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The tax on rental income can be reduced by making expense deductions such as insurance, prtb registration fees and repairs and maintenance of the property. Landlords may also be able to claim for wear and tear maintenance and insurance, as these are both expected expenses that landlords will have to pay. Another good tip is to keep receipts and invoices for all transactions that relate to the properties you are renting. These will be essential when it is time to fill out your rental income tax form as you will have a clear record of the money you have earned and the amount of money you have spent on upkeep of the property.

Thereby reducing the tax you owe if any. But perhaps the biggest tip is to seek the help and advice of a registered professional such as a chartered accountant. Chartered accountants are highly trained and experienced in dealing with tax, mortgages and finances. They also regularly submit rental income tax forms for many businesses and individuals. By seeking the knowledge that such professionals have, you could save time and money as they help you to complete your forms correctly. They are also experienced in dealing with the deductions mentioned above, and will be able to show you exactly what you can and cannot deduct, meaning you will pay less tax on the remaining rental income after expense deductions.

The less tax you have to pay, the more money you will have as income from renting your property. No matter how good your tax professional is, if you don’t provide all of the necessary information and figures, your return will be wrong. And, any tax return that is done wrong will fail an audit if exposed. Undocumented cash income, inventory mistakes, overlooked deductions, and missed benefits are common within this industry. Some of these errors increase your federal tax bill; others shortchange your future. Self-employed people can take advantage of the same IRS rules used by large corporations, allowing them to lower their tax bill without cheating on their taxes.

This is the cold, numbers-driven side of campaigning that candidates and their staffs don’t tend to talk about in public. Yet Obama’s advisers seem especially eager to showcase their data collection and mining operation, perhaps because they want to signal to potential donors—if not voters—that even if the President can’t inspire the same level of excitement the second time around, he can make up for his shortcomings by other means. “In 2008 we were very adept users of technology,” says Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer. “This time we are much more ambitious about what we’re capable of building on our own.” Obama’s advisers won’t divulge much more than that about how the operation works.

“I’ll be happy to discuss what we’re doing after we do it,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist. Axelrod reveals only enough to taunt his Republican counterparts. “The things we did in 2008 in many ways were prehistoric by contemporary standards,” he says. “There’s a lot you can do in the way of more finely targeting voters so they’re getting information that’s useful to them.” Obama’s GOP rivals have taken notice. “Right now, if you want to call this the ‘data arms race,’ clearly Democrats are ahead,” says Alex Gage, chief executive officer of TargetPoint Consulting, who worked on voter targeting for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. “Republicans realize they have to catch up, and I’m reasonably confident they will. Will they surpass them? No.

” Gage, who is working for Mitt Romney’s campaign, says he realized the Obama camp was up to something new last spring, when he saw a want ad on barackobama.com: “The Obama for America analytics department analyzes the campaign’s data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision-making,” it reads. “We are a multidisciplinary team of statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts, and organizers—all striving for a single goal: reelecting President Obama.” The campaign’s call for coders and quants attracted guys like Harper Reed, who is now the campaign’s chief technology officer. “We have all these engineers here who were part of startups, and almost all of them competed against some giant behemoth,” Reed says.

Before joining the campaign, he was chief technology officer of Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company that lets customers vote on which designs it should produce. Reed, 33, is every bit the political operative, if you can get past the scraggly beard and stretched earlobes. He and Slaby plan to keep expanding their team, recruiting largely by word of mouth. One of his first hires was Anders Conbere, a 28-year-old engineer from Seattle. “There was a weird sense when you came in here that you were changing the campaign just by coexisting in the same spaces as everyone else,” he says. Last spring, Conbere was driving home from his job as a software developer for Estately, a property listing service that describes itself as a “team of geeks taking on the $50 billion real estate industry,” when he got a two-word text message from Reed: “Dude. Obama.”