Streamline Your Processes with Airbnb Invoice PDF for Administration

Airbnb invoice pdf for Administration

when you're first getting started on any short-term rental listing platform whether it be Airbnb or verbo or one of the others it can be a bit overwhelming to navigate through all of the different fields and settings generally it's a good idea to have all of the fields filled out so that you have a complete listing and at first glance it might seem like the best option is to turn on every setting that Airbnb recommends but that's not always the best idea because I'm sorry to break it to you but Airbnb does not always have your best interest in mind not to worry you've got your back and we'll show you how we configure our Airbnb settings for our short-term rental business so that you can optimize your pricing protect yourself from getting kicked off the platform and more what's up guys I'm Stephen and I'm Kylie and we're going to jump right into three Airbnb settings that we always make sure are turned off and then if you stick through to the end we'll also show you a few settings that we always make sure are turned on so one of these things actually almost got our listing shut down so you're going to want to stick through to the end to hear about that the first setting that we want you to shut down is any fee except for cleaning fee pet fee and maybe extra guest fee guests hate fees and understandably so you go searching for an Airbnb to book and maybe it says1 190 per night but then when you actually go to book it there's a whole list of added fees tacked on for most listings there'll be the Airbnb service fee which is usually about 14% for the guest unless the host is using the host only fee structure and then you have the cleaning fee which for our properties ranges from about $120 to up to $350 and then in all of the markets that we operate in we also have to collect occupancy tax which is a requirement of the city and that transi and occupancy tax can range from anywhere from 10% to 133% in some of the markets that we operate in when you add on all those fees that $190 per night starts to look pretty expensive to the guests and those are just the essential fees hosts also have the option to add on a pet fee a Linens fee Resort fee a management fee a community fee and an extra guest fee that's a lot of additional fees and if it were me you know looking at a potential place to book I'd probably skip over that listing once I started seeing all those hidden fees add up if you do legitimately have those extra fees then we would recommend trying to bake those into your nightly rate with the exception of the cleaning fee pet fees and maybe the extra guest fee which we'll discuss charging a cleaning fee is pretty standard practice and pretty widely acceptable at this point so I don't think that adding a separate cleaning fee is really going to hurt you but we would recommend looking around what other comparable listings in your area are charging for a cleaning fee so that you can set Yours competitively maybe even a little bit lower even if you have a great cleaner who might charge a little bit more for her excellent service you really don't want to charge much more than what the market rate is or you'll probably lose bookings because of it yeah you have to think you're always with guest going to be compared to other listings guest will have a few that they're you know kind of narrowed down their search and something has to make your listing stand out and you don't want a detractor of your listing to be like an above market cleaning fee so all that being said if you feel like you have a really good handle on your numbers and setting your pricing you could try and bake in the cleaning feed to your nightly rates by increasing them and do a little trial and see if that helps you pet fees are something that we do charge an extra fee for it depends on the size of the house and there are some properties where we don't allow pets at all but we typically charge somewhere between $80 and $150 per short-term stay and again we haven't seen this hurt our bookings and we've only had maybe a couple of people turn down the offer I think it's because because the alternative for a lot of people is either to leave their dog at home or with someone else or pay to board them somewhere and so usually they're willing to pay a little extra for the convenience of bringing them along and then there's an extra guest fee which is a per person per night dollar amount for every guest over a set number so for example if you have a one-bedroom place that can sleep two in that bed but you also have a foldout couch so you can charge an extra fee if the quantity of guests is more than two and that would mean you know people sleeping on that couch we do have this set up at one property because our cleaner does charge us extra if the pullout couch has been used because it's extra time and laundry for them to do during the turnover but I have been meaning to talk to you about getting rid of that it's probably better that it just be something we bake in to our nightly rates you know our listing looks more attractive without that extra fee and because people are either going to intentionally or unintentionally put down the wrong number of guests on their booking so maybe they put down two but they show up with three or four and then we see see it on the camera and we're upset because we feel a little duped do we reach out to them do we charge them more do we just let it slide are we going to sit at home stewing angry because they went behind our back we just don't want to deal with it one thing though to keep in mind about this extra guest setting even if you don't set it you know for any extra guest up into your max occupancy set it for the number of guests past your max occupancy for like a very high fee so let's say your max occupancy is six and then you put the setting for every guest after six the fee is $100 per person per night this is a way what we've been told by Airbnb that if someone does bring extra gas they do damage to your house and you can prove that they had extra guest you can go back and say okay you brought eight so that's $200 per night that you're going to have to pay to You Know cover the problems that you caused with bringing extra people the second setting we want you to turn off is the ability to book 365 nights at your property you'll find this on the pricing and availability tab under trip length and the setting called maximum stay so when you first set up your listing the default setting is usually a one night minimum stay and a 365 night maximum stay we set our short-term listings to a 289 maximum stay but there then is