Dashboard
Your rental's complete financial picture. One screen.
Open Rentalist on any day of the year and the Dashboard answers the question you actually have: how is my rental doing right now? Booked revenue, payments received, outstanding balances, YTD expenses, and net income — pulled automatically from your bookings and expenses, no configuration required.
Overdue payments surface in red with the guest name, amount, and how many days past due. Occupancy tax deadlines appear as colored banners — red for overdue, amber for due soon, blue for upcoming. Problems don't hide until it's too late to address them.
- Operating P&L vs. Cash Flow
- Toggle between two views of your expenses. Operating P&L excludes capital improvements and mortgage principal — it shows the business. Cash Flow includes everything except mortgage principal — it shows what actually moved.
- Upcoming bookings
- Next arrivals with guest contact info and payment status visible at a glance.
Booking Management
Every booking's full financial detail, in one place
Every reservation is tracked from signing through post-stay. Guest information, dates, rate, fees, occupancy tax, security deposit, payment schedule — all in a single record. The payment tracking alone replaces the most error-prone part of spreadsheet management: manually calculating who has paid and who hasn't.
Payments pre-populate from the schedule you configure in Settings. The system handles split payments, last-minute booking rules, security deposit returns, and cancellations with full financial impact tracking — retained amounts, tax implications, refunded amounts.
- OTA booking support
- Simplified form for Airbnb and VRBO bookings showing estimated payout. Platforms that remit occupancy tax are automatically excluded from STR Tax tracking.
- Gap week display
- Unbooked weeks between reservations appear automatically with available pricing. Click any gap to create a booking for that date range.
- Returning guest feature
- One-click to carry a guest forward to next year. Holiday anchor logic maps their dates to the correct week, even when holidays fall on different days.
- Up to three properties
- Each property gets its own bookings, expenses, pricing, and analytics. An "All Properties" view shows your combined portfolio. Add properties in Settings — clone an existing one to save setup time.
Expenses & Tax Preparation
Every expense already in the right category at tax time
Twenty-two built-in expense categories, each pre-mapped to the corresponding IRS rental property deduction category. Enter a cleaning expense under Cleaning, and it flows automatically to Schedule E. No sorting at year end. No guessing which category applies to a propane delivery.
The Tax Summary export — a single PDF with every expense, correctly categorized and totaled by deduction type — is what you hand your accountant. Custom categories can be added and assigned to any IRS category or marked non-deductible.
- STR Tax Payments
- Tracks occupancy tax collection and remittance deadlines by period. Configurable frequency (monthly, quarterly, annually), calculation basis, and due day. Dashboard banners remind you before deadlines pass.
- Year locking
- Prior years lock automatically to prevent accidental changes. Unlock with confirmation when needed.
Pricing Planner
What to list on each platform so you net what you're targeting
If you list at $4,800 on Airbnb, you net $4,056 after their 15.5% commission. The Platform Pricing Calculator reverses this math automatically — enter your target net rate and it calculates the list price for each platform, rounded up to the next whole dollar, for every week of your season.
The Pricing Planner also handles year-over-year duplication with holiday anchor logic. Memorial Day doesn't fall on the same week every year. The anchor system maps your peak-week pricing to the right weeks in the new year, flags conflicts, and lets you resolve them before committing.
- Excel export — 5 tabs
- Airbnb horizontal scroll (365-column daily calendar), Airbnb granular instructions, Airbnb simple instructions, VRBO monthly calendar, VRBO simple instructions. Exact numbers to enter on each platform.
- Platform support
- WNAV (WeNeedAVacation), Airbnb Host-Only (15.5%), Airbnb Split-Fee (3%), VRBO Pay-Per-Booking (8%), VRBO Subscription (3%), and custom platforms with configurable commission rates.
Financial Analytics
Five years of performance on one chart
Multi-year revenue trends, expense trends, occupancy rates, booking source breakdowns, and profitability analysis — all in a single section, with plain-English explanations of what each chart means and what to look for.
Import your historical spreadsheet data during setup and the analytics reach back as far as your records do. Every chart has an "Understanding this chart" panel that explains the data without assuming accounting knowledge.
- Budget vs. Actuals
- Real-time comparison of budgeted amounts to actual spending, with no false monthly pacing. If you buy all your supplies in April, the system doesn't penalize January through March for "underspending."
- Guest Insights
- Repeat guest rate, booking pace vs. prior year at the same point in time, inquiry conversion funnel, and open week pricing urgency analysis.
Contacts & Marketing
Your guest history, filtered and exported in under a minute
Every guest who has booked or inquired is in Rentalist's contact database, enriched automatically from booking records: number of stays, years visited, party size, booking source, pet fee history, and more.
The Mailing Lists builder lets you filter any combination of stay year, month, booking source, minimum stays, minimum party size, and pet fee history — then export a CSV that drops directly into any email marketing tool. A guest who books direct because you reached out in February costs you nothing in platform commissions.
- Guest Directory
- Auto-populated via Sync from Bookings. Sortable, filterable, expandable rows. Includes "not welcome back" flag, unsubscribed flag, and notes. Unsubscribed contacts are always excluded from mailing list exports.
- Inquiries
- Tracks rental inquiries from first contact through conversion or loss, with stale detection for inquiries older than 7 days without a response.