Vacation Rental Bookkeeping

[Chase Hoover]

PMs - How do you keep up with the whirlwind of bookkeeping involved with vacation rentals?  I've tried different vacation rental softwares that feature "integrated accounting" without much luck.  For years I've used spreadsheets where I input each booking every month giving me final numbers I can trust, but as we scale and add more properties I'd like to find a more streamlined solution.  Does anyone use Quickbooks to keep up with VR bookkeeping?  My brain is spinning thinking about splitting deposits, classifying properties, and creating custom reports, but if I can get it set up properly I can see it being a great option.

[Karen Chenaille]

@Chase Hoover.  You ask a really great question...something I have spent a lot of time trying to crack the nut on.  I work full time and was spending a lot of time on my books every weekend. I am huge fan of 'Clockwork' by Mike Michalowicz. After reading his book, I realized book keeping is not the highest and best use of my time.  My time is best focused on figuring out how to grow my business and quit my corporate gig :-)

I use Quickbooks for my back office. Every two weeks, I pay a Virtual Assistant to go in and classify all the sales deposits. Each property is a class. We do both traditional STR Air BnB for properties we own and we host properties for other people. Using classes allows us to see the expenses and income by property. This is very handy, especially when you are applying for loans and trying to grow your business.

OwnerRez has a quickbooks integration built into it.  If you already have a robust QB setup, you may not want to jump on the bandwagon for the OwnerRez integration because it goes in and creates a bunch of entries on your chart of accounts.  If you don't have a QB setup though and are just starting out, the integration may be the way to go.

I'd be happy to share a snapshot of what some of my reports look like with you so you can see first hand how nice it all rolls up using Classes in QB.

Best of luck to you,

Karen