a little check box to manually review and approve any requests for longer than that the primary reason for this threshold is depending on where you are and what the regulations are where your property is located guests can start to establish tenant rights and I'm sure you've heard horror stories about squatter and guests refusing to leave and needing to start a formal eviction process to get them out and nobody wants to deal with that sounds like a night we've never had to deal with that you should check your local laws regulations you know what they are be aware and then set your nightly maximum ing to that the third setting that we want you to turn off is rolling calendar availability so we went over this topic in detail in our pricing video and we'll put a link to that at the end of this video but basically when it comes to availability on Airbnb you have three options either you can have all dates open in the future or you can have dates opening automatically on a rolling calendar basis in 3 69 or 12month increments where every day your calendar is opening another day 3 6 9 or 12 months in the future or you can set it to dates unavailable by default which is our recommendation when you first start your listing the default setting is going to have all future dates open which is wild to me but it also makes total sense because Airbnb wants your calendar open because if it's closed or limited then there's less opportunity for a guest to book so in theory that sounds fine but there's a few reasons why we choose to set dates on available by default the first and you know most frequent occurrence I think would be that dates get released where you haven't accurately set pricing and the second kind of comes along with this if you have a shorter leadtime window gives you a better opportunity to capture changes and market conditions and therefore price the house in the best way but if you want to learn more about this setting and some of our other pricing strategies then be sure to stick around to the end and we'll link the full video for you to check out those are the settings we recommend turning off but then there's also a couple that are important to make sure are turned on the first one is a camera disclosure we cannot stress to you enough how important it is to not only disclose your recording devices and yes your noise monitor is considered a recording device but also to disclose them properly we have two instances that almost got us in a lot of trouble which we'll share about and we'll also be showing you exactly how we write our disclosures to hopefully keep us out of trouble the first situation we had disclosed a camera but not the noise monitor this was pretty early in our hosting days but since they don't record audio or video or people's voices or anything like that we didn't think it was considered a recording device but when you get down to the technicality of it they record decel levels which is something that does need to be disclosed on your listing page yeah we were operating this way for a while and I guess just sort of flying under the radar until a guest at one of our properties reached out to Airbnb to report us this guest was somehow involved in the music industry worked with some high-profile people and was concerned that we'd been EAS dropping on his conversations in reality he just didn't really understand the capabilities and really the limitations of that device when Airbnb support contacted us we provided evidence of what the device was that it wasn't you know recording any conversations or audio and didn't get any penalty or issues from Airbnb but all also note of that was pretty early on on when these noise monitoring devices were coming out I think they were a little more lenient because of that so I wouldn't necessarily assume that they would be lenient with everybody now we were okay in this situation the guest did leave us a pretty bad review lesson learned and something we make sure to check whenever we're creating a new listing now let's talk about cameras I'm sure it's no surprise to you that you need to disclose a camera at your property but did you know that there is a correct way in an incorrect way to disclose it we didn't until about 2 years ago when we got a pretty scary message from airb we were reported by guests for not having a camera disclosed at our property but we were confused when we read this message because we did disclose that we had to camera at the property the problem was I guess that we didn't disclose that it was actively recording I know we were like huh like what Good's a camera for it's not apparently just listing the camera is not enough this was a bit of a frustrating situation because I couldn't really figure out what we had done wrong so I just kept calling and calling until finally I got somebody that was super helpful they basically spelled it all out word for word what we need to have to make sure that our cameras are disclosed properly so here's what we write now quick disclaimer that this is not legal advice nor do we work for Airbnb we're simply sharing something that's worked for us this is for general information purposes only so here's what we write we say we have one actively recording camera overlooking the driveway which records video and audio there is also a smart home device on the back patio which actively Records Noise decel levels it does not record audio or video all devices are on the exterior of the property this wording hopefully eliminates any confusion while we're on this topic that's in the safety section of your listing we recommend taking a close look at everything there it's also a good place to disclose you know details about your pool in case you have a you know an on gated or non fenced pool you can disclose it there and just be fully transparent the second setting you should be turning on is the criteria for instant booking you'll find this under the policies and rules tab of your listing in the instant book section here you'll be able to select whether or not you'll allow guests to instant book your property and you'll also be able to set some secondary criteria we require all of these fields first is a governmen issued ID second is a host recommendation and the third is a pre-booking message you can keep this message pretty simple we ask the guests to let us know a little bit about the reasons for coming to the area and who's going to be staying at the house with them those are our quick tips for today if you found this video helpful we hope you consider subscribing for future videos on vacation retal tips and if you need to go make any tweaks to your listing make sure to do that ASAP and we'll see you in the next video