If you are like a growing number of homeowners in the travel market, you might be thinking of renting out a vacation home to travelers. Or, perhaps you have already started and you are now looking for ways to keep up with the increasing demands of the fast-moving industry. Statistics show that 9% of all lodging in the U.S. is run by an independent AirBnB user – meaning that more and more people are renting out their homes. 

Vacation Rental Bookkeeping Tips

Managing a vacation home – or two – can quickly turn from a profit paradise to an accounting nightmare with a slew of bookkeeping paperwork and documents to tend to. Tracking every expense, keeping every receipt, adding the right formulas to the excel sheet, and updating all of your financial records might be too much to handle on your own. The need for trustworthy, advanced, and affordable accounting solutions is more important than ever in this industry and these handy vacation rental bookkeeping tips can help you stay afloat. Learn what to do when managing your vacation rental business with Indevia today. 

Try Scheduling Recurring Payments

Indevia’s automated accounting solutions make it easy to manage any number of bookkeeping matters through a scripted system that handles it all automatically, leaving your time freed up to tend to other matters of business. One way to get in the habit of automatic accounting is to set up recurring payments or subscriptions for certain services you want your business to invest in. 

Something as simple as an Amazon subscription or a Netflix monthly account – billed to your company and not to your personal account – can give you a good idea of how much you are spending each month. You can also automatically schedule towel pickup services, item deliveries, and much more. 

Pay Attention to Bookkeeping Needs

While you can delegate most major accounting tasks to a trusted accounting system online, it is a good idea to still stay apprised of housekeeping matters related to accounting that you should have your eyes on at all times. Try to spend a few minutes a week – or about an hour a month – looking at the books and reviewing your company’s finances to ensure everything is up to par. 

Go Digital

Paper receipts aren’t just a waste of resources, they are also easy to misplace. Although more than 77% of businesses still use paper receipts and have a storage system in place to file them. While going digital is not always something that can be achieved overnight, it might be wise to start introducing digitization more and more into your daily accounting routine. 

There are a vast number of apps and online cloud software that will help you integrate paper and digital products seamlessly. Depending on what works best for your company’s needs, you can use an app to upload images of paper receipts and store them digitally so you will never lose track of them in the future. 

Open a Company Credit Card 

It might be tempting to dedicate different credit cards to different types of expenses. However, that might only serve to further complicate and clog up the bookkeeping process, causing you to fall behind in important financial matters come tax season. Combat the chaos by opening a single credit card and using it for all of your business expenses. Pay it off every month if you can to avoid incurring additional interest fees. You can even use a single credit card for multiple properties to simplify the accounting process further. 

Work With an Accounting Pro 

When in doubt, don’t go at it alone. You can easily simplify your bookkeeping tasks through professional accounting services that offer automation, organization, and personalization to save you time and money in the long run. Whether or not you have experience keeping company books, it may become increasingly difficult to manage your vacation rental home’s financial affairs without a good organizational structure in place. 

Indevia’s specialized services focus on bookkeeping for vacation rentals and other vacation homes that you are using to diversify your source of income. It is easy to fall behind on financial matters, especially with daily maintenance being a requirement of good financial health. Get started today by contacting us online and try a 30 day risk-free trial of our inclusive accounting package to see how our trusted bookkeeping solutions can keep your business on the right track.