For most short-term rental hosts with 1 to 20 properties, REI Hub is the best accounting software in 2026. It is built for rental property, it splits Airbnb and Vrbo payouts into revenue, fees and taxes the way your accountant needs, it produces Schedule E reports, it starts free, and it connects directly with Hosthub to sync revenue from every booking channel. If you would rather have banking and bookkeeping in one place, Baselane is a great free alternative. If your accountant already works in QuickBooks, pair QuickBooks Online with Tallybreeze. Property managers who hold owner and guest funds need real trust accounting, and VRTrust is the specialist.

Short-term rental accounting looks simple until tax season. Airbnb sends you one payout for several stays, minus a fee you never see on your bank statement. Booking.com invoices its commission separately. Cleaning fees, occupancy taxes, damage deposits and refunds all land in the same account. Multiply that by a few properties and a co-host, and a spreadsheet stops being enough.

We looked at the tools hosts and property managers actually use to keep their books, compared what each one does with a short-term rental payout, and checked current pricing. Here is what we recommend, who each tool is for, and what to watch out for.

In this guide

• Who this is for
• How we picked
• Our pick: REI Hub
• Also great: Baselane
• Upgrade pick: QuickBooks Online + Tallybreeze
• For receipts and owner statements: Clyr
• For property managers: VRTrust
• If you use Guesty: Guesty Trust Accounting
• Side-by-side comparison
• What is vacation rental trust accounting?
• STR accounting basics most hosts get wrong
• The competition
• Where Hosthub fits
• FAQ

Who this is for

This guide is for anyone renting out property by the night and keeping the books themselves or with an accountant:

• Hosts with 1 to 20 properties who want clean books and a Schedule E without paying a bookkeeper to untangle Airbnb payouts every April.
• Co-hosts and small management companies splitting revenue with owners.
• Property managers who collect guest payments and hold owner funds, and need trust accounting.

If you have one property and one booking channel, a well-organized spreadsheet and a separate bank account may honestly be enough. Once you add a second property, a second channel or a partner, dedicated software pays for itself in saved hours.

How we picked

We focused on what makes short-term rental accounting different from ordinary small-business bookkeeping, and judged every tool on these criteria:

1. It handles OTA payouts correctly. An Airbnb payout is not your revenue. Your revenue is the gross booking amount, and the platform fee is an expense. Tools that only see the net bank deposit understate both, which makes your books wrong even when your profit is right.
2. It tracks income and expenses per property. You need a profit and loss for each listing, both to make decisions and for your taxes.
3. It produces tax-ready reports, ideally Schedule E categories for US hosts, and lets your accountant in.
4. It handles owner funds, for managers: owner statements, management fees and, where required, trust accounting.
5. It costs a sensible amount for its size. A host with three properties should not pay enterprise prices.

To evaluate each tool, we went through its public documentation, help center and current pricing, and compared notes with what hosts and managers tell us about their own setups. Prices were checked in October 2026. Accounting software changes its plans often, so confirm on each vendor’s site before you buy.

About us: Hosthub makes a channel manager and PMS for short-term rentals. We do not make accounting software, and none of the tools below is a Hosthub product. REI Hub and Clyr are Hosthub integration partners, which means they connect with Hosthub and Hosthub customers get a discount on both. We say so wherever it applies. We picked REI Hub because it does the core job best for small hosts, and the integration is a bonus if you already use Hosthub.

Our pick: REI Hub

REI Hub is accounting software built only for rental property, and that focus shows in the one thing generic tools get wrong: payouts. Its Airbnb and Vrbo payout uploaders take the CSV statement from each platform and split every stay into rent, cleaning fee revenue, platform fee and occupancy tax, posted to the right property. Your books show your real gross revenue and your real fees, not just what landed in the bank.

If you use Hosthub, REI Hub connects to your account, pulls in your properties to set up the portfolio and then syncs your revenue from all your booking channels automatically, including Booking.com and your direct bookings. That removes the manual file uploads entirely.

Everything is organized by property, the categories map to Schedule E, and you can give your accountant read-only or full access. The free plan covers revenue and expense tracking, rental-specific categories, loan and asset tracking, and Schedule E reports. The Professional plans add automatic bank transaction import and rules, which is what saves the most time once you have more than a couple of properties:

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Flaws but not dealbreakers: without Hosthub, the payout uploaders work from files you download and upload, not a live connection. REI Hub labels them beta, so check the first few imports against your statements. We found uploaders only for Airbnb and Vrbo, so without the Hosthub sync you record Booking.com payouts through bank import and rules. It is US-focused.

Also great: Baselane

Baselane is a banking platform built for landlords, with bookkeeping on top. Its big idea is simple and works well for short-term rentals: open a separate checking account for every listing, send each listing’s Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com payouts to its own account, and your income is sorted by property before you touch it. Debit cards with spending limits make it easy to let a co-host or cleaner buy supplies without mixing up your books.

