Short-Term Rental Bookkeeping
Airbnb pays you net. Your books should still show gross.
Channel payouts arrive net of host fees, on a date that has nothing to do with the stay, sometimes with cleaning folded in and sometimes not. Get that wrong and every number downstream is wrong — your margin per property, your lodging tax, your depreciation basis. We run STR books so those numbers hold up.
Why generic bookkeepers break on STR
Four things that a normal bookkeeper has never seen.
None of these are hard once you know they exist. All of them are silently wrong when nobody does.
The payout is not the revenue
Airbnb deposits net of the host service fee, days or weeks after the stay, and may or may not include the cleaning fee depending on how you have it configured. Booking.com invoices its commission separately instead of netting it. Book the deposit as revenue and you understate gross, overstate margin, and lose the fee deduction.
One rental line hides everything
A single blended rental income account tells you the portfolio made money. It cannot tell you which property lost money, which is why owners keep the underperformer for years. Each door needs its own P&L, its own ADR, and its own occupancy.
Lodging tax varies inside one portfolio
Some channels collect and remit occupancy tax in some jurisdictions and not others. The same owner can have one property where nothing is owed and another where a monthly return is due. This is the item we most often find unfiled.
Schedule E or C changes the whole return
Average stay of seven days or less with substantial services can move the activity to Schedule C and add self-employment tax. It also changes how the books should be structured, so it has to be settled before the chart of accounts, not at filing.
Pricing
Per property, published.
You should be able to work out what this costs without booking a call. Base fee plus a per-property rate that drops as your portfolio grows.
Base
Your entity plus your first 2 properties.
- Monthly close and reconciliation
- Channel payout reconciliation (Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com)
- Per-property P&L, not one blended rental line
- Cleaning and passthrough separated from revenue
- Occupancy and lodging tax tracked by jurisdiction
- Tax-ready year-end package
Properties 3-10
Most commonEach property beyond the first two.
- Its own reconciled P&L
- Its own channel and payout mapping
- Its own lodging-tax position
- Its own depreciation schedule maintained
Properties 11+
Volume rate once you pass ten doors.
- Everything in the per-property rate
- Portfolio-level roll-up reporting
- Revenue per property and ADR comparison
- Priority close scheduling
- 2 properties
- $199 / mo
- 5 properties
- $334 / mo
- 10 properties
- $559 / mo
- 20 properties
- $859 / mo
- One-time onboarding
- $499
- Onboarding, prepaid annually
- Waived
What the $499 onboarding covers
- Bank, card, PMS and channel accounts connected and verified
- Chart of accounts rebuilt to produce a real per-property P&L
- Class or tag tracking configured per property
- Current year reconciled to date
- Schedule E versus Schedule C determined before the books are structured
- A written diagnostic of what we found in your file
Covers up to twelve months of catch-up. If your books are further behind than that we quote the extra after looking at the file, rather than discovering it halfway through the work.
Tax return preparation and cost-segregation planning are quoted separately. That work is not monthly, and it is where an STR portfolio actually saves money, so we would rather scope it properly than fold it into a retainer.
What the monthly close covers
Every stream, reconciled to the deposit.
Your stack, not ours
We work inside the systems you already run.
The PMS handles operations well. The gap is between it and the accounting file — that is the part we close, rather than asking you to migrate anything.
Getting started
First call to a clean first close.
Questions
Straight answers before you book.
How much does short-term rental bookkeeping cost?
$199 per month covers the monthly close for your entity and your first two properties. Properties three through ten are $45 each per month, and anything past ten is $30 each. A 5-property portfolio is $334 a month, a 10-property portfolio is $559. Onboarding is a one-time $499, which we waive if you prepay a year. Tax return preparation and cost-segregation planning are quoted separately because they are not monthly work.
What does the $499 onboarding actually cover?
Connecting your bank, card, PMS and channel accounts; building a chart of accounts that produces a real per-property P&L rather than one blended rental line; setting up class or tag tracking per property; reconciling the current year to date; and a written diagnostic of what we found. It covers up to twelve months of catch-up. If your books are further behind than that, we quote the extra separately after looking at the file, rather than discovering it halfway through.
Do you work with my channels and PMS?
Yes. Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com payouts each behave differently and each breaks naively. Airbnb pays net of the host service fee and the payout date rarely matches the stay date. Booking.com invoices commission separately instead of netting it. We reconcile gross reservation revenue to the net deposit for each channel, and we work inside Hostaway, Guesty, OwnerRez, Lodgify or Hospitable rather than asking you to change systems.
Is my rental Schedule E or Schedule C?
It depends on the average guest stay and whether you provide substantial services. Most rental activity lands on Schedule E, but once the average stay drops to seven days or less with substantial services the activity can move to Schedule C and pick up self-employment tax. That distinction changes the whole return, so we determine it before the books are structured rather than after, because the classification drives the chart of accounts.
Can you handle occupancy and lodging tax?
Yes, and it is the single most commonly botched item we see. Some channels collect and remit lodging tax for you in some jurisdictions and not in others, which means the same portfolio can have properties where you owe nothing and properties where you owe monthly. We track what was collected, what the channel remitted, and what you still owe by jurisdiction.
Do you also do the tax return and cost segregation?
Yes, quoted separately. Tax work is where an STR portfolio actually saves money, so we would rather scope it properly than bundle it into a monthly fee. Our tax team includes US-licensed CPAs and an Enrolled Agent with 23 years in U.S. taxation. Start with the STR tax calculator if you want to see the order of magnitude before talking to anyone.
What if I only have one property?
The $199 base covers you, and plenty of single-property owners start here — usually the ones planning to buy a second. If a single property is all you will ever run and the books are simple, software plus your CPA at year-end may genuinely be cheaper, and we will tell you that on the call rather than after you have signed.
Go deeper — or just talk to us
Go deeper — or just talk to us.
Related terms
Tools & guides
Send us one Airbnb payout report.
Thirty minutes. We will show you what your gross revenue actually was, what the fees really cost you, and whether your lodging tax is filed everywhere it needs to be. Then you get the monthly number in writing.
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