Basic property information — name, address, property type, week start day, and backup settings. Week start day is set per property, because a Saturday-to-Saturday beach house and a Sunday-changeover ski condo shouldn't have to agree.
It's also where you decide how much the app speaks up: which weeks the open-week alerts watch, whether the pricing reminder appears at all, and whether Rentalist reads inquiries from this property's booking inbox (see Inquiries from Email). All per property, all reversible.
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)
A rate with a date on it
Tax rates change, and one stored number would quietly misstate your past. So a rate here comes with the date it starts — today, next January when the increase kicks in, or back in 2022 if you're filling in what that year charged. Rentalist keeps the history and uses the right rate for the right stay, and it settles what you newly owe the moment you save.
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." Analytics groups your spending by tax line, so getting more specific over time — splitting Utilities into Electricity and Propane, say — sharpens this year's detail without breaking your year-over-year history.
The reasons you can pick when an inquiry doesn't turn into a booking — too expensive, dates unavailable, and so on. It comes with the common ones and you can shape it to match how you think about your own market.
After a season or two that becomes one of the more useful charts in the app: the top reasons you lose business, in your own words.
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.