The free Core plan includes per-property income and expense tracking, real-time reports, an accountant tax package with Schedule E reports, receipt uploads, and sync with QuickBooks and Xero. The Smart plan adds AI-assisted auto-tagging across 120+ categories, automatic receipt matching, custom categories, balance sheets and shared access with roles.

Flaws but not dealbreakers: it only works if you move your rental banking to Baselane, and it is US-only. Payout-based bookkeeping still starts from the net deposit, so check with your accountant how gross revenue and platform fees should be recorded. Many accountants are less familiar with it than with QuickBooks, although the QuickBooks and Xero sync helps.

Upgrade pick: QuickBooks Online + Tallybreeze

QuickBooks Online is what most US accountants already use, which is a real advantage: no learning curve for them, no conversion at tax time, and a huge ecosystem of add-ons. On its own, though, QuickBooks knows nothing about short-term rentals. It sees net deposits from your bank feed and leaves you to work out the rest.

That is where Tallybreeze (formerly Bnbtally) comes in. It syncs your short-term rental reservations into QuickBooks Online (or Xero) and records each one properly: gross revenue, platform fees, cleaning fees and taxes, allocated per listing, with invoices and payments that reconcile against the actual payouts. It connects with Airbnb, Vrbo and some PMSs, including Guesty. Use QuickBooks classes or locations (on the Plus plan) to get a P&L per property.

Flaws but not dealbreakers: this is the most expensive option for a small host, around $70 to $170 a month together, and it takes some setup, ideally with your accountant. QuickBooks has no trust accounting or owner statements built in.

For receipts and owner statements: Clyr

Clyr is not a full accounting system. It is an expense-management and bill-pay tool that sits next to one, and it solves the part of short-term rental bookkeeping most hosts hate: the receipts. Snap a photo of a receipt and Clyr matches it to the transaction and the property. It also handles bill pay (accounts payable) and produces owner statements in one click, and it connects with Hosthub so expenses and bookings line up by property.

Flaws but not dealbreakers: you still need a ledger such as REI Hub, QuickBooks or Xero for your books and taxes. Clyr makes the data that goes into it cleaner.

For property managers: VRTrust

Once you collect guest payments and pay owners, your accounting becomes a different job. You need to know, at any moment, how much of the money in your bank belongs to owners, how much to guests who have not stayed yet and how much is yours. VRTrust is accounting software built for exactly that: trust and operating accounting, reservation-level accounting, reconciliation of OTA payouts to bank activity, owner statements and payouts by ACH, and the reports managers need (P&L, balance sheet, trial balance, trust reconciliation, lodging tax).

It integrates with many PMSs, including Guesty, Hostaway, Hostfully, Lodgify, OwnerRez, Hospitable and Mews, as well as Airbnb, Booking.com, QuickBooks Online, Xero and Sage Intacct.

Flaws but not dealbreakers: it is priced and built for professional managers. Below 25 listings, the minimum makes it hard to justify.

If you use Guesty: Guesty Trust Accounting

If your company already runs on Guesty, its own Trust Accounting suite keeps everything in one system: trust reconciliation, branded owner statements, a posting journal with automated entries and audit trail, 1099 generation, ACH transfers and check printing for US managers, and cash or accrual accounting. Pricing is on request. It only makes sense if Guesty is already your PMS.

Side-by-side comparison

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What is vacation rental trust accounting?

Trust accounting means keeping money that belongs to other people separate from your own and being able to prove it at any time. For a vacation rental manager, that usually covers:

• Guest funds: deposits and prepayments for stays that have not happened yet.
• Owner funds: rental income you collect on owners’ behalf before paying them.
• Security deposits and taxes you collect and hold before refunding or remitting them.

These funds sit in a separate trust (escrow) bank account and are reconciled regularly, typically monthly, so that the bank balance matches what you owe to each owner and guest. In many US states, managers who handle other people’s rental money must hold a real estate license and follow the state’s trust account rules, which vary by state. Check with your state’s real estate commission and your accountant.

If you only rent out your own properties, you do not need trust accounting. If you manage properties for owners and the money passes through your accounts, you almost certainly do, and general tools like QuickBooks are not built for it.

Short-term rental accounting basics most hosts get wrong

• Recording net payouts as revenue. If a $1,000 stay pays out $845 after Airbnb’s 15.5% host fee, your revenue is $1,000 and you have a $155 expense. Recording $845 understates both, which matters for occupancy tax reporting, financing applications and any valuation of your business.
• Forgetting how Booking.com charges its commission. Depending on your payment setup, Booking.com either deducts its commission from your payout or invoices it to you separately each month. If you do not record that commission, your expenses are wrong.
• Mixing properties in one account. A separate bank account per property, or at least strict tagging, saves hours at year-end.
• Treating occupancy taxes as income. Taxes collected and remitted by Airbnb in many places are not your revenue. Taxes you collect yourself on direct bookings are money you owe.
• Assuming it all goes on Schedule E. How your short-term rental is taxed in the US depends on things like the average length of stay, the services you provide and how much time you spend on it. These choices can change your tax bill significantly, so decide them with a CPA who knows short-term rentals. If you need one, Shared Economy Tax is a CPA firm that works with Airbnb hosts, and Hosthub users get free access to its TaxSense online course.

