrative pill
§280A(d) personal-use tracking	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes, four-state narrative pill per property
Depreciable-asset register	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes, per-property with suggested MACRS class-life
Schedule E CSV export	"Download your data" (format not specified)	Not described in public marketing	Per-property CSV with line-by-line subtotals mapped to Schedule E categories
Receipt / document attachment	Yes (evidence upload per time entry)	Yes (receipts and photos)	Yes on any expense, activity, or trip; 30-day recovery on deleted files
AI receipt reading	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes (opt-in); drafts an expense you review before saving
Natural-language capture	Not described in public marketing	Not described in public marketing	Yes (opt-in); prose parses into structured drafts you review
Named legal entity	REPStracker LLC (Solana Beach, CA per Terms)	"TrackYourSTR™" only; no legal entity disclosed on the site	Kapakos LLC (Brooklyn, NY; full address in every footer)
Terms + Privacy pages	Yes, published	No published Terms or Privacy Policy (footer links to #)	Yes, published at fieldledger.app/terms and /privacy

Where REPStracker wins

Native mobile across four operating systems, plus web

iOS, Android, macOS, and visionOS native apps in addition to the web app. If native mobile is a hard requirement, no other tool in this category ships as broadly. The iOS app has been on the App Store for several years and iterates on a normal review cycle.

Dual REPS + STR positioning with a real REPS story

REPStracker markets to both real-estate professionals pursuing REPS under §469(c)(7) and STR hosts pursuing the ≤7-day exception. If you are running the REPS strategy (or you and your spouse are, and one qualifies), REPStracker is one of a small number of tools built with that path in mind. Field Ledger and Track Your STR do not model REPS aggregation under §1.469-9(g).

Established CPA partnership channel

Named partner CPAs in the STR-tax space, including Amanda Han + Matt McFarland (Keystone CPA), Chris Picciurro (Teaching Tax Flow), and Natasha Verela. If your CPA already recommends REPStracker or you want a tool with visible practitioner endorsement, the partner surface is real.

Narrower scope, simpler product

One job: logging hours (yours, your spouse's, your team's) with evidence attached. Less to learn, less to maintain, less that can go wrong. If a bookkeeper or a general tool is already handling your expenses and mileage, REPStracker's narrower scope is a benefit, not a limitation.

Where Track Your STR wins

Team seats included in the base paid tier

The $29/mo Paid tier includes up to 10 team members with no per-seat surcharge. If you have contractors, cleaners, or a co-host who need to log their own hours (relevant to the "more than anyone else" prong of Reg. §1.469-5T(a)(3)), Track Your STR's default seat allocation is generous compared to competitors that gate multi-user access behind higher plans.

Simple, focused, low-decision-cost

Hours logging plus receipt / photo upload. No feature sprawl, no configuration surface, no capture-format learning curve. If simplicity is a virtue for your team, the tool respects it.

Same $29/mo entry point as REPStracker with a longer trial than Field Ledger's default

Price parity with REPStracker at the base tier, both with 14-day free trials. If your comparison is strictly on trial length and dollar price for hours-only work, the two hours-only specialists are equivalent on that dimension.

Where Field Ledger wins

One daily entry captures four record types (AI-assisted, opt-in)

With Field Ledger's opt-in AI-assisted capture toggled on, the 60-second sentence "Cleaned Brooklyn 2.5h. Drove from Brooklyn to Greenfield Park for a check-in. Home Depot $45 for paint." drafts an activity (2.5 hours cleaning), a trip (Brooklyn to Greenfield Park with a stated business purpose), a mileage row, and an expense (Home Depot, $45, supplies), all filed under the active property. You review and confirm each draft before it saves. Prefer to type structured lines yourself (Trip:, Expense:) or use single-record forms? Those paths are first-class too. See our 4-log system reference for the doctrinal framing.

The three-axis §469 record: material-participation hours, average-stay days, and personal-use days

The STR loophole is a compound test. Field Ledger surfaces all three axes per property: hours against 100h and 500h thresholds ("Reached" / "Below"), the average-customer-use test from §1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii) as a three-tier pill (under 7 / over 7 but under 30 / STR exception per-se rule not met), and §280A(d) personal use as a four-state pill (no-data / within / approaching / over). REPStracker and Track Your STR cover axis 1 only in their public marketing.

Substantiation-aware mileage math (§274(d))

Field Ledger's headline "at standard mileage rate" figure only counts miles you gave a stated business purpose to. Miles logged without a purpose surface on a visible warning rather than being included in the deduction total. §274(d) requires contemporaneous records of amount, time, place, and business purpose for auto-and-travel deductions. Neither hours-only competitor tracks mileage at all in their public marketing.

