Airbnb issues VAT invoices to hosts when a reservation is confirmed. The date on the invoice is the date of confirmation. However there is no way to chronologically sort reservations by date of confirmation in order to go through these invoices. Reservations are sorted by date of arrival and that date might even be a year ahead of time of confirmation. VAT invoices are to be submitted to the tax office. Depending on the country this has to be done every month, every three months, every year. This creates following problems:
a) what happens when the confirmed guest cancels?
b) hosts have to hunt down invoices timely, otherwise they are practically lost.
We have 3 listings which all get booked mostly a year before arrival -at times even more than a year; sometimes even 2 years before! Having 3 listings that are in big demand is a pain trying to keep up with reservations as they happen, in order to print invoices for them, before our inbox gets filled with other communication, inquiries and questions. Currently, the inbox is the only way to somehow have reservations chronologically ordered by confirmation.
Solution would be if Airbnb issued invoices on date of payment, which ensures the invoice is right (in case of cancellation) and printed on time.
Best solution is what booking.com is doing: issue a monthly invoice based on the commissions that were issued for the previous month. And have a "finances" category where we can see and print all these invoices, like in booking.com, instead of going through them in the reservations tab one by one, only to find out they have a past date, by even a year in some cases. It's funny the Reservations page has a "Booked" column, but you cannot sort by it! Duh...
Furthermore, printing single invoices for every reservation is a huge waste of paper, surely not good for the environment, a sign of bad company practices by Airbnb.
