Airbnb income

spkrause

Does anyone know how I should handle Airbnb income? It changes from month to month. How should I reflect this in Simplifi?

DannyB

Hi @spkrause

Good question.  Looking forward to seeing the feed back from others who have the same situation as you.

Some questions:  Do you have separate banking accounts for your STR payouts or does it go into your regular personal account?  If it goes into an account connected to Simplifi how are you currently handling it?

Since Simplifi isn't set up to handle business accounting do you have some other way to handle that. 

I had a separate checking account for my STR income and I used a spreadsheet I created to handle my accounting from month to month and year to year.

DannyB

Welcome to Simplifi, @spkrause

I’ve been using this app since January as our personal budgeting app.  It’s name is significant - Simplifi.  It’s designed to focus on the Spending Plan month-to-month and not so much as a long term comprehensive financial management tool.  IMHO it does what it is designed to do very well and new features and abilities are added that are in alignment with it’s core usage.

Since your STR income is variable from month-to-month and arrives in your account “randomly” through the month you won’t be able to use any of the current recurring income presets.  When we had our rental listed as an STR I used Quicken’s Rental option which worked pretty good for tracking both payouts and expenses.  

For what it’s worth here are some of my ideas on how to get started:

1. Since your STR payouts comes in “randomly” and in varying amounts, you may have to edit each deposit once it is downloaded into Simplifi.  If you want to track this income you can create a Tag such as "Airbnb payout" or "STR" or some such.  That way you can create a Watchlist to track STR income and you should be able to pull reports that separate out your STR income and expenses to see how you’re doing.  However, an income watchlist will look “funny” so see this and add your vote if this feature would be helpful for you.
2. Recurring bills related to your STR will show up in your Bills and Subscriptions sub-sections (if you have anything you designate as a subscription for your STR). Again, you can use your STR tag when you set up these recurring bills.
3. In the Planned Spending Section you can create Categories for such expenses as amenities, house cleaning, supplies, and whatever other variable spending categories you might need. You’ll be able to set an amount to spend for these categories and you can change the amount in any given month based on your advanced bookings leading into a given month.  And again, if you want to run reports for these expenses you can add your STR tag to these expenses.
4. Right now, as you may have already discovered, there is no way to rollover funds from month-to-month to cover annual or semi-annual expenses.  There is a lot of discussion around this and many users hope the development team will figure out a way to include these types of expenses in the Spending Plan.  For now one work around is to use Savings Goals. Depending on how you are handling such things rental insurance, property taxes, income taxes, etc, you may want to set up Savings goals for these and choose to have contributions included in your Spending plan.  
5. Again, you may want to add a tag to identify anything to do with your STR for reporting and analysis purposes.

Once more, Simplifi is meant to be a personal budgeting app that focuses on the immediate month and may not work out for what you need, but with some thoughtfulness you may find it will work for you.

I’ll be interested in hearing how this goes for you

spkrause

@DannyB my STR payments go directly into my personal account. I'm brand-spanking-new to Simplifi so to answer your question, I'm still trying to figure this out.