Elena's quarter, saved up for the last day
Elena has two flats in Marbella, and for years she did what nearly everybody does: keep the paperwork and send it all together at the end. On 12 July she sat down to gather the second quarter. She found the same laundry invoice twice, could not find the May statement for one of the flats, and had to ask the community of owners for a receipt she had thrown away. She sent everything on the 14th, with six days of the filing period left. What she risked was not a fine. It was her figures reaching her on the very day they had to be filed, with no time to look at them, and the lost statement turning up in August, after the quarter had gone in.
She no longer gathers anything. When a document arrives, she drags it into her folder. It takes ten seconds and she does not think about it again.
Where your folder is and how to use it
The link reaches you in the welcome email and again in the email we send every month, so there is no need to keep it anywhere. Inside there is a subfolder for uploads. You open the link, drag in the PDF or the photo, and that is it. It works the same from a phone: open the folder and upload the photo.
There is nothing to sort and nothing to rename. Every day the system collects whatever is new, reads it and posts it. At the end of the month we go through what has come in and, if something obvious is missing, we ask you about it.
The folder lives in Google Drive, and you need a Google account to get into it. If you do not have one, or would rather not open one, that is fine: use email, which is explained further down.
What to drop in
- Platform statements, exactly as they arrive each month. Do not summarise them, do not add them up, do not convert them into a spreadsheet. The originals contain the gross amount, the commission, the dates of each stay and any tax withheld, and all four are needed.
- Cost invoices: community charges, utilities, cleaning, laundry, repairs, insurance, the tourism registration if paid in the period, the IBI receipt when it arrives, management fees, accountancy.
- Bookings taken directly: the contract or the receipt. If there is no document at all, write the arrival date, the departure date, the amount and the day you were paid in a note, and upload that.
- Anything unusual, in one sentence. A property bought or sold, a new co-owner, a month the flat was used by the family, a claim on the insurance, a letter from the town hall. These are the things that change the return, and they are the things owners most often assume are not our business. A reply to the monthly email is the easy place to mention them.
- Nothing else. Bank statements, screenshots of a booking calendar and photographs of a guest's payment confirmation are not accounting documents and cannot be posted.
The format rules, which exist for a reason
| Do | Instead of | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The original PDF, as it reached you | A photograph of a screen | A PDF carries the figures as text and can be read automatically. A photograph of a screen carries a reflection |
| One file per invoice | Eleven invoices in one scan | Each document is posted to its own entry. A combined scan has to be split by hand |
| Straight on, in daylight, all four edges visible | At an angle with a corner cut off | The cut corner is always the one with the tax number or the total |
| Invoices in the owner's name, with the NIE on them | Invoices in the manager's name | An invoice addressed to somebody else is not your deductible cost, however genuinely you paid it |
| Each document on the day it reaches you | Everything kept back for the last day | What comes in early gets queried early. What comes in on the 19th leaves no room for anything |
For a Spanish property, costs are apportioned between the days it was let and the days it was at your disposal, and for a non-resident owner only the let portion is deductible — and only if you are resident in the EU, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein. A statement showing totals but not dates makes that apportionment impossible to do properly, which is why we ask for the original statements rather than a summary. The mechanics are in the Modelo 210 guide.
If you would rather use email
Email still works, just as it did before. You forward the document to your personal Salama Tax address, the one you were given at the start, and it ends up filed in your folder as if you had uploaded it yourself. Send one at a time or several together, whichever suits you. What does not change is the format: the original PDF or a legible photo, and whole statements rather than a summary.
Some clients use both: the folder for what reaches them at a computer and email for what reaches them on a phone. That is fine, as long as each document goes in only once.
A month with nothing in it
A flat closed for February, or a month with no costs, does not oblige you to upload anything. Replying "no activity" to the monthly email is enough; the Spanish wording, sin movimientos, does the same job. It looks like a detail and it is not: it tells us the month is complete rather than overlooked, and it stops us chasing you for a statement that does not exist.
Two or three owners, one folder
One folder is enough even when there are two or three owners: whoever receives a document uploads it. Tell us each owner's percentage if it has changed, and who paid the costs if they were not shared equally. Invoices should be in the owners' names; if only one name appears, say so, because it affects who can deduct what. With several properties, if an invoice does not make clear which flat it belongs to — the plumber, a purchase of linen — tell us in a line. An electricity bill posted to the wrong flat is the commonest error among owners with more than one property, and the hardest to spot afterwards.
The dates worth keeping in mind
For resident owners filing quarterly, the returns are due in the first twenty days of April, July and October, and by the end of January for the last quarter — and if you pay by direct debit, five days earlier than that, as explained in paying by direct debit. If the documents have been going into the folder through the quarter, only the last few are left in the first week of the following month, and there is time to query anything odd, prepare the figures, send them to you and still file comfortably.
For non-resident owners the rhythm is annual rather than quarterly, and the dates have moved: rental income for 2024 and 2025 was filed between 1 and 20 January of the following year, and from the 2026 tax year the window runs from 1 to 20 April of the following year. Imputed income for the days the property was available to you runs on its own, longer calendar. Dropping each statement into the folder when it arrives is still the better habit, because reconstructing twelve months of platform statements in March is a much worse afternoon. The dates to work back from are set out on the Spanish tax calendar.
When something arrives late
It happens, and it is rarely serious. If the document belongs to a period we had already calculated but not yet filed, the file is redone with it and the new figures reach you before anything is submitted. If what is missing is a platform statement, download it from the reports section of your host account rather than waiting for it to be sent.
What turns up once the quarter has been closed and filed is a different matter. It is not beyond repair either, but it may call for a supplementary return, and that work is quoted separately. It is the only reason we keep saying not to leave everything to the end.
The four documents people forget
- The IBI receipt. It arrives once a year, it is a deductible cost for the days let, and it carries the rateable value and the cadastral reference, both of which are needed for the imputed income calculation.
- The community of owners' annual statement. Monthly charges are usually known, but extraordinary levies for a roof or a lift are not, and they are frequently capital rather than expense, which is a distinction worth getting right at the time.
- Insurance. Deductible, and frequently paid by direct debit from an account nobody looks at.
- Tax withheld by a platform. Some platforms withhold in certain circumstances. It appears on the statement, it is money already paid on your behalf, and if the statement never reaches us it is money lost.
What happens to what you drop in
Documents are read and classified automatically, the figures are computed by code, and a person checks the result before anything leaves. Where something does not reconcile — a statement that does not match the bank, an invoice dated outside the quarter, a booking with no corresponding payout — you get one query with the document attached, rather than a list of questions in March. Then the draft figures reach you, you approve them, we file, and the receipt goes into your folder, organised by year, quarter and tax.
The whole flow is described in how it works. If you are not a client yet and want to know which returns your situation actually generates, the two-minute form ends with that answer and a price. Elena, for what it is worth, has not spent another 12 July in front of a box of papers.