How a PMS Simplifies Accounting Management for Hotels & Vacation Rentals 

The key to successful hospitality accounting lies in meticulous record-keeping. 

While your Property Management System (PMS) is not an accounting management tool, it is a powerful ally for organizing and exporting financial data to your accounting management software. This includes data related to your invoices, payments, commissions, taxes, owner statements, and trust accounts. 

Discover the key role a robust PMS can play in helping you manage your finances – saving time, reducing errors, and unlocking better business decisions. 

Hospitality accounting covers how accommodation businesses track revenue, expenses, taxes, and owner funds across bookings, channels and properties.  

Before diving into best practices, here’s why accounting should be at the heart of your operations:  

A dedicated PMS is not a complete accounting system by itself – but it is a powerful driver for structured, exportable, and automated financial data. 

The unique challenges of the hospitality industry make accounting especially complex. Unlike many other sectors, accommodation businesses must manage fluctuating demand, seasonal revenue patterns, multiple booking channels, and diverse income streams – all while staying compliant with constantly evolving tax regulations. 

Your PMS should be an invaluable ally in helping you organize, record and summarize your financial transactions, across all properties and revenue streams.  

A robust PMS can help you: 

Here’s how a modern PMS such as eviivo Suite™ helps simplify and streamline accounting processes across different accommodation types. 

To ensure proper accounting, it’s important to collect the right data – and this all starts with the invoice. 

Whether your customers ask for an invoice or not, it is essential to issue one for every booking. By doing so, you keep a detailed record of the products or services for which a customer has paid you. Accurate invoices equal cleaner books and easier submissions during audits or tax season. 

In practice, this means your PMS should generate compliant, itemized invoices automatically – without manual rework after check-out. 

eviivo Suite allows you to make sure that every booking – whether direct, through your website, or via OTAs – gets a properly formatted invoice. This includes: 

While most property management systems struggle to provide invoices, eviivo Suite goes the extra level with invoicing that always shows the price paid by the guest, together with a credit reflecting any amount prepaid by an OTA. This ensures that travelers are always able to receive an accurate invoice – especially crucial for corporate guests who need to file expense claims.  

Top tip: Make the month-end easier by having front-office teams check-out guests via eviivo Suite, then generate an accurate, itemized invoice (i.e. once the booking is checked-out and the balance is zero). 

For many reasons, managing taxes as an accommodation provider can quickly get complicated: 

Regardless of these complicating factors, you need to stay compliant to reduce the risk of costly audits and penalties. 

Therefore, it’s important that you are able to configure all your taxes in your PMS. Ideally, your system should enable you to: 

The next step is automation. Having a PMS that automatically calculates taxes and applies them accurately on every invoice saves time, reduces mistakes, and ensures compliance with local authorities.  

eviivo Suite allows you to configure, name and automatically calculate taxes from a vast range of options, including rates that adjust automatically based on the length of the stay. Tax rates are automatically mapped to your connected online travel agencies (OTAs) where applicable, reducing mismatches and manual updates across channels.  

One of the biggest challenges in hospitality is managing multiple revenue sources while keeping your books balanced.  

Tracking these individual expense lines from different departments – and booking channels  –  can quickly complicate your accounting: 

Recording, then balancing, the revenues and settlements from these various streams requires ongoing management of cash, credit cards, in-house guests, and accounts receivable.  

To help, you need a PMS that tracks revenue in real-time and synchronizes data across all booking channels and revenue sources. 

Every revenue system at work in your business should sync with the PMS. This enables you to balance sub-ledgers such as: credit cards; guest ledgers; city ledgers; and advance deposit ledgers. It’s an approach that ensures precise reporting, preventing the over/under-reporting that often results from manual entry errors or misallocation. (Learn more in our quick guide to effective deposit management.) 

Additionally, your PMS should offer real-time updates and error-checking features that help you quickly action any discrepancies. For example, some OTAs require that invalid cards on bookings be reported within a brief window of time, making it critical you are alerted quickly. 

A robust PMS helps you keep track of:  

By providing timely notifications, your PMS allows you to follow-up quickly, which is vital for maintaining a strong cash flow.  

Having the ability to export accounting journals on a regular basis will save you a lot of time – not to mention your accountant!  

With a good PMS you can:  

Ensure that all journal entries can be generated, exported and sent to cover any period you need – whether that’s every day, week, or month.  

eviivo Suite allows you to do all the above, so you never need to send your invoices manually. When you map the PMS to your chart of accounts, you’re free to manage as many ledgers as you need and can assign each a unique account number (or general ledger account code) for easy tracking. 

This means you’re also able to manage sub-accounts to hold balances at a more granular level. For example, you can set up separate accounts for each OTA (with its own account number and name) and greatly simplify the process of reconciling OTA commissions and payouts. 

By compiling your journal entries into reports, you produce accurate financial statements that provide a clear, auditable trail of all your business’s financial activity.  

Key reports that can simplify accounting for your accommodation business include: 

With a PMS that generates these reports (and more) natively, you save your accounting team untold amounts of time.  

Did you know? eviivo Suite generates trial balance movement reports in one click, eliminating the need to manually extract and balance data from multiple other reports. You can also drill down to underlying transactions for faster, simpler reconciliations. 

For more granular or tailored reporting insights, consider a PMS that lets you create custom reports using all the financials data integrated in the platform.  

With an advanced custom report writer integrated into your PMS, the possibilities to record and analyze your finances become virtually limitless. Here are just a few examples: 

Trust accounting involves managing and recording the financial transactions of funds held in trust, ensuring they are separate from personal funds and used only for their intended purpose. It’s a key practice for professional Property Management Companies (PMCs) managing income, payouts and charges across multiple property owners.  

For many jurisdictions, trust accounting is a legal requirement for property managers handling owner funds. Where so, mixing rental income from multiple owners into a single account breaches the legal requirements for trust accounting.  

Therefore, it’s critical you establish separate accounts for each property owner. 

A PMS that supports trust accounting natively should allow you to: 

For managers or PMCs handling multiple  properties, a quality PMS thus becomes a single point of control for: 

This integration of owner management tools is essential for hospitality operators looking to comply fully with trust-accounting principles while navigating diverse property sets and owners. 

Nobody gets into the accommodation industry because of a passion for number crunching. Yet accurate accounting is fundamental to running a compliant, profitable accommodation business – and it becomes far simpler with the right PMS. 

By centralizing financial data across every property, department, and revenue stream, a robust PMS helps automate tax calculations, generate accurate invoices, produce balanced journal entries, and export clean data to your accounting software. Add native support for transparent trust accounting, and you gain stronger compliance, healthier cash flow, and greater trust with owners and partners. 

We know accounting is a complicated topic. So, we’ve put together more information on simplifying your invoicing, tax compliance and accounting with a PMS.  

eviivo’s free, detailed Invoice and Reconciliation Guide will help you get a better handle on the features you need.  Download it here if you’re a multi-property manager or here if you’re a hotelier.