How to Automate Vacation Rental Accounting

How to Automate Vacation Rental Accounting

How much time do you spend each week on vacation rental accounting? If you’re like most firms, the answer is too much. Critical as accounting may be, it consists of tedious, time-consuming, error-prone processes that take hours to complete. And then the cycle starts all over again.

Making matters even worse, finding qualified accountants experienced in vacation rental accounting is ever more challenging. Qualified accountants are in short supply and expensive to recruit, and many general accounting firms can’t handle trust accounting for vacation rentals despite what they claim. 

Where does it leave vacation rental management firms if internal accounting resources aren’t enough and external resources aren’t available? It compels them to consider a third option: automated vacation rental accounting. 

The Advantages of Automating Vacation Rental Accounting

Automation gives vacation rental management firms the ability to optimize their own accounting processes. The time savings of automating vacation rental accounting processes are also significant when manual tasks that used to take hours now take no time at all. Whoever handles accounting in-house suddenly has huge blocks of time they can apply to long-term, high-level, revenue-generating initiatives instead of routine accounting obligations.

Purpose-built technology creates confidence that a relatively obscure yet highly complex financial mechanism like trust accounting proceeds exactly as it should. Compared to the alternatives, automation begins to look like the only logical approach to vacation rental accounting.

Vacation Rental Accounting Automation Made Simple

Today, more than ever, robust tools exist to help small businesses automate their back office. This automation starts and ends with your property management system & accounting software. At Ximplifi, we prefer a best-in-class approach. This approach combines the best vacation rental management platforms for channel management, sales, marketing and operations management with leading cloud-based accounting software such as QuickBooks Online or even better, Sage Intacct. A few of our favorite rental management platforms are Guesty, Hostaway, Hostfully, and Booking Automation because of their powerful integrations, open API, rich data and sales & marketing tools. These systems represent the revenue engine of your enterprise. Linking your PMS with accounting creates a seamless platform for financial data, accounting obligations, and fiscal decision making.

How VRPlatform Can Help

VRPlatform provides the missing link to streamline your back-office and automate your vacation rental accounting processes, so your entire business runs more efficiently. For example, VRPlatform can post management commissions and other owner’s fees to expedite trust accounting, or post Stripe and Airbnb deposits daily. Syncing guest invoices can also be automated, and since accounting and booking “speak” to each other, it’s easy to void or update guest invoices and see those changes reflected throughout the system.

Beyond the individual capabilities, VRPlatform strives to break down barriers between complementary systems and automate how data moves between them. By utilizing the data, software, and processes already in place, this automated tool implements quickly and has an immediate impact. Most compelling of all, everything improves about your accounting, yet very little changes in terms of your current processes. For vacation rental management firms with lean operations and big growth potential, automation makes it possible for vacation rental management companies to scale with fewer accounting headaches.

Rely on Ximplifi, the creator of VRPlatform and an innovator in the field of vacation rental accounting, to provide the best solution for your business.

Contact us to continue the conversation.