I’m following the guidance from QuickFile for landlords, using the standard method. The property is a short term holiday let, it is let by an agent. I have added the property and the code for a sales invoice. I’d like to ask:
Question 1. Do I need to add each tenant’s name and address, they may be there for only 2-3 nights, this information is recorded by the agent, and provided to me on the agent’s portal, so I can enter it to QuickFile.
Question 2. I have started to add the name and address details for the first holiday let guest this year, however I was required to enter a time period for the rental period, none of the options were weekly or less. As a holiday let guest, the ‘tenant’ makes the payment once only, for anything from 2 nights to 4 weeks. If I do have to enter each individual holiday let guest, how do I record the required field of frequency of rental payments?
It sounds like your business doesn’t really fit the landlord tools, which are designed more for long term lets with monthly or weekly rent payments.
How exactly does your business operate? Do your guests interact directly with you at any point or is everything done through the agent? Do you invoice the guests yourself or does the agent handle the invoicing and payments with the customer? Is there any VAT involved?
The property is let both through an agent, and directly with me.
The bookings that go through the agent are made between the guest and the agent.
The guest pays to the agent a deposit and a balance, and the agent passes to me the net balance of these payments, after they have taken their fee.
The only VAT that is paid is attached to the agents fee.
I also take a few bookings directly, through the cottage’s own website.
A potential guest contacts me via email from the cottage website, expressing a wish to make a booking.
I send booking forma etc, gather the required information about the guest, I take a deposit and then the full balance a number of weeks before the start date of the guest stay.
I (the property) am not liable for VAT, the turnover is small, the profit even smaller…I am well below the VAT threshold.
Bookings that guests make with the agent, or with me directly, can be anything from a 2 night stay to a 4 week stay, though the maximum stay to date has been 3 weeks.
I’m wondering if QuickFile isn’t designed for short term FHL properties?
Could you let me know if it instil, I really don’t want to have to change software, but if I have to I think I need to be doing that straightaway.
I would say that QuickFile can certainly handle what you describe, but maybe the dedicated landlord tools are not the best fit for this kind of business. Instead I’d treat it more like a regular business selling goods.
You could make a set of sales inventory items for your standard rates, whatever those are (high season nightly, low season nightly, Fri-to-Mon, etc.), then for direct bookings handle them as you do now, but when it comes time to invoice the customer use those inventory items to create the customer invoice.
For agent bookings where the customer gets their invoice from the agent rather than from you, you could bundle up all the agent bookings once a month or fortnight or whatever, and make a single sales invoice for the total rental and a single purchase invoice for the total fees. Mark both of these as paid using a dedicated “merchant” bank account in QuickFile and then whatever the agent pays you would be tagged as transfers from the merchant account to your current account. You don’t need to enter every customer’s details into QuickFile if you’re not sending them any correspondence yourself. As long as the total amounts are correct and each stay is invoiced in the correct quarter for your MTD updates then that should be fine.
Thank you.
This does sound over complicated.
There are not any set nightly rates, they change all the time dependant on the market.
I wonder also how the system you suggest would feed into the landlord section of the annual tax return?
I’m afraid the whole MTD side is beyond my experience - I used to use QuickFile to manage a retail shop a few years ago when MTD was a thing for VAT but not for income tax, nowadays I just use it for a very small non profit community group that turns over less than 2.5k per year…
Hopefully someone else (or someone who works for QuickFile) can chip in with better advice.