Taxpayer-safe defaults: recorded, but not auto-counted

Travel-only hours are captured but never auto-counted toward the §469 MP total. Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(1) counts hours when work is done "in connection with" the activity; case law and IRS audit practice give little weight to travel-only time absent contemporaneous evidence of substantive work at the destination. Investor-capacity work on the activity's own financials (Reg. §1.469-5T(f)(2)(ii)) and general-education work (researching STR markets, reading investing articles or newsletters, listening to real-estate podcasts) are captured too but held out of the qualifying total. You confirm the underlying activity; the tool then counts the time. Material-participation badges read "Reached" and "Below" rather than "PASS" or "FAIL"; a threshold is a marker, not a legal determination.

Schedule E export a CPA can work directly from

Per-property operating-line subtotals mapped to Schedule E categories, plus capital items listed separately with a suggested MACRS class life (5, 7, 15, 27.5, or in some transient-lodging fact patterns 39 years), plus items ≤$2,500 flagged as potentially de-minimis under §1.263(a)-1(f). Your CPA reviews and elects. Not tax advice; the summary is data your preparer works from, not a filed form.

Human review is the whole safety story

Field Ledger's capture flow accepts free-form prose, structures it via a language model into typed drafts, and requires you to confirm each before it saves. Every parsed record is a draft until you confirm; the human review step is the whole safety story. AI features are opt-in; if you would rather type entries by hand or use structured single-record forms, both paths are first-class.

What all three fall short on

Honesty check on the shared category. None of REPStracker, Track Your STR, or Field Ledger is a complete replacement for a CPA, a bookkeeper, or a booking platform. Specifically:

None files your taxes for you. All three produce records or exports; TurboTax, H&R Block, TaxSlayer, or a CPA does the filing.
None makes the tax determination that you materially participated, that the STR exception applies, or that your property is not a §280A(d) residence. All three surface records; your CPA decides.
None integrates directly with the Airbnb, VRBO, or Booking.com APIs. Booking revenue and payouts still need to be entered manually or imported via platform CSV exports.
None does automatic bank-feed reconciliation (Plaid or equivalent). If you want that, Baselane, Stessa, or QuickBooks is a different category of tool. See our Field Ledger vs Stessa comparison for that category conversation.
None does cost-segregation studies, entity-structure planning, or REPS-election filing. Those are engagements with your CPA and (for entity structure) an attorney.

Decision framework by host profile

Hands-on host with 1-2 STRs pursuing the §469 loophole; bookkeeping already handled elsewhere → any of the three

If your CPA or bookkeeper is already handling expenses, mileage, and Schedule E prep, an hours-only tracker is enough. REPStracker if you want native mobile; Track Your STR if you want the cheapest web option with team seats; Field Ledger if you want the record to survive future scope-creep (adding a property, adding a co-host, wanting the CPA handoff simpler at year-end).

Host with 3+ STRs, or hosts who want one file for the CPA in April → Field Ledger

Per-property MP cards, per-property Schedule E CSVs, per-property depreciation registers, per-property §280A tracking. See our multi-property record-keeping guide for the framework at 2, 5, and 10 properties. Hours-only tools leave you stitching three or four exports together at year-end.

Taxpayer pursuing Real Estate Professional Status (§469(c)(7)) → REPStracker

REPStracker is the only one of the three that markets to REPS-pursuing taxpayers. Whether the app itself specifically models the §1.469-9(g) aggregation-election workflow is not spelled out in its public marketing. Note that REPS status under §469(c)(7) removes rental activities from the per-se passive rule but does not itself establish material participation, so hour tracking is still doing that work (per activity, or per §1.469-9(g) aggregation if elected). Field Ledger is deliberately STR-loophole-focused and does not model REPS. Track Your STR's hero copy targets REPS, but its published feature scope is the same hours-only surface as REPStracker at a lower platform surface. Talk to your CPA about which election path fits your fact pattern.

Host who wants native iOS or Android and refuses to use a web app on mobile → REPStracker

REPStracker is the only tool of the three with native iOS + Android + macOS + visionOS apps. Field Ledger and Track Your STR are both responsive web (mobile-optimized in the browser). If native mobile is a hard requirement, this decides it.

Host with a large team of contractors + cleaners logging hours → Track Your STR or Field Ledger Operator/Portfolio

Track Your STR includes 10 team seats in the $29/mo Paid tier with no per-seat surcharge. Field Ledger includes team access on Operator ($39/mo, up to 5 properties) and Portfolio ($79/mo, unlimited properties). REPStracker supports spouse and team hours in one account without a seat model surfaced publicly.

Try the whole-day §469 record

Capture hours, mileage, trip purpose, expenses, guest stays, and personal-use days per property. Structured single-record forms and prefixed-line entries by default; opt into AI-assisted capture if you'd rather write in plain English and review the drafts it produces. Your CPA gets one file per property in April, not four exports to stitch together.

