Hi @Ena13
Hope you are well and this is a great topic!
We do our own bookkeeping and I do a personally try to put aside some time as to audit myself at the end of every month for personal reasons.
On google sheets (as any changes made are automatically saved and can be shared with editing/viewing restrictions) we record every reservation confirmed (and cancelled but with any attached cancellation fees).
Confirmed date
Name (first plus surname initial)
check in date
check out date
number of nights
reservation code
rate per night
cleaning fee (among any other)
Airbnb Fee
total value of reservation
notes on reservation
this also allows us to ensure there no discrepancies between the reservation value and what has been paid by Airbnb!
We close off at the end of the month and using calculations set on the sheet it self calculates reservation revenue and profits etc.
this is our main sheet and all information feeds to another which allows us to calculate automatically the sales per room, per month, per quarter , occupancy etc.
You could go further and do this with ratings but honestly I do not have the time for this or the patience.
Another sheet records the expenses and these are categorised (cleaning, products, laundry, uncategorised etc)
We hand this to our book keeper or accountant as to ensure everything is fine and given my professional experience we usually have a couple of accountant friends who help on this (we do a lot of the admin work so pay them for the other elements of their roles and triple check everything every end of month and before handing them). All receipts are arranged by month and type of service they represent and archived. I try to be super organised as it just makes everything easier for me.
I read somewhere that if the value of total made by your room is under £8k then it’s not taxable as mentioned above (not sure at all about this- as @Gordon0 mentions please verify over and over again). If exceeds this I would definitely recommend you register under sole trader or as a LTD company but of course please speak with a professional before- this is not my profession but I try my best regardless.
Either way good luck to you! 🙂