The product team viewed the correct and accurate declaration of the online travel agency (OTA’s) platforms reservations as an opportunity to crystallise the submission of the reservations to the country’s Tax Platform and approached the process thoughtfully. “We evaluated the entire process and developed the necessary accounting tools required by every property host.” Our role was to create the project from bottom to finish.
As soon as short term rentals started to booming, a lot of EU countries wanted to regulate the industry by imposing rules, one of which was to mandatory declare all reservations to a local tax platform- the founding team made the decision to start looking for a tool. They needed a seamless solution that could help the property hosts and make the entire reservations’ declaration process easier for everyone.
The problems with manually collecting all information needed -from Airbnb, Booking.com or VRBO portal- with often important details not provided, like the guests’ passport or tax number details to submit the reservation form, created stress to the property hosts -or to their representative accountants- as to what total amount of reservation should be used for declaration (do I add the cleaning fee or not, do we add the gross amount or the net etc.) and if guests information were correctly gathered and recorded. The more reservations occurring the harder the process of gathering all this data had become.
Designing an ease-of-use accounting tool that autopilots the entire declaration process and seamlessly perform the declaration process on the tax platform became our goal.
We strategised an accounting tool framework that not only allows our users to have peace in mind when it comes to the submission of the declaration forms, but also extending the user experience by having reporting functions and aggregately compare each years performance at a glance.
