Is Your Guesthouse Actually Making Money? A Simple Way to Track Income and Expenses

Here's a situation many guesthouse owners in tourist areas will recognize.

December was full. Every room, almost every night. Messenger never stopped. You were exhausted in the good way.

Then you look at the bank account in February and it doesn't feel like a full December happened. The electric bill was huge. The OTA payouts were smaller than the rates you remember. You paid for a new water pump. Somewhere in there, the profit went.

Bookings are not profit. A full calendar tells you demand is there. It doesn't tell you what's left after electricity, laundry, staff, commissions, and the months when nobody comes.

You don't need an accountant to get a clear picture. You need a few numbers, tracked consistently. (For taxes and BIR filings, do talk to a bookkeeper or accountant. This article is about knowing your own business, not compliance.)

Step 1: Count income the way it actually arrives

The rate on your Booking.com listing isn't what you earn. For each booking, the money that reaches you is:

Room rate − OTA commission − payment or transfer fees = what you actually keep

A ₱2,000 night booked through an OTA charging 15–18% commission leaves you with ₱1,640–₱1,700. The same night booked directly on Messenger with a GCash deposit leaves you with almost all of it.

So track income per booking with the source attached: Booking.com, Agoda, Airbnb, Messenger, walk-in. At the end of the month you'll see not just how much you earned, but how much each channel cost you. That's the starting point for deciding whether to push more direct bookings, which we break down in Direct Bookings vs OTA Bookings.

If deposits and balances themselves are the messy part, fix that first: How to Track Guest Payments and Deposits.

Step 2: Put every expense into a few simple categories

You don't need 40 accounting categories. You need ones that tell you something. For a small Philippine guesthouse, these cover almost everything:

The split that matters most is between costs that rise with guests (laundry, supplies, electricity) and costs you pay even when you're empty (rent, base wages, permits, internet). The second group is what hurts in lean months.

Step 3: Build a one-page monthly summary

Here's an illustrative example. These are made-up numbers for a 6-room guesthouse in an island destination, not a benchmark:

Two things jump out of a table like this:

1. September loses money. That's normal for seasonal destinations, but you need to know it's coming and set aside cash from December to cover it.
2. Fixed costs and staff don't drop much when rooms are empty. That's why a few extra bookings in a lean month are worth more than they look. They're paying for costs you're already stuck with.

One page per month, kept for a year, will tell you more about your business than any amount of gut feeling.

Step 4: Learn three numbers (in plain language)

Hotels use a lot of jargon. Three numbers are actually worth knowing for a small property:

Occupancy rate. What share of your available room nights you sold. Room nights sold ÷ room nights available. In the December example: 160 ÷ 186 = 86%.

Average daily rate (ADR). What you earned per room night sold, on average. Room revenue ÷ room nights sold. December: ₱320,000 ÷ 160 = ₱2,000.

Revenue per available room (RevPAR). Occupancy and rate combined into one number, which is useful for comparing months. Room revenue ÷ room nights available. December: ₱320,000 ÷ 186 ≈ ₱1,720. September: ₱72,000 ÷ 180 = ₱400.

Why bother? Because they answer practical questions. If occupancy is high but profit is thin, your rate might be too low or your costs per guest too high. If ADR is healthy but occupancy is weak in the off-season, you have a demand problem, and that's where promos or direct-booking efforts belong.

Step 5: Make it a weekly 15-minute habit

The owners who know their numbers aren't doing anything complicated. They're doing something small, often:

• Every day: record payments against bookings and log expenses as they happen. Keep receipts in one envelope or one photo album on your phone.
• Every week: spend 15 minutes adding up the week and checking the cash box and GCash against what you recorded.
• Every month: fill in the one-page summary. Compare it to the same month last year if you have it.

The hardest part is logging expenses. The ₱300 for an aircon capacitor, the ₱1,200 for the plumber. Small, frequent, easy to forget. If you only remember the big bills, your profit will always look better on paper than it is in the bank.

Step 6: Separate the business money

This one is uncomfortable in a family business, but it's the single biggest improvement most small properties can make: the guesthouse needs its own GCash and bank account.

When guest payments land in the same wallet you use for groceries and tuition, you can't tell whether the guesthouse is profitable or just busy. Pay yourself a set amount from the business account instead of dipping in as needed. It makes the lean-month planning in Step 3 possible.

Where software helps (and where it doesn't)

A spreadsheet can do everything in this article. The trouble is that income lives in one place (your bookings), payments in another (GCash, bank, cash box) and expenses in a third (a notebook, receipts, your memory). Pulling them together every month is the part people stop doing.

A property management system helps by keeping bookings, payments and reports in the same place, so occupancy, revenue and balances are already calculated. If you're not sure what a PMS covers, see What Is a PMS?.

GoOverbooked's free core app records every reservation with its payments and shows them in a dashboard with reports, so revenue and outstanding balances don't need to be rebuilt by hand. It also tracks expenses alongside bookings, which is the piece most small owners never get around to. It was built by a guesthouse owner in Bantayan who deals with the same peak-and-lean cycle.

You can look through the demo with sample data to see the reports, no signup needed. Either way, start the one-page monthly summary this month. By next peak season you'll know exactly what a good December is worth.