TL;DR
Your bank deposit isn’t your revenue. It’s what’s left after the platform takes its cut. Vacation rental accounting means tracking the full picture: gross bookings, platform fees, pass-through expenses like cleaning, and taxes you may or may not owe. Separate your business and personal finances from day one, reconcile monthly, and centralize your booking data in one system. Get this right, and you’ll know exactly what each property earns, not just what hits your account.
Why your bank statement lies to you
Here’s the gap most hosts don’t see until tax season: Airbnb sends you $425. You record $425 as income. But the guest actually paid $500. That $75 difference (platform fee, cleaning pass-through, occupancy tax) is invisible in your bank feed.
This matters for two reasons. First, you’re underreporting gross revenue, which can trigger questions during an audit. Second, you’re missing deductible expenses. The platform’s commission is a business cost you’re entitled to write off. Record only the deposit, and you lose on both ends.
Vacation rental accounting isn’t about tracking what lands in your account. It’s about capturing what actually happened: what the guest paid, what got deducted, what you owe, and what you keep.
STR financial terms at a glance
| Term | Definition | Why it matters |
| Gross revenue | Total amount the guest paid, including fees | Used for calculating total tax liability |
| Net revenue | Amount received after OTA commissions | The actual cash available for operations |
| Pass-through | Fees like cleaning or pet charges | Must be tracked to ensure they cover actual costs |
| Lodging tax | Taxes collected by you or the OTA | Crucial for compliance; not part of your income |
| NOI | Net Operating Income (revenue minus expenses) | The true measure of your property’s profitability |
The foundation: Separate everything
Before you track a single transaction, draw a hard line between personal and business finances. Open a dedicated business bank account. If you’re operating under an LLC or corporation, this isn’t optional. Commingling funds may pierce your liability protection and expose personal assets if something goes wrong.
From there, build a basic chart of accounts. These are the categories where every dollar gets sorted. For most STR operators, that means:
- Revenue: Nightly rates, booking income
- Pass-throughs: Cleaning fees, pet fees, extra guest charges
- Platform fees: Airbnb service fees, Vrbo commissions, channel manager costs
- Operating expenses: Supplies, maintenance, utilities, insurance
- Taxes collected: Occupancy and lodging taxes held on behalf of guests
This structure turns a pile of transactions into a readable story about your business.
Gross vs. net: The number that actually matters
When a guest books for $200/night, that’s your gross revenue. But Airbnb deposits $170 after their 3% host fee and a pass-through cleaning charge. If you only record the $170, your books show less income than you earned, and they hide a deductible expense.
The fix: Record the full $200 as revenue, then record the $30 deduction as separate line items (platform fee, cleaning pass-through). Now your P&L reflects reality. Your accountant can work with real numbers. And you’re not leaving deductions on the table.
This gets complicated fast when you’re listing on multiple channels, each with different fee structures and payout timing. That’s where centralized data becomes non-negotiable.
Pass-throughs and the cleaning fee trap
Cleaning fees feel like free money, until you check them against what you’re actually paying your cleaner. A $150 cleaning fee that costs you $175 per turn means you’re subsidizing every checkout. Multiply that by 40 turnovers a year, and you’ve quietly lost $1,000.
Track pass-through fees against their actual costs. If the math doesn’t work, adjust your pricing. This is one of the fastest ways to recover margin without raising nightly rates.
Taxes: Know what you owe (and what you don’t)
Lodging and occupancy taxes vary wildly by jurisdiction. In some markets, Airbnb collects and remits automatically. In others, that’s your responsibility. And in a few, it’s a mix. The platform handles state tax while you owe the city.
The key is knowing your local rules before you get a notice. Check your listing address against your city and county requirements. If you’re collecting taxes manually, track them as a liability. That’s money you’re holding for the government, not income.
Monthly reconciliation: Catch errors before they compound
Once a month, match your bank statement against your reservation data. Every deposit should trace back to a specific booking. Every payout should account for platform fees, taxes, and pass-throughs.
This takes 30 minutes when you do it monthly. It takes a full weekend when you wait until April.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s catching discrepancies before they multiply. A missing $50 in January is a line-item fix. Twelve months of missing $50s is a forensic accounting project.
The right tools for the job
Most hosts start with spreadsheets, and that’s fine for one or two properties. But as transaction volume grows, so does the risk of manual error.
The professional setup: A short term rental property management system (PMS) to centralize booking data from every channel, paired with accounting software to store and categorize it. Your PMS captures the raw reservation details: guest name, dates, gross amount, fees, taxes. Your accounting software turns that into financial statements.
Guesty sits at the center of this stack for many operators. It pulls reservation data from Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and direct bookings into one dashboard, so you’re not downloading four separate reports to hand your accountant. The unified reporting means one source of truth for revenue, fees, and channel performance, without the tab-switching.
FAQ
Bank statements show net payouts, not gross revenue. They don’t capture the guest’s name, stay dates, platform fees, or taxes collected. To be audit-ready, you need reservation-level detail.
Failing to account for owner stays and maintenance blocks. These non-revenue nights skew your occupancy calculations and confuse your tax reporting.
A PMS centralizes your data. Instead of pulling separate reports from each channel, you generate one unified export showing all income, fees, and taxes in one place.
Your numbers tell the story of your business, if you’re tracking the right ones. See how Guesty’s reporting gives you the clarity to grow.
A B2B marketing professional with deep familiarity in the short-term rental industry, translating complex ideas into clear, engaging content. Writes blogs, web copy, and industry reports that inform and inspire. Uncompromising on the Oxford comma.
