Can anyone recommend a good income/expense tracking software? Do people use things like Quickbooks or do you use software that is specific to the hospitality industry? I want to be able to track my income, estimate taxes, etc, and also run reports about what I’m spending each month on utilities, amenities, house repairs, etc.
I use Quickbooks for tracking expenses and income with my rental. The profit and loss statements, as well as other reports, are rather handy for when tax time rolls around and it’s always nice to have some metrics to see how things are going. You could get pretty good results with some spreadsheets, but QB seems to pretty much have it all sewn up. Most importantly, the reports allow me to track expenses for budgeting purposes, so I can have a pretty good handle each month on how much I’ll be spending.
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Thanks, abz. Can you get detailed reports on specific categories of expenses? I was looking at Quickbooks earlier, but I hate that they have moved into a monthly subscription service now. I’d rather just spend the money to buy a good software program and update it as needed, rather than pay a monthly fee to use it.
If you’ll be keying things in manually, try Wave Accounting. It’s very advanced, yet free.
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You can get detailed reports on whatever categories you want. A quick look at my PNL for the month shows categories like: Rental Income, Commission to AirBNB, Cleaning service, Util:gas, Util:electric,Util:water, Household:bathroom, Household:kitchen, Household:living room, etc. Here’s a screenshot of August of last year’s PNL. Only categories that had activity are shown. (“Rent” is what I have the business pay myself for the space, so it’s what I keep…the rest gets saved for improvements and the like.)
Clicking on any one item, Lodging Sales for example, then brings up a report of all the transaction info for all activity in that category (see image).
Anyway, go up to CostCo or go to Amazon, spend the ~$150, and buy the CD’s. Software-as-subscription is unnecessary for this sort of thing unless you want to do your bookkeeping ‘in the cloud’ which seems rather unnecessary for this sort of operation. (And, yeah, commision to AirBNB should be under expenses, not COGS…I’ve fixed that since then.)
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The top two accounting systems today are Xero and Quickbooks Online. Some people use Wave accounting because it’s free but it may not be enough depending on your needs. Quickbooks Online is the most popular system used in North America and has the most support in terms of accountants certified. There’s also a tool that perfectly integrates Airbnb with Quickbooks Online for automatic importing of reservation income called Bnbtally. This makes things a lot easier and precise.
There are a few other options. Some people also use spreadsheets to track everything. However, if you have more than one listing, it’s much better to have a well-supported system that will pull in your bank feeds automatically like Quickbooks Online.