What your trade computes that others do not
The unit of management is the property, and the property is a profit centre in its own right. Its revenue arrives through several channels that do not bill the same way: commission withheld at source here, net payout there, tourist tax collected by the platform in one case and by you in the other. Adding up amounts that do not cover the same thing is the most common error in the trade, and it distorts every decision that follows.
Costs, meanwhile, are real and recurring: cleaning between stays, laundry, consumables, energy, internet, service charges, insurance, and the maintenance that arrives unannounced. Set against nights sold, they decide whether a studio with good occupancy really earns more than a flat let less often at a higher rate. Without that allocation, the trade-off is made on instinct.
On top sits an operational constraint a spreadsheet cannot carry: every departure triggers work that must happen before the next arrival. The cleaning schedule is not a task list, it is a time constraint between two bookings — and the day two departures and two arrivals collide in the same slot, the tool should flag it, not the guest.
What most operators work around by hand
The trade is simple to describe and hard to measure: that is where the time goes.
- Revenue from each platform is copied into a spreadsheet every month.
- A property's costs meet its revenue at year-end, if at all.
- The cleaning schedule is sent by message, and corrected by message.
- A maintenance job is not attached to any particular property.
- A property's profitability is a conviction, not a number.
- Nobody can say which property should be dropped.