Per-property material-participation progress against the 100h and 500h thresholds
Per-property §1.469-1T average-customer-use pill
Per-property §280A(d) personal-use status pill
§274(d)-substantiation-aware mileage totals
Per-property Schedule E CSV export with MACRS class-life suggestions
Owner $19/mo · Operator $39/mo · Portfolio $79/mo

Start free trial

714-day free trial, no credit card required. Renews monthly or annually at the plan price you select until canceled. Cancel anytime in Manage Billing. Plus applicable US sales tax.

Frequently asked questions

Are REPStracker, Track Your STR, and Field Ledger competing for the same host?

Overlapping but not identical (based on each vendor's public marketing as of August 2026). REPStracker markets to both real estate professionals pursuing REPS under §469(c)(7) and to STR hosts pursuing the ≤7-day STR exception; it is a two-in-one framing. Track Your STR's name says STR but its hero copy explicitly targets Real Estate Professional Status, which is an internal positioning mismatch worth knowing. Field Ledger is unambiguously an STR-loophole record-keeping tool built for the ≤7-day exception plus §280A(d) personal-use limits, and it does not model REPS. The strategy you are running determines the fit.

What is the difference between REPS aggregation (§1.469-9(g)) and the STR grouping election (§1.469-4)?

Different regulations for different taxpayers. §1.469-9(g) is a Real Estate Professional Status election that treats all of the taxpayer's rental real estate as a single activity for the material-participation test; only qualifying real estate professionals under §469(c)(7) can file it. STRs that meet the §1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii)(A) ≤7-day average-customer-use test are not §469 rental activities in the first place (they are trades or businesses), so they are generally outside the scope of (g); the (g) election matters for long-term rentals and for STRs whose average stay exceeds 7 days. §1.469-4 is the general §469 grouping election available to any taxpayer for activities that constitute an appropriate economic unit; STR hosts commonly file it to combine multiple STR trades or businesses for the material-participation test, though each property in the grouping must still independently satisfy the STR exception. The two elections are commonly conflated in vendor marketing; they are not the same.

Do any of these three trackers cover mileage, expenses, or Schedule E export?

REPStracker's and Track Your STR's public marketing describe hour tracking and receipt or evidence upload; they do not describe mileage tracking, expense categorization, guest-stay averaging, §280A personal-use tracking, or a Schedule E export flow. This is not the same as verified absence, since the apps themselves are behind a login. Field Ledger's public product ships mileage entries (with §274(d) substantiation warnings), transactions (per-property expense categorization), guest stays (for the §1.469-1T(e)(3)(ii) average-customer-use test), personal-use days (§280A), and a per-property Schedule E CSV export.

Can I use one of these trackers alongside a separate bookkeeping tool?

Yes, and many hosts do. REPStracker and Track Your STR pair naturally with a general bookkeeping tool (Stessa, Baselane, QuickBooks) that handles the expense and mileage side. The trade-off is stitching three or four exports together for your CPA at year-end. Field Ledger is designed to be the single record so the CPA gets one file per property in April, but if you prefer separation of concerns, an hours-only tracker plus a bookkeeping tool is a defensible pattern.

Which of these trackers works best on my phone?

REPStracker ships native iOS, Android, macOS, and visionOS apps in addition to a web app. Track Your STR is a web app only, though mobile-optimized in the browser. Field Ledger is a responsive web app (no App Store or Play Store review cycle to iterate through). If native mobile is a hard requirement for you, REPStracker is the only one of the three that offers it.

What is Field Ledger's biggest weakness vs the two hours-only trackers?

More surface to learn. REPStracker and Track Your STR do one job (hour logging) and do it directly; Field Ledger asks you to capture mileage, expenses, stays, and personal-use days too. If you have a bookkeeper handling the expense and mileage side already and only need hour tracking, an hours-only tool is a cleaner fit. Field Ledger's argument is that the year-end handoff is easier when the record lives in one place, but that argument depends on your operational structure.

Do any of these tools file my taxes for me?

None of them file taxes. All three are record-keeping tools that produce data or exports your CPA (or DIY tax software) uses at year-end. Material participation, the STR exception, personal-use classification, and every other tax determination are decided by your CPA on your specific facts. This guide is general information about STR software categories and is not tax advice; consult a qualified tax professional.

Related guides

Statutory sources

General information about U.S. federal tax rules for short-term rentals; not tax advice.

The key takeaway

REPStracker, Track Your STR, and Field Ledger are three implementations of the same category: software that produces defensible records for a §469 strategy. The pick depends less on price ($29 vs $29 vs $19-79 across tiers) and more on the shape of your operation. If you need native mobile and dual REPS + STR coverage, REPStracker fits. If you want the cheapest team-friendly web tool for hours-only work, Track Your STR fits. If you want one record that captures the whole day and hands your CPA one file per property in April, Field Ledger fits. All three ask you to bring your own CPA for the tax determinations. Not tax advice; consult a qualified tax professional.