See the true profit on every Airbnb and Vrbo stay
A full calendar feels like success — until you add up the year and can’t find the profit. The channel fee was bigger than it looked. A one-night booking paid one night of rent against a whole turnover. The cleaner, the supplies, and the lodging tax never got netted out. And tax time turned into a reconstruction from a dozen payout screens.
That’s not a hosting problem. It’s the business half of running a short-term rental — and it’s exactly what this workbook is for. One connected file turns your Airbnb and Vrbo payout reports and a phone full of cleaner texts into the numbers that matter: what each stay truly netted, which property actually pays, and where your money really goes across a year.
It works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice, and it ships with a ready-made native Google Sheets copy — open the included link, click Make a copy, and it’s in your Drive with every dropdown, formula, and calculated cell already set up. No import, no monthly subscription. You own the file.
What each stay really made — after the cut, the cleaner, and the tax
The Booking & Payout Log is the heart of it. Enter what the guest paid and a few costs, and it works out the channel fee, the payout that hits your account, the true net profit after the cleaner and supplies, the margin, and the lodging tax on the stay. Pick the listing and channel from dropdowns you set up once. No channel dashboard nets this out for you — because none of them know what you pay your cleaner.
- Channel fee profiles for Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and direct bookings — set the rate once, applied to every stay, so you see instantly why a returning direct-booking guest is the most profitable booking you can take.
- The one-night turnover trap, made visible — every stay costs a full turnover no matter how many nights it was, and the net-profit column shows you which short bookings quietly lose margin.
- Lodging / occupancy tax tracked per stay — estimated on every booking so you can see the liability and reconcile it against what a channel remits. It’s a pass-through, kept out of your profit.
Which listing actually pays — occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR
Nightly rate and occupancy each tell half the story. The Occupancy & RevPAR tab computes the three numbers the hotel industry runs on — occupancy, ADR (average daily rate), and RevPAR (revenue per available night) — plus net profit per listing, pulled from your bookings. RevPAR is the honest tiebreaker: it blends rate and how full the calendar is, so a high-rate, half-empty listing and a low-rate, always-full one can finally be judged on the same scale.
Tax-ready, without the January scramble
The Expense Log captures everything the booking log doesn’t — mortgage interest, insurance, utilities, repairs, property tax, furnishings — tagged by Schedule-E category. The Dashboard then rolls it all up: portfolio P&L, net profit by channel, and a Schedule-E year-end summary that folds your per-stay costs into the right tax lines automatically. Rents received minus every expense, line by line, already computed when the year ends.
The operations side, handled
A five-star cleanliness review is won at the turnover. The Turnover & Supplies tab holds a six-stage turnover checklist — depart and inspect, strip and launder, clean, restock, reset and stage, final check — that moves from dirtiest to cleanest so nothing gets missed and finished work never gets re-soiled. Print it for whoever cleans. The supplies par list tells you exactly what to reorder, so you never arrive to a turnover short on toilet paper or coffee. There’s a printable cleaner handoff sheet too.
What’s included
- A 7-tab workbook (.xlsx): Read Me, Setup, Booking & Payout Log, Expense Log, Occupancy & RevPAR, Turnover & Supplies, and a Dashboard — pre-loaded with illustrative example stays so nothing is blank.
- A one-click Google Sheets copy — the native version, no import needed.
- Five PDF guides: Start Here; Profit Per Stay & Payout; Occupancy, ADR & RevPAR; Expenses, Schedule-E & Lodging Tax (with a host glossary); and Printable Turnover & Supplies Sheets.
- READ-ME-FIRST.txt to orient you.
Evergreen and instant to download — the math and the method are timeless, and the logs use date columns you fill in yourself.
Own it, don’t rent it
This sits exactly where it should: between a blank spreadsheet (free, but you build everything) and a monthly channel-manager subscription (powerful, but overkill and rented forever). It’s structure you keep — a workbook that’s yours, that works offline, and that no one can switch off or raise the price on.
And when you outgrow a spreadsheet — several properties, a cleaning team, stock across them — it’s the same thinking, ready to graduate to Ardent Seller, the living version of this workbook, with a free plan to start.
A business and record-keeping reference — not licensed tax, accounting, or legal advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative; channel fees change and lodging-tax and income-tax rules differ by place and year, so enter your own current numbers and confirm how the rules apply to you. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, or any booking platform.
Try the free version first
Want a taste before you buy? The free STR Profit Calculator nets a single stay — enter the nightly rate, nights, cleaning, and the channel fee to see the monthly net and effective margin for one listing. The full workbook runs every stay, every property, and the whole year.
