Your Short-Term Rental Chart of Accounts: A Template That Works
The structure decides everything downstream
A chart of accounts is just the list of buckets your money goes into — income here, expenses there, liabilities somewhere else. It sounds like a formality, but it quietly decides what your books can ever tell you. Get the structure right and your P&L answers real questions: what each platform costs, which property earns most, how much of your revenue is cleaning. Get it wrong and you spend every tax season untangling a single "Rental Income" account that lumps everything together.
This guide gives you a chart of accounts template built for short-term rental hosts, explains why each split earns its place, and shows how Airflow files every booking into the right accounts automatically. It is part of our wider guide to accounting for short-term rentals.
The mistake of one big income account
Most hosts start with a single income account and a vague pile of expenses. It works for ten bookings a year. It collapses the moment you want to know anything specific — because once accommodation, cleaning, extras and platform fees are mixed together, no report can separate them again without manual surgery.
The whole point of a chart of accounts is to keep distinct kinds of money distinct as they are recorded, so that distinction is available forever afterwards. The cost of splitting is a few extra accounts; the cost of not splitting is recreating the detail by hand, repeatedly, under deadline.
The income accounts
Keep your different revenue streams separate. They can carry different tax treatment, and you will want to report on them independently.
| Account | What it holds | Why separate |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation Income | Nightly rate × nights | Your core revenue; may differ in tax treatment |
| Cleaning Fee Income | Cleaning charged to guests | Often taxed differently; useful to track against cleaning costs |
| Extras / Add-ons Income | Late checkout, equipment hire, experiences | Lets you see ancillary revenue on its own |
| Direct Booking Income | Bookings taken on your own site | Higher margin; worth isolating to see the channel mix |
Keeping accommodation and cleaning apart is the split hosts skip most and regret most — your accountant needs it, and it lets you check whether cleaning fees actually cover your cleaning costs.
The expense accounts
This is where the host-specific detail lives. A generic chart misses most of these.
- Platform Commission — one per platform. Airbnb Commission, Booking.com Commission, VRBO Commission. Splitting by platform shows you what each channel really costs, which is the foundation of any direct-booking decision. We go deep on this in tracking OTA commissions as expenses.
- Cleaning & Turnover. What you pay cleaners, against the cleaning fee income above.
- Maintenance & Repairs. Fixes, replacements, wear and tear.
- Utilities. Power, water, internet, where you cover them.
- Insurance. Property and liability cover.
- Supplies & Consumables. Toiletries, linens, welcome items.
- Software & Subscriptions. Your tools, including accounting and any channel manager.
- Payment Processing Fees. Card and processor costs on direct bookings.
- Professional Fees. Accountant, bookkeeper, legal.
The recurring theme is that platform commission is an expense, not a reduction of income. Record gross revenue and the fee as a cost, and your P&L stays honest. Net it out and both your revenue and your costs disappear. More on that in why your payouts don't match your invoices.
The liability and holding accounts
Some money that passes through your accounts is not income at all, and it needs its own home.
- Damage Deposits Held. A refundable damage deposit is a liability, not revenue — you are holding the guest's money, and you owe it back unless you make a claim. Booking it as income overstates your earnings and creates a mess when you refund. We unpack this in cleaning fees, deposits and taxes: where do they go?.
- Occupancy / Tourist Tax Collected. Where you collect a local tax from guests to remit onward, it is a liability until you pay it over, not your income.
- VAT / Sales Tax Control. If you are registered, tax collected and reclaimable tax flow through their own control accounts.
Mixing these into income is one of the most common and most distorting errors hosts make, because it inflates revenue with money that was never yours to keep.
Tag by property, not just by account
If you run more than one property, your chart of accounts alone is not enough — you also want a way to slice every account by property, so you can produce a clean P&L per unit. Most accounting packages do this with tracking categories, classes or locations rather than by duplicating accounts.
The payoff is real: you find out which property actually makes money once its own cleaning, maintenance and platform fees are charged against its own income. We cover the setup in multi-property short-term rental accounting, and the Xero-specific account codes in Xero short-term rentals setup.
How Airflow files bookings into the right accounts
A chart of accounts only helps if every booking lands in the right buckets — and that is exactly the discipline that slips when you are entering invoices by hand at speed.
You forward a booking email, or connect Gmail or Outlook so new bookings are picked up automatically. Airflow's extractor reads the email and pulls out the guest, dates, nightly rate, cleaning fee, platform service fee, payout, currency and reference. From that it builds a draft invoice in your accounting software with:
- Accommodation, cleaning and extras posted to their own income accounts
- Platform commission posted to its expense account, not netted away
- Damage deposits and collected taxes kept out of income where applicable
- Correct tax treatment per line, and the property tagged so per-property reports work
- Currency converted at invoice time with the rate, source and timestamp logged
Every invoice lands as a draft you review and approve — nothing posts automatically. Because the mapping is consistent, your accounts stay clean by default rather than by heroic effort each spring. Airflow works with Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and FreshBooks.
Build it once, benefit all year
A good chart of accounts is a half-hour decision that pays off every month afterwards. Set up the income, expense, liability and per-property structure once, keep each booking mapped to it consistently, and your books answer the questions that actually drive the business — what each channel costs, what each property earns, and what you genuinely owe at year end.
For the wider context, read the complete short-term rental accounting guide, and when filing season arrives, getting your books ready in a weekend shows how a clean structure turns tax prep into a review.
Get started — early access includes 3 months free. Connect your accounting software, forward a booking email, and watch each line land in the right account. A card is required at checkout, with no charge during the free period.