Basic property information — name, address, property type (beach, ski, mountain, urban, cultural), week start day, and active rental season dates. Also includes backup settings to safeguard your data. Week start day is set per property.
Configure standard fees (cleaning, pet, linen, custom) and occupancy tax settings:
- Tax rate
- Remittance frequency (monthly, quarterly, annual)
- Due day
- Calculation basis (by arrival, departure, or spread across stay)
- Cancellations — whether money you keep from a cancelled booking is taxed by default (overridable per cancellation)
How you collect payment from guests — number of payments, timing, security deposit handling, and last-minute booking threshold.
Which booking platforms you use (Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, WNAV, Other) and their commission rates. For each platform, indicate whether they remit occupancy tax on your behalf.
Seasons form a chain across the year — every day belongs to exactly one season, separated by boundaries. A boundary can be a fixed date, the week of a holiday (so it follows the holiday each year), the Nth full week of a month, or an offset from a holiday. A year-wrap option keeps a winter season whole across December–January. Seasons drive Plan Next Year's per-season percentage adjustments and mark weeks that are closed to guests. The app checks your boundaries up to 10 years ahead and warns you (amber) or blocks you (red) if a moving boundary would fall out of order in a future year.
How weekly rates distribute across days. Default weights weekends higher (Friday 22%, Saturday 23%), but you can customize. Used when applying nightly weighting in booking pricing.
Holiday and custom anchor weeks for year-over-year pricing mapping. Anchors ensure holidays like Memorial Day map to Memorial Day next year, not a fixed calendar date. You can remove built-in holidays you don't use (removals persist between sessions), and "Reset to Defaults" restores them — but note that doing so also removes any custom anchors you've added.
Add custom categories, hide ones you don't use, and exclude categories from budget tracking. Custom categories can map to any existing IRS deduction category or "Other." If you manage multiple properties, see the Managing Multiple Properties section for details on adding properties, cloning settings, and settings mirroring.
Rentalist backs up automatically on a schedule, and you can also make a manual backup anytime from the property tab in Settings. A backup is a single portable file containing all your data.
Restoring returns the app to the exact state of that backup. Before it does, the app shows you every category of data that will change. Contacts, inquiries, and saved mailing-list filters can be merged with what you have now; bookings, expenses, budgets, and settings are always restored exactly, not merged. A safety copy of your current data is saved automatically before any restore, so a restore can always be undone.