Managing financial aspects for Short-Term Rental property management companies can be complex, especially when dealing with multiple bookings and various fees associated with them. Property managers often face challenges in keeping track of different types of fees and ensuring that each one is appropriately applied per booking. Without a proper system in place, this can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and difficulty in maintaining transparent bookkeeping. This is where Clearing steps in, offering a streamlined solution that allows property managers to efficiently create and manage fees per booking, ensuring accurate booking financials and better organization.

Clearing introduces a feature specifically designed to simplify financial management by allowing property managers to create and manage fees per booking with ease. This functionality automates fee management, saving time by automatically adding fees for each booking based on pre-set rules. It enhances financial visibility by offering a clear and organized view of fees within the booking details, making trust accounting and bookkeeping more transparent. With this feature, property managers can enjoy greater accuracy in tracking revenues, better organization of booking line items, and overall improved financial transparency.

Log in to Clearing and navigate to the "Rules" section from the left-hand menu. Click on "On Bookings", tab and then choose the “Fee per booking” option. This is where you will be able to create and manage rules related to your bookings.

Once in the “Fee per booking” section, you can click on the “Type of fee” dropdown to select the type of fee that will apply to each booking. Clearing offers four different types of fee per booking:

You can choose the fee type that best suits your booking financial need and proceed with defining the rules accordingly.

There are four main scenarios related to the “Type of fee”.

A percentage-based fee charges a percentage of the total booking value.

In the “Type of fee” section click on the dropdown arrow and select "Percentage based" from the fee type dropdown.

Name the rule for identification.

If you want this rule to work moving forward with all bookings, ensure the status is set to "Ongoing".

Think of this as an “If this, than that” type functionality. The items that gets isolated on the “if” side, drive the outcomes related to the “that” side of the functionality. In this case, the “that” side creates a new booking line under the booking details, filtered by the categories and metrics related to the “if” side.

The following are criteria that can isolate and trigger the occurrence of a fee to be added to the booking details:

After defining the criteria for when this will happen, move on to the booking line item and confirm the following outcome information:

The fee per booking creates a new booking line item that is a flat rate for each booking that the formula is applied to. Here, you'll also set the criteria to determine when the fee applies.

In the “Type of fee” section click on the dropdown arrow and select "Fee per booking" from the fee type dropdown.

All other steps for defining rules and booking line items are similar to Scenario 1, but instead of a percentage, you'll be entering a flat fee that gets added as a booking line item to the booking. For example, maybe you charge a $50 service fee on every booking for accounting purposes, but not through the booking channel itself.

For all other steps, refer to the criteria and output details from Scenario 1.

The “fee per night per booking”, does exactly as the name implies. It adds a booking line item as a fee for every night the reservation includes.

In the “Type of fee” section click on the dropdown arrow and select "Fee per night per booking" from the fee type dropdown.

All other steps for defining rules and booking line items are similar to Scenario 1, but instead of a percentage, you'll be entering a fee per night per booking which will show up as a new booking line item on the booking details.

For all other steps, refer to Scenario 1.

In this case, you can manually import fees from existing transactions.

In the “Type of fee” section click on the dropdown arrow and select "Import from transactions" from the fee type dropdown.

The criteria setup is similar to the other scenarios, but instead of defining a percentage or amount, you'll be importing fees manually or from the transaction tab once the booking line item is created. For all other steps, refer to Scenario 1.

Once you've set up the appropriate rules for the fee type you chosen, the fees will show up as booking line items in the booking details, ensuring that they are reflected in your trust accounting and financial reports.

To see this go into “Bookings” section in clearing, choose the particular booking you want to see, and click on “Open” option.

Now you will have a new window, scroll down to “Booking financials” where you can see the fee under the relevant “booking line type”.

If at any time you want to delete booking lines created with this formula, you can click the “Reset rule” button and it will remove each of them. Use caution when doing this. While you can always re-add the rule, it does take time to go through and create the rule or apply them.

Take advantage of Clearing’s powerful rule based automation to seamlessly create and manage fees on your bookings. Enjoy the benefits of automated fee management, improved financial visibility, and streamlined trust accounting.

Are you ready to take your financial management to the next level?

Sign up for a personalized demo and discover how to create and manage a fee per booking in Clearing.

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Clearing is a Financial Technology Company, not a bank. Deposit Accounts are issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, Member FDIC.