Just as it is to run a hotel, STR business means more than making certain that guests are informed of their rights to a hassle-free stay. It has to be done with a lot of financial sanity. In addition to its variances in revenues, seasonal and fixed expenses make the management of cash flow a difficult task.

This is where specialized tools such as Baselane comes in handy, by having all the banking and book keeping needs in one package. Some of these tools can give such hosts an accurate, real-time inside look at how their businesses are running, and by automating many aspects of financial management, they can do so without investing a lot of time in manually crunching numbers.

If you are overwhelmed with receipts or even manually running the expenses or you barely understand where the money goes, it is high time to look at how the modern account will help manage your business.

In this paper, a variety of questions has been asked regarding the finances of STR.
Gig economy short-term rental business owners have specific financial dynamics that distinguish them from conventional property owners. The list of guests’ payments, cleaning services, utilities, and repair – planned and emergency – can only turn into an endless list. For those who are in the business of managing many properties, it becomes even harder.

Using excel or other off the shelf accounting tools limits you to having to spend time keying and sorting data which can be so much more effectively used in expanding the business. Automation has the potential of turning all that around by making bookkeeping more efficient faster, easier and much more accurate.

The Automation of Bookkeeping for Efficiency

Employing this vision for bookkeeping doesn’t have to be a second job. Such apps as Baselane connects with users’ bank statements and the platforms where you manage your apartment rentals for instance, the app does the repetitive work.

In contrast to other accounting programs which have pre-set categories that may be difficult to change and which are, anyway, often of only general applicability, Baselane has been developed with more than 120 expense categories that are specific for real estate business. The functionality allows every money-charge from guest refunds to property repairs, which include marketing expenses, to be categorized and allocated to the correct property.

This streamlined process helps STR owners:

Get rid of having to do all the calculations all over again by hand.
Get immediate insight into performance in the financial aspect of the business.
Spend more time on how to further grow their business.
As with any multiple transaction processing, automation is the order of the day, greatly enhancing accuracy while saving time.

Real-Time Financial Insights

This is especially so if cash flow management goes beyond mere balancing of income and expenses and is more generally represented by the financial situation of any enterprise at any point of time. Such platforms like Baselane afford you real time information on all aspects, meaning that you can work with immediate updates of all parameters in all the properties you own.

Interested in knowing how much return on investment a particular building is making once the costs are considered? What if you have to overdraft your budget in the middle of a particular season to cater for some expenditure?. Getting timely updates ensures that one is able to manage the finances well since there will be no surprise encounters yet which would be very expensive to handle.

Simplifying Tax Season

Accounting and, in particular, the process of preparing taxes are one of the main issues that STR hosts experience, especially if the costs are dispersed across properties, and categories. As it is discussed in this SocSci paper, there are special tools for accountants to provide detailed organization of all your financial affairs throughout the year.

With Baselane, creating a complete, categorized tax package can be done with the click of a button to present to your accountant. This avoids thesteller in rushing around at the last minute looking for the relevant financial data from all over the place.

Homework; Integrated Banking for STR Hosts

Apart from being an accounting solution, Baselane provides banking services for rental property owners under the service’s umbrella. This way more and more hosts will prefer having banking and bookkeeping in one place and decrease the number of tools they have to use.

With this integration, you can:

Record every transfer involving property in one place.
Minimizing the period it takes in comparison of income and expenditure.
Enjoy property loan and other property related insurance services provided with flexibility.
This methodology is easy to implement, especially for the hosts, who have multiple properties and income sources.

Why Baselane Stands Out

Baselane’s features are designed specifically for the needs of STR hosts:

• Automated expense tracking: Segment transactions without additional steps, with property assignment on categorization.
• Customizable dashboards: Work within a single screen and see your cash flow at all the properties.
• Real-time reporting: Stay informed and make decisions with real time information.
• Integrated banking: All your rental finances contained within one single virtual account with unlimited virtual cards.
  This is especially so if you are already a well-experienced host; or even otherwise, as a novice host, employing such tools that ease or delegate your financial jobs will be most beneficial to you. With Baselane, you can worry less about the financial aspect of it and focus more on the guests experience.

Dynamics of smarter financial management will improve the short-term rental business as noted down below.