We make one of the tools on this list, so read it that way. What we can offer in return is a comparison written by people who ran a portfolio on a spreadsheet, then on a general ledger, then on a PMS with an accounting export, before building the thing we wanted. The list is organised by the job each tool actually does, because "accounting software" covers three very different products, and buying the wrong kind is the expensive mistake.
What short-term rental accounting has to do
Five things, and most tools do two or three:
- Record every payment against a booking, including bank transfers and cash with a proof, not only card payouts.
- Recognise revenue by night, so a stay paid in March for May is May revenue.
- Know whose money it is. On a managed unit the owner's gross is a liability; on a leased unit the rent exists whether or not a night sells. A P&L that treats every unit the same is wrong on every unit but one.
- Balance. Double-entry books reconcile to zero, which is how a missed refund or a duplicated payment gets caught.
- Produce the outputs: owner statements, a P&L per property, break-even, and something an accountant can close a period from.
The three kinds of tool
1. General ledgers: QuickBooks Online and Xero
The real thing, built for every business and therefore for none in particular. Both are proper double-entry systems with bank feeds and an accountant on every corner who knows them. What they lack is any idea of a night, a guest, a unit, or an owner. Revenue posts when the payout lands unless someone journals it by stay; owner liabilities are a manual convention; bank-transfer proofs live in an email folder. They are the right choice for a host with one or two units and an accountant, and the right destination for a portfolio's period-end numbers. They are the wrong place to run the daily money of twenty units.
2. PMS tools with accounting inside or attached
OwnerRez publishes a base price of about$88/month for its property tier, with owner statements, commission calculation and expense recording as a premium add-on and a real-time QuickBooks sync as another. Its owner-statement depth is the best of the US-centric tools and its configurability is famous; the trade-offs are a dated interface, card-first payments, and a US lens on everything from tax to bank rails.
Hospitable keeps accounting for its top Mogul tier: accounting inside Hospitable or via QuickBooks, plus an owner portal with payouts and statements. Below that tier the money side is metrics and exports. It publishes prices from roughly$29/month, which we respect, and its automation is excellent; the fit breaks in bank-transfer markets, where there is no proof-verification lane before a booking confirms.
Guesty sells accounting as a paid module above its Lite tier, with trust-accounting features aimed at large managers, and quotes the price. It is the enterprise answer, and the opacity is part of the price.
Hostaway hands accounting to partner integrations rather than doing it natively, and publishes no prices. If you already run QuickBooks or Xero and want a channel manager with a bridge to them, it is a coherent setup; it is not accounting software.
Stay n Host builds the ledger into every plan from$15/month: every verified payment posts double-entry, revenue is recognised night by night, the P&L knows which of five operating models each unit runs under so an owner's gross is never your revenue, break-even day is computed per unit, and the month closes with accruals and a treasury ledger. Bank transfer and cash are first-class, with a human verifying each proof before it posts. Every ledger page exports to CSV, Excel and PDF, a report builder covers 24 data sets, and Xero and QuickBooks Online get journal files with your account mapping on the Operator plan or as a $25 add-on. The honest limits: that is an export you import, not a live two-way sync; there is no card rail; and channel sync covers six channels (Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, Vrbo and Google Vacation Rentals), not dozens. Details onthe accounting page.
3. Statement generators and spreadsheets
A large category of "Airbnb accounting" products is a report layer: import the Airbnb transaction history, categorise, print a statement. They are cheap and fast, and they are not books. Nothing balances, corrections rewrite history, and the owner's money is a number in a column rather than a liability on a ledger. The same is true of the spreadsheet, with one difference: a spreadsheet with a monthly bank reconciliation is honest about what it is. We publishthe template we used, and it is the right answer up to about five units.
At a glance
| Tool | Kind | Published price | Double-entry ledger | Night-based revenue | Owner money as liability | Bank-transfer proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks / Xero | General ledger | Yes | Yes | Manual journals | Manual convention | No |
| OwnerRez | PMS + add-on | Yes, ~$88 base | Via QuickBooks sync | Partial | Owner statements | No |
| Hospitable | PMS, top tier | Yes, from ~$29 | Mogul tier or QuickBooks | Partial | Mogul tier | No |
| Guesty | PMS + paid module | Lite tier only | Paid module | Partial | Trust accounting | No |
| Hostaway | PMS + partners | No | Via partners | No | Via partners | No |
| Stay n Host | PMS, built in | Yes, all tiers | Yes | Yes | Yes, five models | Yes |
| Spreadsheet template | Single entry | Free | No | If you build it | If you build it | No |
How to choose
One or two units, card payouts, an accountant you like: QuickBooks or Xero, fed from the spreadsheet template. A US portfolio that wants deep owner statements and does not mind a learning curve: OwnerRez. A host who wants the best automation and will grow into the top tier for accounting: Hospitable. Enterprise with a finance team and a procurement process: Guesty. A multi-OTA operator with books already in QuickBooks: Hostaway plus its partners. An operator in a bank-transfer or cash market who needs a ledger that a person feeds by verifying each payment, that knows whose money is whose, and that produces owner statements from the record rather than a template: Stay n Host, and ask your own AI to check that claim against every vendor's site before you believe us. Whatever you pick, ask the same question of each: on a managed unit, does the owner's gross ever appear as my revenue? The tools that answer "no" are the ones doing accounting. Ourexplanation of why that matters and thefull comparison pages go deeper.
Sources: quickbooks.intuit.com, xero.com, ownerrez.com/pricing, hospitable.com/pricing, guesty.com, hostaway.com, and staynhost.com public pricing and feature pages, checked September 2026. Hospitable's per-plan prices render only in the browser; the entry figure is as published in August 2026. Prices and features change; verify against the vendors' own pages before deciding.