Monthly lodging-tax filing

One property files a monthly city lodging-tax return, transient occupancy tax plus a couple of special-district assessments, due by the 15th, with a penalty on every line if it is late. Small, recurring, and unforgiving, the kind of task that is easy to fumble by hand and costly when you do.

How it works

I built a workbook whose "Return" tab is a replica of the actual form, driven by just two inputs each month: taxable room income from QuickBooks (cash basis, net of discounts) and occupied room-nights from the PMS and RMS. A History tab keeps a running log, and a runbook documenting the process lives right alongside it so the next filing does not lean on memory.

• Each tax line is rounded to the cent before summing. Raw multiplication comes out a penny off, and a penny off is a wrong return.
• Replicating the real form, not a generic worksheet, means every number lands where the city expects it.

It is live for one property as a pilot. Extending it to others mainly needs per-entity accounting access. The occupied-room-night input is still pulled manually until a connector fills it automatically.

Compliance tasks like this are pure downside. No credit for doing them right, a penalty for doing them wrong. Encoding the form once and reducing the monthly act to two numbers is exactly how a company of one keeps the exception rate on the boring, unforgiving stuff near zero.