Running five Airbnbs without a single spreadsheet — what I use instead

Last January I deleted the Airbnb Master Spreadsheet. Thirteen tabs. Colour-coded. Three years of turnover data, guest notes, inventory levels, expenses, a half-finished forecasting tab I'd built in a flush of optimism one February.

Actually, I didn't delete it — I exported it to a folder called archive/old-life and ignored it. I didn't quite have the courage.

A year on, I haven't opened it. I haven't needed it. And it turns out I was using a spreadsheet as a bad version of four things: an inventory tracker, a turnover scheduler, a guest CRM, and an accounting feed. None of those actually needed to be a spreadsheet. Most of them needed to be something else.

Here's the stack I use now, across five properties. No one tool has replaced the spreadsheet. About four of them together have.

Why the spreadsheet had to go

Three reasons, specifically.

First, nobody else could use it. My cleaner couldn't open the bit she needed without scrolling through seven tabs she didn't need. My partner once tried to add a turnover note for the cottage and accidentally overwrote a cell that was driving the summary tab. I spent an hour fixing it.

Second, it was always out of date. I'd update it on a Sunday, then forget about it for three weeks, then frantically reconcile while trying to remember what I'd bought on the Tuesday. Every month I'd have a wobble about whether the numbers were right.

Third, it was invisible on my phone. The main way I manage my flats is from my phone. A spreadsheet on a phone is a small nightmare. Pinching, zooming, accidentally editing a formula instead of a value.

None of these are problems with spreadsheets, actually. They're problems with using a spreadsheet for a job it isn't right for.

What replaced it — the four-tool stack

Tool 1: inventory — a dedicated inventory app (mine: Hoststock)

I use Hoststock — full disclosure, this blog is their site, so take that with however much salt you want. But the honest version: before I had an inventory tool I was tracking supplies on a spreadsheet tab that was always wrong.

Now I track three things per property: par levels for consumables, current stock levels (which the cleaner updates on her phone on turnover day), and reorder triggers. When something's below par, I get a notification. When something's ordered, it updates.

I don't track every item — I got into that trap with the spreadsheet. I track the ten to twelve items per property that cause 90% of the problems. Toilet roll, kitchen roll, pods, teabags, bin bags, dishwasher tablets, washing-up liquid, shampoo refill, shower gel refill, hand soap. Those ten. Everything else I manage by looking.

The cleaner adding a count on her phone in 90 seconds at the end of each turnover has replaced about four hours a month of my spreadsheet maintenance. It's the biggest single workload change I've made in the last two years.

Tool 2: turnover scheduling — the Airbnb app plus a shared calendar

Turnover scheduling I used to do on a spreadsheet calendar. Dumb. The Airbnb app already has a calendar. So does Vrbo. So does Booking.com.

I now have a single Google calendar called "Turnovers" that subscribes to the iCal feeds from each platform for each property. It updates automatically. My cleaner subscribes to the same calendar on her phone. Her partner — who's my backup cleaner — subscribes too.

If Airbnb shows a new booking, the cleaner sees it without me doing anything. If a booking moves, the calendar updates. No spreadsheet tab to update.

Setup took me about twenty minutes and cost me nothing. I'd been meaning to do it for literally two years. I kept updating a spreadsheet calendar manually because I hadn't sat down to set up the iCal feeds.

The one thing the calendar doesn't do is track which cleaner is assigned to which turnover. For that I've got a small WhatsApp group — me, the Brighton cleaner, the Edinburgh cleaner, the Lakes family friend. Turnovers for the week get assigned on a Sunday evening in about four messages.

Tool 3: guest notes — the Airbnb messaging thread

I used to keep a "guest CRM" tab on the spreadsheet. Notes about repeat guests, allergies, preferences, the guest who wanted oat milk, the guest who left a five-star review and came back the next year.

I don't do that any more. The Airbnb messaging thread already has it. If someone messaged me two years ago saying they're allergic to feathers, I can find that in the thread in about thirty seconds. If they rebook, the thread picks up where it left off.

