Every year, the same thing happens. Tax season arrives, your CPA asks for rental records, and you spend the next two weeks pulling numbers from three different places, chasing down receipt photos, and trying to remember whether you hit 500 hours of material participation. The records exist — they are scattered across your ArrivHQ account in expenses, revenue entries, work logs, and mileage trips. Getting them into a format your CPA can actually use has been the bottleneck.
Compliance Packs solve that. You select a property and a date range, and ArrivHQ generates a zip file containing everything your tax professional needs to work with your Schedule E — organized, cross-referenced, and ready to hand over.
The problem with manual handoff
If you have been exporting CSVs and PDFs individually, you know the drill. You export expenses, then revenue, then work logs, then mileage. You attach receipt images one by one or try to match them to line items after the fact. Your CPA gets a folder of loosely related files and has to piece together the story themselves.
This is not just tedious — it introduces risk. A missing receipt, an unexplained gap in revenue, or hours that do not add up can raise questions during review. The data was in ArrivHQ all along. The problem was always assembly.
What a compliance pack contains
A compliance pack is a single zip file. Inside, there are three things.
compliance-report.pdf
This is the core document. It is a formatted PDF that pulls together your financial and operational records for the selected property and date range. The report includes:
- Profit and loss statement with income and expenses organized by category, mapped to the corresponding Schedule E line items. Repairs map to Line 14, utilities to Line 17, insurance to Line 9, and so on. Your CPA sees the same categories they will enter on the form.
- Material participation summary showing your total hours logged against the 500-hour test threshold. If you are pursuing material participation to treat losses as non-passive, this section documents where you stand. It breaks down hours by activity type — property management, maintenance, administrative work, guest services — so your CPA can see not just the total but the composition.
- Mileage log listing every trip with date, origin, destination, miles driven, and the deduction calculated at the current IRS standard mileage rate. This is the contemporaneous log the IRS expects, formatted and totaled.
- Work log detail showing individual work entries with dates, descriptions, durations, and property assignments. This supports the material participation summary with the raw data behind it.
- Evidence index cross-referencing each expense to its attached receipt files in the pack. If expense #47 has two receipt images, the index tells your CPA exactly which files in the receipts folder correspond to that entry.
- Completeness summary flagging potential gaps in your records. If a month has no revenue entries when prior months did, it gets flagged. If expenses exist without attached receipts, those are listed. If your material participation hours fall short of the 500-hour threshold, the summary notes the shortfall. These flags do not mean something is wrong — they mean your CPA should be aware and can ask you about them.
receipts/
A folder containing every original receipt file attached to expenses in the selected date range. These are the actual images and PDFs you uploaded throughout the year — not compressed thumbnails or screenshots. File names include the expense date and vendor for easy identification.
Your CPA gets the source documents alongside the summary report, so they do not need to come back and ask for individual receipts later.
evidence-index.csv
A spreadsheet that maps every expense entry to its receipt files, amounts, categories, and dates. This is the machine-readable version of the evidence index in the PDF. Your CPA can open it in Excel or Google Sheets, sort by category or date, and cross-reference against bank statements or platform payouts.
The CSV also includes a column indicating whether each expense has a receipt attached. Expenses without receipts are easy to spot and address before filing.
How to generate a pack
Navigate to Compliance in the sidebar and select Generate Pack. Choose the property and set the date range — typically January 1 through December 31 for annual filing, though you can generate quarterly packs if your CPA prefers interim reviews.
ArrivHQ assembles the pack from your existing records. The generation takes a few seconds depending on how many expenses and receipts are included. When it finishes, you get a download link for the zip file.
Each pack is a point-in-time snapshot. If you add or edit records after generating, the pack does not update — generate a new one when you are ready.
Schedule E line mapping
The profit and loss section of the compliance report maps your expense categories directly to Schedule E line items. This is the same mapping ArrivHQ uses throughout the app — the 15 built-in expense categories were designed around these lines from the start.
| ArrivHQ Category | Schedule E Line |
|---|---|
| Advertising | Line 5 |
| Auto & Travel | Line 6 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | Line 7 |
| Commissions | Line 8 |
| Insurance | Line 9 |
| Legal & Professional | Line 10 |
| Management Fees | Line 11 |
| Mortgage Interest | Line 12 |
| Repairs | Line 14 |
| Supplies | Line 15 |
| Taxes | Line 16 |
| Utilities | Line 17 |
| Other | Line 19 |
Your CPA does not need to re-categorize anything. The numbers in the pack match the lines on the form.
Material participation and the 500-hour test
The compliance report includes a dedicated section on material participation. If you have been logging work hours in ArrivHQ throughout the year, the pack summarizes your total hours and compares them against the 500-hour threshold — the most common test STR hosts use to demonstrate material participation under IRC Section 469.
The report does not make a determination about whether you qualify. That is between you and your CPA. What it does is present the documented hours, broken down by activity type and month, so your tax professional has the data to make that assessment. If you fall short of 500 hours, the completeness summary flags it so there are no surprises.
For hosts pursuing the 100-hour test (Test 3 — more hours than any other individual), the work log detail provides the per-person breakdown your CPA needs to evaluate.
The completeness summary
This is the section most hosts overlook, and it might be the most valuable part of the pack. The completeness summary scans your records for gaps and inconsistencies:
- Missing receipts — expenses over $75 without an attached receipt image or PDF.
- Revenue gaps — months where a property had reservations but no corresponding revenue entries.
- Hour shortfalls — material participation hours below the 500-hour threshold.
- Category gaps — expense categories logged in prior months but absent in recent months (did you forget to log utilities, or was there genuinely no bill?).
None of these flags mean your records are wrong. Some months have no utility bills. Some trips do not need receipts. The point is to surface anything your CPA might question so you can address it before filing — not after.
Plan limits
Compliance packs are available on all paid plans. The generation limits differ:
- Comply — 3 packs per month across all properties.
- Host — 5 packs per month across all properties.
- Portfolio — 5 packs per month per property.
Most hosts generate one annual pack per property at tax time and occasionally a quarterly pack for mid-year CPA check-ins. The limits are generous enough that you should not hit them under normal use.
What this replaces
Before compliance packs, the CPA handoff process looked like this: export expenses as CSV, export revenue as CSV, export work logs as CSV, export mileage as CSV, download receipt images individually, and email everything in a folder with a note saying "let me know if you need anything else." Your CPA would then spend billable hours organizing and cross-referencing the files.
Now you generate one zip file and send it. The report is already organized by Schedule E line. The receipts are already matched to expenses. The material participation hours are already summarized. Your CPA opens the PDF, reviews the completeness summary, and gets to work.
The records are yours. The pack just makes them useful.
For the complete reference, see the Compliance Packs documentation.