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5 min read
Mangobeds already knows what your property earned. Every invoice, payment and refund is in there. What it has never known is what you spent, and without that half you cannot see what a month actually made. The Accounting app adds the cost side, puts the two together for any period you choose, and turns the whole thing into a file your bookkeeper can import instead of retyping.
This guide walks through setting the app up, recording expenses, mapping your chart of accounts, and exporting your journal.
At the top of the app you will find a From and a To date. Everything below them, the summary, the expense list and the export, follows those two dates. They open on the current month, which is what most properties want, but you can set them to a quarter, a year, or the exact range your accountant asked for.
Four figures sit above your expenses.
Revenue (net of tax) is what you earned in the period, with tax taken out. It comes from your confirmed invoices, using the tax rates you set in the Invoicing app, so it can never disagree with the invoices themselves.
Tax collected is the tax portion of those same invoices, the amount you are holding on behalf of the tax authority rather than money you earned.
Expenses is the total of everything you recorded in the period.
Net is revenue minus expenses. This is the number most owners are actually looking for.
Underneath the Net figure you will also see how much was collected, which is the money that genuinely arrived in the period, payments minus refunds. It is deliberately a different number from revenue: an invoice you issued in March and were paid for in April counts as March revenue and April cash.
Note: a refund is counted on the day it was refunded, not the day the original payment was made. A January payment refunded in March belongs in March’s books.
Revenue arrives on its own. Expenses are the one thing you enter by hand.
Date is the date of the expense, which is what decides the period it falls into.
Amount is always in your property’s currency. There is nothing to pick, and nothing to get wrong.
Category is what the money went on: Cleaning, Maintenance, Utilities, Supplies, Salaries, Commissions, Marketing, Software, Insurance, Taxes, Rent or Other. This is what makes your expense list readable a year from now.
Tax % is the tax rate on that expense, if you want it recorded. It is carried through to the export for your accountant. It is not split into a separate line, because recovering tax on purchases follows rules that differ by country and belongs in your accounting software.
Supplier is who you paid. The cleaning company, the electricity provider, the builder.
Reference is the number printed on their bill. It is what lets you find the paper receipt again from a row in Mangobeds, and it stops the same invoice being entered twice.
Notes is free text for anything else you want to remember about it.
Note: Salaries appears as a category so that your profit figure is complete. Mangobeds does not run payroll, does not pay your staff and does not file social contributions. Record what payroll cost you, and leave the paying to your accounting software.
This step is optional, and you can safely skip it until your bookkeeper asks for it.
Every accounting package files transactions into numbered accounts. Switzerland has the KMU-Kontenrahmen, Germany has the SKR plans, Spain has the PGC. Your accountant already works with one of them, and their software will not accept the word "Cleaning" where it expects a number.
So the app lets you record their numbers once. Open Settings and you will find two groups.
Transaction accounts covers the five things that come out of your invoices and payments: accommodation revenue, extras revenue, tax collected, accounts receivable and bank.
Expense categories covers the twelve categories, one code each. Set Cleaning to 6040 once and every cleaning expense you ever record carries that code.
You do not invent these numbers, and neither do we. Ask your bookkeeper, or read them off your existing accounting software. It takes them five minutes and they only do it once.
Leaving them blank is perfectly fine. Your summary, your expenses and your export all still work, the Account column simply comes out empty for your accountant to fill in.
Click Export journal (CSV) and you get the whole period as a proper double-entry journal.
Each line carries the date, the account, a description, a debit or a credit, the currency, the tax rate where there is one, and a reference back to the invoice, booking or supplier bill it came from. Your invoices, your payments and your expenses are all in the same file, in the format accounting software expects to receive.
The app tells you how many lines are in the period before you export, and the totals always balance: every debit has a matching credit. That is not decoration, it is the check that tells your bookkeeper the file is sound.
Three things become journal lines.
An invoice records what you are owed against what you earned, splitting accommodation, extras and tax apart.
A payment moves that amount from what you are owed into your bank. A refund does the same in reverse.
An expense records the cost against the category’s account and takes the money out of your bank.
Today the export is how your books reach your accountant, and for most small properties that is genuinely all they need. We are building direct connections to accounting software next, so the journal posts itself instead of being exported.
If you already use a particular package, tell us which one. We prioritise the ones our customers actually run.
Open the Accounting app, add last month’s expenses, and look at the Net figure. Most owners find it is the first time they have seen revenue and costs for their property in one place without building a spreadsheet. From there, ask your bookkeeper for their account codes whenever you are ready, and the monthly export stops being a job anyone has to think about.
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