How do I do bookkeeping for my Airbnb rental?
Start with a dedicated bank account for your rental income and expenses. Mixing Airbnb deposits with personal transactions makes tracking impossible and creates headaches at tax time. One account per rental business keeps everything clean, even if you have multiple properties flowing into it.
The biggest confusion in Airbnb bookkeeping is income recording. Guests pay $200 per night, but Airbnb takes their 3% host fee before depositing the rest. Your bank shows $194, but Airbnb’s 1099-K at year end shows $200. If you only record what hits your bank, you’ll have a mismatch with the IRS form.
Record the gross booking amount as income and the Airbnb service fee as a separate expense. This matches what the 1099-K reports and gives you visibility into how much you’re actually paying in platform fees. Your accounting software can track both with the right setup.
Expense categories for vacation rentals differ from regular rental properties. Beyond the usual mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and utilities, you’ll track cleaning costs between guests, guest supplies like toiletries and coffee, linens and towels, listing photography, and minor repairs. Furniture and larger purchases get depreciated over time rather than expensed immediately.
If you operate multiple properties, track income and expenses separately for each one. In QuickBooks, you can use classes or projects to tag every transaction to a specific property. This tells you which rental is actually making money and which one is breaking even after you account for all the real costs. A bookkeeper for small business owners can set this up correctly from the start.
New Mexico requires Gross Receipts Tax on vacation rental income. The rate varies by location within the state, and Santa Fe has additional lodgers’ tax on top of GRT. These aren’t optional and need to be filed regularly. Missing GRT filings creates penalties that add up quickly.
Reconcile your Airbnb payouts monthly. Match each deposit to the corresponding reservation in your host dashboard. Airbnb sometimes adjusts payouts for cancellations, damage claims, or resolution center cases. If you’re not reconciling regularly, you won’t catch discrepancies until they’re old and hard to research.
Keep receipts for everything, especially items under $75 that you might think don’t matter. Cleaning supplies, replacement towels, and small repairs add up to meaningful deductions over a year. A photos folder on your phone synced to cloud storage works fine for capturing receipts as purchases happen.
Vacation rental operators in Northern New Mexico face specific requirements that generic bookkeeping advice misses. Between GRT filing, lodgers’ tax, and the seasonality of the Santa Fe market, your books need to account for local realities. Getting the system right early saves hours of cleanup later.
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