The one thing I do keep — on a small note in my phone's notes app, one line per repeat guest — is the thing they specifically mentioned. "Rebecca and Ed — loved the Brighton Gin, are coming back in October." That's it. When they rebook, I put an extra miniature in the welcome pack. They notice. They re-rebook.

This replaced probably 80% of the "guest notes" spreadsheet tab, and the other 20% I genuinely never used.

Tool 4: finances — an accounting app, feeding from a separate business bank account

Finances were the bit of the spreadsheet I used most. Tracking what I spent per property, what I earned per property, what my margins were.

I killed the finance tab by opening a separate business bank account for the Airbnb operation, plus a credit card that only gets used for Airbnb spending. Then I hooked both of those up to a small-business accounting app.

Every supply run to Costco, every Amazon Business order, every hotel laundry invoice goes on the same card or bank. The app categorises most of it automatically. The few items it gets wrong, I fix on my phone in about two minutes a week.

Per-property accounting I don't really do any more. I look at the overall Airbnb operation as one business, not five separate ones. My accountant and I pick a property to audit in detail once a year — different property each year — to make sure none of them are bleeding quietly. Otherwise I trust the overall margin.

This was the scariest tab to give up. It's been the best decision.

What I kept

One spreadsheet survived. I keep a short one-tab sheet with a line per property: address, key codes, cleaner's name and number, water stop-cock location, boiler make and model, broadband account number, a couple of other emergency details.

This one I print on A4 and tape to the inside of each property's hallway cupboard door. Cleaner can read it if I'm not available. Guest can read it if there's a pipe burst and I'm on a flight to Portugal.

Total length: about fifteen lines. Not really a spreadsheet. Just a list.

The tools I tried and ditched

• Trello. Too many boards, too much friction, I forgot about it for a month and then gave up.
• Notion. Beautiful. Pretty. I rebuilt my spreadsheet in Notion and ended up with a beautiful, pretty spreadsheet that I still didn't update. Notion didn't fix the problem — the spreadsheet mindset did.
• A dedicated channel manager. The ones I looked at were priced for hosts with 15+ properties. My five weren't worth the monthly cost. Might revisit if I grow.
• Project management tools like Monday or ClickUp. Hilariously overkill for what I do. The last thing a part-time Airbnb operator needs is project management software.

What this costs and what it saves

Monthly cost of the stack: about £45. Airbnb messaging is free; the Google calendar is free; the accounting app is around £20/month; the inventory tool is around £25/month.

Monthly cost of the old spreadsheet: technically £0. Plus about six hours of my time updating it and fixing it.

Six hours at whatever you value your time — for me, around £40/hour on a conservative evaluation — is £240 a month of my time. Now it's about 40 minutes of my time and £45 in tool fees.

The actual saving isn't the money. It's the cognitive load. I'm not mentally tracking "have I updated the spreadsheet yet this week" any more. That's the bit I underestimated for years.

What I still do by hand

One spreadsheet I haven't replaced — and I'm not sure I should — is my supplies-price tracking sheet, which is the per-unit price of every consumable I buy, from each channel (Amazon Business vs Costco vs trade wholesaler), updated whenever I do a shop.

It's about 34 rows, one column per channel. I update it every few months. The inventory app tracks quantities; this sheet tracks prices. I use it to decide where to buy what.

For price benchmarking, a spreadsheet still feels right. For everything operational, it's wrong.

The honest summary

The spreadsheet wasn't the problem. Using a spreadsheet as a catch-all was the problem. Break it up into four dedicated tools, each of which does its job well on a phone, and the whole operation feels calmer.

Give up on the dream of the One Beautiful Dashboard. I spent years trying to build one. The dashboard is a Google calendar, four apps, and a WhatsApp group. It's ugly. It works.

If you're running five properties on a spreadsheet and you're stressed, the problem isn't that you need a better spreadsheet. The problem is the spreadsheet. Pick one of the four jobs above — start with inventory, probably, because that's where most of the chaos lives — and replace it with something built for the job. Then move to the next.

Three months later, you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.