7 effective ways to maintain the accounting of your tourist rental

The accounting needs of hotels and tourist rental services are different from any other commercial sector. Why? Because there is no doubt that guest satisfaction is fundamental in accounting, as an operational part of the business. Keeping good control will avoid unexpected problems, and ensure your efficiency and performance. Maximize your results, take care of your brand reputation and improve the satisfaction of your customers, suppliers and staff with these keys. Here we tell you 7 effective ways to keep the accounting of your tourist rental.

1. Automate processes to the maximum

It's possible that today your accounting for your tourist rental or hotel business is being affected by unnecessary expenses or tasks that are reducing the effectiveness of your staff. If you have a good tool and dynamics, which gives you maximum productivity, you will be able to ensure excellent performance. Running with a full schedule for your entire team will prevent you from seeing opportunities, anticipating problems, and maximizing productivity in a sustainable way. Therefore, it's essential to rely on technology as much as possible. You need to reserve hours to attend to clients, resolve potential incidents, work on the interpersonal relationship of your employees, and of course, on marketing, innovation, and crisis management. Therefore, it's convenient to have systems that allow for a global and integrated vision of the business, improving the agility of processes, and more. For example, do you think there are meetings that can be resolved with a weekly email? It's also possible that some emails can be avoided with the use of a task management program or with a more agile internal communication dynamic. If you want to avoid the problems inherent in key management, you can install the

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Whether it's managing accommodation or controlling the food in each tenant's fridge, towels, sheets or cleaning supplies, you need a practical management system to give you the necessary professionalism. All these aspects influence the guest's experience, and will make the difference in their final experience, in the reputation of your brand and in the re-hiring rate.There are computer programs that include stock management, from a basic POS to more advanced software like Salesforce for example. The important thing is to choose an agile methodology that allows you to carry out comfortable and fluid management, both in periods of low work pace and in peak occupancy.

3. Avoid surprises of unexpected expenses

Unexpected expenses can ruin your vacation rental business, and that's why it's ideal to be able to make forecasts. To do this, it's key to take notes and be able to have repeated patterns of fixed expenses and even to a large extent variable ones. A good online billing program can be a good tool so that you don't lose perspective at any time on how your company's numbers are. Ideally, you can carry out such an exhaustive control that allows you to detect patterns of repeated expenses, as well as possible productivity peaks, timely resource needs and more. The more global vision the program you use offers you, the less you will need to go into detail or waste time on calculations. This is important because the time invested in accounting has a direct impact on it, subtracting productive time for other necessary tasks in the business that impact its efficiency.

4. Comply with all legal obligations

It won't do you any good to keep impeccable accounting if a legal problem can ruin your business. Don't neglect essential bureaucratic aspects, keep your employees in line, check the security of your facilities and more. Make sure you make the correct payment of services on time, keep good track of taxes, municipal records, tourist license, staff papers, electronic invoicing and price competitiveness. You won't want to lose the benefits of your tourist rental paying lawyers or compensation for damages to a client who can sue you, or even an employee. In addition, taking care of all the legal issues will give you security, confidence and reliability as a company. The more transparency you can offer, the better for your brand reputation, and for sleeping well at night. If necessary due to lack of time or knowledge, and if you have the resources for it, the ideal is to hire a recurring legal service. Nothing like having an expert with legal knowledge who can supervise, advise and manage. This way you will avoid possible complications, gain time and above all a lot of tranquility.

5. Secure cash flow for your business

Invoices from suppliers can be very expensive, but there is no worse invoice than the one you will receive for the lack of cash if you don't protect yourself from it. Avoid paying an irreversible price for a cash flow problem. Otherwise, it could be critical to the success of your tourist rental business, directly affecting performance and customer experience. A possible time interval without cash could lead to a deterioration in the professionalism that your business needs. Prevention is better than cure, so a good practice to keep your tourist rental accounting up to date is to finance invoices. In this way, you can optimize your cash flow avoiding unpleasantness. Thus, with this point guaranteed, your management can focus on adding value, seeing creative solutions, generating more efficient processes and even enjoying your profession. One solution is factoring, which allows you to obtain discount lines on invoices and promissory notes. You can also opt for confirming, that is, the comprehensive management of payments to suppliers.

6. Don't exhaust your resources to the limit

In tourist rentals, it is always convenient to have a certain margin for unforeseen situations. For example, it is always convenient to have a free apartment, space or room. If you have a tourist rental business with enough capacity to make a profit, beyond staying afloat, try to reserve an Ace up your sleeve. You never know if you may have a unique opportunity, such as offering a VIP service to an exclusive client. What could you offer if that were the case? It's worth having a solution for those occasions, which could bring you extra benefits and an additional point of cache to the company. On the other hand, having a margin of rooms or apartments is key for hotels and tourist rental businesses. Otherwise, it's possible that any problem could ruin the satisfaction of a customer or your reputation. Do you have a Plan B if a customer complains about a problem in one of your rental spaces? The same thing happens with other resources that it's convenient to have always above the necessary, such as those linked to customer service. What happens if a customer has stained their towels and needs replacements ahead of time? You can't have everything at the limit, because you may not be able to respond in these cases. The ideal is to differentiate between perishable and non-perishable goods. For example, having a set of sheets or shower gel paralyzed in stock will not cause you losses. On the other hand, if you don't control the stock of food with an expiration date well, you could have financial losses.

7. Optimize your costs

Beyond improving control of your fixed or variable costs, take advantage of the quieter times at work in your business to reduce unnecessary expenses. The first step is to be clear about which expenses are essential for the profitability of the business and which are optional. Prioritizing is essential to make strategic decisions that make you much more competitive.On the other hand, you could also look for more economical suppliers, better prices for buying packs and others. There are also companies willing to negotiate certain costs, so it's all about doing the math and seeing possible reductions in spending. On the other hand, it's possible that you're overloading your employees with unnecessary work, or that you have unproductive staff. Improving in this sense can have a direct impact on your business profits.Analyze carefully which employees are reporting more profitability to the business, and which are less. Beyond the decisions you can make with them, also taking into account the human factor, you can't stop analyzing in detail the performance of each one and the expenses involved in maintaining their position, as well as the seniority of the staff and so on.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a series of steps, measures, and tools that you can implement in your vacation rental business to improve performance. Make sure your team is well-trained in following protocols and, where applicable, in using the technology incorporated into the business. Take advantage of slower periods to provide this training and define all processes, as well as improve internal communication in general. Good luck and much success!

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