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Hiya, in the last year I’ve gone from 1 listing on Airbnb alone to 3 listings on Airbnb & booking dot com. I’m trying to get some business analysis tools together that show me (at least) a unified view of profitability.
For fellow hosts that also have multiple listings across multiple booking sites, what are your favourite tools?
[second attempt at posting this - my first attempt listed the tools I use, but was flagged as spam]
Welcome! Glad you posted again, it is good to learn from each other. 
I am still trying our different things, but I am with Square now (on independent bookings) but have heard good things about Stripe. I’d like to research the differences between them. Square was more well known to me when I was looking into options but I am not crazy about it’s interface.
I currently use Google Sheets for my record keeping because I like that I can update things in real time. My accountant was happy with my first year … We’ll see if he has better ideas as time goes on.
Stripe is really good but the main difference is that Stripe is a payments API so might be harder to setup if you are not a developer…you could use services built on top of Stripe that do what you need to (but you’ll need to pay them extra), if Square already works for you I wouldn’t recommend to change.
I think you could connect Quickbooks or similar accounting apps to Airbnb and Booking and get a unified view of all the income
@RiverRock may be able to expand about OwnerRez. I don’t know. Not trying to put RR on the spot or anything… But have heard excellent things.
Huh? What is Balsamiq and no…RR does not own OwnerRez. lol. Chris Haynes is the owner though…lol. I guess I missed the joke???
Lol wasn’t a joke, I misunderstood
balsamiq is a design/protyping tool (that whoever the owner of that site is, used in a unique manner)
Actually I know Chris is the first name of the owner. It is very popular tool. Supposedly high learning but people rave about the site well worth it. It didn’t quite meet my needs for what I need at the moment but may in the future.
I have done this generally.
One thing to note: If you take a damage deposit from Stripe those CC funds won’t be refunded.
Another note: Square “technically” doesn’t allow their account to be used for holds on damage deposits but lots of people do it.
There is a CC credit authorization you can use also on Stripe. I haven’t tried. I am set up with both Stripe and Square.
You can read this research I did and ignore all Houfy stuff about it. But this works as good information for book direct owner in general…
Hope this helps with a general comparison…
@cabinhost Thank you! I’m reworking a few things, in the midst of rebuilding my house site, and will check this out.
@sitebnb I need to check out QuickBooks. I used our family accountant the first year to make sure I was as above-board as I could possibly be, but I’d like to do everything on my own. (Sadistic nerd that I am, haha)
I think you are over my tech head…lol. I don’t play in that high tech world…lol
Definitely look at pricing. I haven’t checked into quickbooks pricing in a couple years. Is it a one time fee? But wait for @RiverRock to wake up and maybe chime in about OwnerRez. I have heard many good things and I think under $20 a month for two properties. They just didn’t have the one thing I needed is all. So def. compare.
I think this advice may be more for Americans though? Are you in U.S. From what I have heard is Stripe is generally superior when it comes to currency conversion for international users. I don’t know though.
I use quickbooks online for both of my business’s and my accountant can log on at tax time. I think it is $14.99 a month
I use Owner Res , not sure what the question is @cabinhost?
RR
I use Stripe for CC processing, I don’t really log in, I use Xero which then calls on Stripe to take the payments (when issuing invoices). There is a control panel where you can do a lot of things by hand, but it’s very much built with the idea that it’ll be the back end to something else.
I also use uplisting.io for channel management and (on probation) Beyond Pricing for rate setting.
@uplisting is the only reason I’m able to work with booking.com and Airbnb at the same time. Support is good, and it has serviceable message automation - so I’m pretty happy there.
Beyond Pricing is expensive, and less smart than you’d hope, but I’ll stick with it for a bit.
And then - as I mentioned - Xero is there for bookkeeping / tracking of monthly profitability and for my accountant to prepare tax returns from.
That’s quite a lot of separate tools. I’ve tried & ditched loads more over the last 12 months - so any other success stories appreciated.
HI Mattbee,
I just finished (well I have to finalize it still) getting my listings on Booking dot com myself. I’ve been on airbnb for 4 years and HomeAway/VRBO for two. Hoping Booking helps boost revenue a bit, I feel I’ve nearly plateaued on how much I can make per listing ha.
How’s Booking been so far for you?
Why do you need a credit card terminal? Booking now offers to collect guests payments on your behalf (i know this was a major gripe people had in the past as i researched whether to list or not). Did you opt to run the cards yourself so you don’t have to wait till the end of the month to get paid by Booking—if not, what’s the reason for the terminal?
Seeing all these other posts mentioning using Stripe etc for CCs, am I missing something here? Should I be doing this to hold guests security deposits? I have a $1500 deposit on Airbnb and Homeaway, but on Airbnb it might as well be $0. AS they are a total joke and not even withheld from the guest during their stay.
I’ve been a longtime Beyond Pricing user, and have been really happy with them. Why do you think they are “so expensive” $750/year on a listing that brings in $75k is such a small expense for all BP does for you…IMO.
But I am now looking elsewhere to see what’s out there. I need one that can integrate with Booking. I’ll check out uplisting.
Are you or is anyone else using Stripe or a product like it to hold Deposits? IF so please share how you do that and what your experience has been like.
Hi Rory, I use Stripe to take payments for direct bookings only - Xero sends the invoices in that case.
I forgot to mention I also use https://textmagic.com/ and https://zapier.com/ to semi-automate the process of texting guests when they’ve checked out, encouraging them to book direct in future. I do do get a small stream of guests who respond to this.
In answer to your question booking.com is fine, probably accounts for 1/3 to 1/2 of my bookings now. Their customer service people are good in a crisis. Their admin interface is an indecisive mess - but your channel manager should keep you away from it.
Beyond Pricing - ehhhh, I find it hard to use. I’m not convinced it does its job of maxmising revenue without being babysat. I hoped could find a market-driven reference point for my properties - instead I still have to pick numbers, tell it about events & react quickly if the market changes. 1% of gross is a lot IMO, and I think I can get the same value out of @uplisting’s simpler pricing rules system, where I had to react weekly anyway. So I will likely switch back.
I know @uplisting can do deposit functionality with Stripe, but I’ve never kept deposits myself.
Good luck with all the integrations 
I’ve downloaded a template and created own tool that allows me to analyze Airbnb hosts data. There are such sections
guest satisfaction, absolute price, listing word count, minimum stay, length, price/bed, review count, saved to wishlist and many others
I use Smartbnb which include smart metrics for understanding occupancy/analysis. For operations side of things, I use Breezeway, which is a scheduling tool for my cleaners, but also is a great way to analyze operational activity. Then on the financial/accounting side, I use Quickbooks Online with the Bnbtally integration for automatic accounting of my reservations - this is my ultimate point of truth for analyzing my business. I’ll also make use of Zapier for various things like notifying me via SMS when an Airbnb guest payment hasn’t completed. I once used Guesty but they became way too expensive. For competitive analysis, I once used Beyond Pricing but I later started promoting more longer term stays and so I wrote a python script that analyzes all local listings and helps me to determine prices for each month.