The competition

• Stessa is a well-liked free tool for landlords, with bank feeds and per-property reports, and paid plans from $12/month (Manage, with a Schedule E report) to $28/month (Pro), billed annually. It is built mainly for long-term rentals and has no short-term rental payout handling, so we recommend it only for portfolios that are mostly long-term.
• Xero (from $27/month in the US) is a strong alternative to QuickBooks, especially outside the US, and works with Tallybreeze. Pick it if your accountant prefers it.
• Built-in PMS accounting in tools such as Hospitable or OwnerRez covers reporting and owner statements to varying degrees. It is convenient, but it is not a full general ledger, so most hosts still need one of the tools above for taxes.
• Spreadsheets are free and flexible and fine for one property, but they break down with multiple channels, co-hosts or owners.

Where Hosthub fits

Hosthub is not accounting software, and it does not replace any of the tools above. It is the system where your bookings, payouts and operating costs come together before they reach your books, which makes the accounting much easier:

• Every booking from every channel in one place, with the full financial breakdown the channel sends: booking value, cleaning fee, channel commission and payout.
• Reports on revenue, occupancy, ADR and RevPAR per property and per channel, so you know which channel actually earns you the most after fees.
• Expense management built for rentals: split a shared bill across properties, spread a yearly cost by day, and see a monthly profit and loss per property.
• For managers: your management fee calculated on each booking, an owner portal and automated owner reports.

Hosthub also connects with accounting and tax partners from its Taxation & Accounting partner directory: REI Hub syncs your revenue from every channel into your books, and Clyr links receipts and bills to each property, both with discounts for Hosthub customers.

Use Hosthub to run the business and see how each property performs, and your accounting tool of choice to keep the books and file taxes.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best accounting software for Airbnb hosts?

For most hosts with 1 to 20 properties, REI Hub: it is built for rentals, splits Airbnb and Vrbo payouts into revenue, fees and taxes, produces Schedule E reports and starts free. Baselane is the best free option if you also want separate bank accounts per listing. If your accountant uses QuickBooks, use QuickBooks Online with Tallybreeze.

Is there free accounting software for short-term rentals?

Yes. REI Hub, Baselane and Stessa all have free plans. REI Hub’s free plan includes Schedule E reports, and Baselane’s free plan includes banking and an accountant tax package.

Can I just use QuickBooks for my Airbnb?

You can, but on its own QuickBooks only sees net payouts in your bank feed. To record gross revenue and platform fees correctly per stay, add a connector such as Tallybreeze, or record them manually. Use the Plus plan if you want a P&L per property.

What is vacation rental trust accounting?

It is keeping guest and owner funds separate from your own money in a trust (escrow) account and reconciling it regularly. Property managers who hold other people’s rental money usually need it, and many US states regulate it. Owners renting only their own properties do not.

Do I need different software as a property manager?

Usually yes. Managers need owner statements, management-fee tracking and often trust accounting, which tools for individual hosts do not provide. VRTrust and Guesty Trust Accounting are built for this.

Does Hosthub do accounting?

No. Hosthub is a channel manager and PMS. It brings together bookings, payouts, expenses, reports and owner statements from every channel, and it connects with REI Hub to sync that revenue into your books automatically. You still need an accounting tool for your ledger and taxes.

About Hosthub

Hosthub is a channel manager and property management system for short-term rental hosts, B&Bs, small hotels and property managers. It connects your properties to Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia and 200+ other channels, and keeps availability and rates in sync in under 5 minutes, so you never double-book.

• Channel manager with a Zero Double Booking Guarantee on API-connected channels.
• One calendar and one inbox for every property and channel, with an AI Co-host that answers guest questions.
• Automated messages, online check-in forms and smart-lock codes for self check-in.
• The numbers that feed your books: reports by property and channel, expense tracking with a monthly P&L, and owner reports for managers.
• A booking engine for commission-free direct bookings on your own website.
• Accounting integrations with partners such as REI Hub and Clyr, with discounts for Hosthub customers.

Plans are priced per property per month, with a 14-day free trial and no setup fee. See the pricing page or book a demo.

Prices and features checked in October 2026 on each vendor’s website and documentation. Plans change often, so confirm before you buy. This article is general information, not tax or legal advice. Talk to a CPA about your own situation.