Best Practices for Month-End Close in Vacation Rental Management

Best Practices for Month-End Close in Vacation Rental Management

The month-end close puts extra strain on vacation rental management businesses. They’re not just accountable to themselves; they send month-end reports to property owners who will expect to see positive numbers presented on time. The month-end close consumes a lot of resources and inspires a certain amount of dread at more than a few businesses – and the process repeats itself 12 times a year.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be an obstacle. Follow these best practices:

• Reconcile Your Accounts –Perform one final data sync between QBO and external software like Bill.com or Expensify. Address any syncing errors before proceeding. Reconcile ALL your bank accounts, credit card accounts and any clearing accounts (undeposited funds, credit card clearing accounts etc.)
• Review Unbilled Activity – Hopefully you have a solid process for tagging transactions and billing them to owners. Part of your close process should be reviewing these transaction and ensure they’ve been properly billed to your owner as deductions on their owner statement.
• Review/reconcile revenue – Review all reservations for the month. If you use a different system for statements than your PMS (i.e. transfer data to a spreadsheet or QuickBooks from your PMS), reconcile the data to make sure what is in owner statements is complete and accurate.
• Look for Unpaid Invoices – Review the customer balance summary report at the end of each month to identify any unpaid invoices. Unpaid invoices OR negative customer balances typically indicate discrepancies between the cash that was collected and revenue that’s been recognized. 
• Find Unapplied Payments – Examine the orphan payments report in QBO to find payments that haven’t been linked to invoices within the system. As long as the month-end close process is working correctly, orphaned payments should only appear if there’s a cancellation with no refund or a partial refund.
• Assign a Class/Location to Each Transaction – Trust accounting requires each transaction to correspond with an owner/property. Whether its class, category or location tag, which can differ depending on what accounting software you use for trust accounting, you want to ensure all transactions are tagged. Use Profit and Loss by Class/Location to identify transactions with a class marked “unspecified” or to a general “owners” and correct.
• Create Bills for Payouts to Owners – Pay the owners and supply the required month-end report. Alternatively, if an owner has a negative balance, turn the bill into an invoice. Once again, the Profit and Loss by Class/Location report can quickly organize the important information.
• Pay Yourself – Transfer cash from your trust account to your operating account. 

A great month-end close depends on three factors: people, processes, and technology. Rely on Ximplifi to help you improve all three in the process of perfecting your month-end close. We offer accounting support, technical expertise and software specialized for the vacation rental management industry. What can we do for you? Contact us to explore the answer.