How to Manage Your Accounting in Mangobeds

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.

Accessing the Accounting App

1. Log in to your dashboard: enter your Mangobeds credentials.
2. Select your property: pick the property you want to keep books for. Accounting is set up per property, so each one keeps its own expenses and its own account codes.
3. Open Apps: click on Apps in the sidebar.
4. Find Accounting: it sits next to Invoicing in the list.
5. Click Set up Accounting: that is the whole setup. Nothing to connect, nothing to configure before you can use it.

The two tabs

The app opens on Books, which is where you spend your time: the summary, your expenses and the journal export. The second tab, Sync, is where you connect an accounting system and see what has been sent to it. If you are keeping your books here and exporting them, you never need to open it.

Choosing a period

At the top of the Books tab there is a date range selector. Everything below it, the summary, the expense list and the export, follows the range you pick. It offers the last 30, 90 and 365 days, or a custom range for the exact dates your accountant asked for. Books are written after the fact, so it only offers ranges that have already happened.

Reading the summary

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.

Recording an expense

Revenue arrives on its own. Expenses are the one thing you enter by hand.

1. Click Add expense.
2. Fill in the fields described below.
3. Click Add expense to save it.

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.

Setting up your chart of accounts

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 six things that come out of your invoices and payments: accommodation revenue, extras revenue, tax collected, accounts receivable, deposits held and bank.

Deposits held is the one worth a sentence. A security deposit is the guest’s money sitting with you, not money you earned, so it goes to a liability account until you hand it back rather than counting as revenue or as something you are owed. Mark a payment as a deposit in the Payments app and the journal files it there automatically.

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 have to start from nothing. The app seeds a conventional set of numbers (assets in the 1000s, revenue in the 3000s, payroll in the 5000s, running costs in the 6000s) that already produces a usable export. Show them to your bookkeeper and change only the ones they do differently. It takes them five minutes and they only do it once.

Exporting your journal

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.

Sending your books to an accounting system

The export is how your books reach your accountant, and for most small properties that is genuinely all they need. If your bookkeeper works in a package instead, you can connect it on the Sync tab and the journal posts itself.

QuickBooks Online is connected today: see the QuickBooks connection guide for how it works. Nothing changes about the rest of the app when you connect one. Your ledger still lives here, expenses are still recorded here, and the CSV export is still there.

If you use a different package, tell us which one. We prioritise the ones our customers actually run.

Getting started

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.