Whether you’re a small company with few owners or one with many parties that receive money from your side, we believe that our Owner statements module has got you covered.
Accounting for Vacation Rental Businesses can be tedious when each owner, check-in agent or cleaning company gets a different deal, and it's hard to automate processes. The aim of the Owner statements module is to provide you with a tool to account for how much your company is receiving and calculate how much you have to pay to your recipients: rental agency, rental owners, check-in/cleaning agents, etc. Therefore, the system is built on three basic concepts: Owner statements, Recipients, and Payments.
In the following, we will explain a bit of each concept and introduce you to the basic flow of the Accounting module.
Read about:
Recipients
A recipient is simply a person or company that needs to be paid or earns money from reservations. This could be the rental agency, the rental owner, or the cleaning company in case the cleaning is outsourced. For each recipient, you can define a Payment Strategy that tells the system how it should create payments for that specific recipient.
💡 Note: The payment strategy should also include how much you "pay" yourself as a property manager, which then gives you an exact amount of how much you earned as a company during that period.
Learn how to create a recipient and their payment strategy.
Accounting Statements
The second concept we need to talk about is Accounting Statements. This is the part of accounting that contains all the economic information for a given set of Rentals with a specific currency, and all the bookings that start between two set dates. Statements do not take into account any Strategies and provide a nice starting point from which you can create payments for recipients. Accounting Statements are updated automatically based on received payments and sent payments. So if an Accounting Statement had been saved while some/any money was not yet received from any OTA, this Statement can be recreated to update any payments sent to you after creating the Statement and the corresponding Payments.
🔎 Example: If a reservation goes from the 25th of January to the 5th of February, and it’s an Airbnb reservation (or Booking.com if online payment set up), the reservation can be paid in two parts; one payment from the 25th until the end of the month, and a second payment by the end of the stay, gathering the money from the 1st of the month until the check-out on the 5th.
Learn how to create an accounting statement.
Payments
Once the Accounting Statement is set up, you can start creating your payments for all your recipients such as Rental Owners, Check-in Agents, Laundry Service, etc. as well as your own company or any other entity you need to transfer money to. When you have selected your recipient, the system will automatically start generating the Payment Report based on your previously defined Recipient Strategy. You will then see a Payment Draft that you can modify as you wish.
💡 Note: The actual payment transactions cannot be handled in the PM Modules.
Learn how to create payments for an accounting statement.
Understand the flow of the Owner statements module
As explained above, the Owner statementsmodule helps with the payments of anyone who takes part in the activity of the rental: from rental owners to providers, but in its essence, it is focused on the rental agency. This means that the account owner should be earning money from every rental accounted in a Statement. Therefore, the default strategy should only be used for the rental agency/account owner.
The following should give you a short overview of the steps you will need to take:
- Setup of the Owner statements module.
💡 Note: This is only done once when you add a rental or a recipient. - Create all your Recipients and set for each of them a strategy that reflects what they should earn.
- From here, you will be able to create your accounting Statements (with your chosen periodicity) by selecting the rental/s and the period you wish to account for.
- Once you have created the statement with the breakdown of all reservations/fees/services, create a Payment for each recipient that should earn from the given rental/s and a given period of time.
- Now you can make any necessary adjustments manually.