Most Airbnb bookkeeping templates are a list of payouts with an expenses tab bolted on. They look fine in March and are useless in December, because nothing on them ever had to agree with the bank. This is the template we used before we built software, rebuilt here so you can copy it into Excel or Google Sheets in ten minutes. It has four sheets, one rule, and a monthly routine that takes twenty minutes. No download is needed: every column is listed below.
What does a bookkeeping template for Airbnb actually need?
Four things, and most free templates have two of them:
- Gross, fee, and net on every booking. A guest paid 500, Airbnb kept its host fee, you received the rest. Three numbers, not one.
- Every expense against a property and an account. "Cleaning" is not an account. "Cleaning, Unit 2B, paid to Sana, receipt 0412" is a record.
- A bank reconciliation. Once a month, the sheet's closing balance must equal the bank statement. If it does not, something is missing, and you find it now instead of next April.
- Revenue by month the stay happened, not the month the money landed. A booking paid in March for a stay in May is May revenue. Without this, your busy months look empty and your quiet months look rich.
The four sheets
Sheet 1: Bookings
One row per reservation. These are the columns, in order:
| Column | Example | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Booking code | HMABC123 | Ties the row to Airbnb's transaction history |
| Property | Unit 2B | Everything is per property; totals come later |
| Channel | Airbnb / Direct / Walk-in | Fees differ by channel |
| Guest | A. Khan | Refunds and disputes need a name |
| Check-in | 2026-05-03 | Revenue month is decided here |
| Check-out | 2026-05-07 | Nights = check-out minus check-in |
| Nights | 4 | A formula, never typed |
| Gross | 500.00 | What the guest paid |
| Channel fee | 15.00 | What Airbnb kept |
| Cleaning fee collected | 40.00 | Pass-through, tracked separately |
| Net payout | 485.00 | What arrived in the bank |
| Payout date | 2026-05-04 | The date to reconcile against |
| Status | Paid / Refunded / Cancelled | A refunded booking stays on the sheet |
The one rule of the whole template: a cancelled or refunded booking is never deleted. Change its status, add a negative refund row on the Bank sheet, and leave the history alone. A sheet you can quietly rewrite is a sheet nobody can trust, including you.
Sheet 2: Expenses
One row per cost: date, property, account (from the chart below), payee, amount, payment method (bank, cash, card), receipt reference, and a fixed-or-variable flag. That last flag is the one people skip and the one that matters most. Rent, internet, and insurance are fixed: they exist whether or not a single night sells. Cleaning, laundry, and consumables are variable: they scale with stays. Separating them is what lets you compute break-even later.
Sheet 3: Bank
Every movement on the business bank account, in and out, with a reference back to the Bookings or Expenses row it belongs to. At the bottom, an opening balance, the sum of movements, and a closing balance. This is the sheet that keeps the other two honest.
Sheet 4: Monthly summary
Formulas only. For each property and month: nights sold, revenue recognised by stay month, channel fees, variable costs, fixed costs, and the result. Occupancy is nights sold divided by nights available. Average nightly rate is revenue divided by nights. If a number on this sheet is typed rather than calculated, the sheet is broken.
A chart of accounts for short-term rentals
Keep it short. Twelve accounts cover a small portfolio and your accountant will thank you for not inventing forty.
| Account | Type | Fixed or variable | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accommodation revenue | Income | n/a | Nightly rate, recognised by stay month |
| Cleaning fee revenue | Income | n/a | What the guest paid for cleaning |
| Channel fees | Cost | Variable | Airbnb host fee, payment processing |
| Cleaning and laundry | Cost | Variable | Turnover cleans, linen |
| Consumables | Cost | Variable | Toiletries, coffee, water |
| Utilities | Cost | Mostly fixed | Electricity, gas, water, internet |
| Rent or mortgage interest | Cost | Fixed | Leased units: the rent you pay |
| Repairs and maintenance | Cost | Variable | The AC technician, the plumber |
| Furniture and equipment | Asset | n/a | Anything that lasts more than a year |
| Insurance and licences | Cost | Fixed | Annual, spread monthly |
| Owner payouts | Liability | n/a | Managed units only: money that was never yours |
| Owner drawings | Equity | n/a | What you took out for yourself |
The account most templates lack is Owner payouts. If you host a unit for somebody else, their share of the gross is not your income. It sits in your bank as a liability until you pay it over, and your revenue is only the commission. Booking it as income overstates your business every single month and produces a tax bill on money you never kept. We wrote more about this inwhy rental businesses need double-entry books.
The monthly close, in twenty minutes
- Day 1: export. Download the month's transaction history from Airbnb and your bank statement.
- Day 1: reconcile. Every payout on the Airbnb export has a row on Bookings and a line on Bank. Every bank line has a source. The closing balance on the Bank sheet equals the statement. Anything that does not match is a task, not a shrug.
- Day 2: expenses. Enter the month's receipts. Photograph each one; the reference column points at the photo.
- Day 2: read the summary. Occupancy, average nightly rate, variable cost per stay, and the month's result per property. Write three sentences about what changed and why. Next year you will be glad you did.
- Lock it. Duplicate the workbook, name it with the month, and never edit the copy. Corrections go in the next month as their own rows.
When does the spreadsheet stop being enough?
A template like this works until one of four things happens. You manage a unit for an owner and need a statement that stands up to their accountant. You take bank transfers and cash, and matching proofs to bookings becomes a daily chore. A second person starts entering data and the sheet stops having one author. Or you cross roughly ten units and the twenty-minute close becomes a weekend. At that point you want the same structure as a ledger that cannot fall out of balance, recognises revenue night by night on its own, and knows which operating model each unit runs under. That is whatStay n Host's accounting does, and the bookings sheet above is the exact shape its spreadsheet importexpects, with column mapping, a row preview, and a rollback. Keep the template until then. It is a good one.