70 homes, one bookkeeper, half a day of month-end: how Breezy Beach Stays built for scale from property one
- About 70
- homes on the Jersey Shore, with one bookkeeper
- 80%
- of bookings reconcile automatically
- ½ day
- of month-end review for Mike, down from two to three days
Breezy Beach Stays went from two homes to about 70 on the Jersey Shore in three years. Two platforms keep the money side of that growth in order. Hospitable brings every Airbnb, Vrbo and direct booking into one place, and Clearing reconciles those bookings against the bank. With that in place, co-founder Mike Anderson now spends about half a day a month reviewing owner statements. At 20 homes, when he did the books himself, month-end took him two to three late nights.
Hospitable is the heart of my business. Clearing's the brain.
At a glance
- Company
- Breezy Beach Stays, a hospitality-first vacation rental management company
- Market
- Seaside Heights and nearby barrier island towns, Jersey Shore, New Jersey
- Portfolio
- About 70 homes, a couple hundred bookings and a couple thousand transactions a month
- Founded
- 2023, by Mike Anderson and his partner
- Stack
- Hospitable (PMS), Clearing (trust accounting), Turno (cleaning), ClickUp (operations)
- Results
- About 80% of bookings reconcile automatically. Month-end review down to about half a day. Roughly 400 cleaning transactions a month matched with zero touch. One bookkeeper, with no plans to add another.
A 100-year-old market, run a new way
Families have been renting weekly beach houses in Seaside Heights for generations, and for most of that time the deal was the same: bring your own sheets, towels, and toilet paper. Breezy Beach Stays was founded in 2023 to change that. White linens, toiletries included, nothing to pack. "Come, just unpack, don't bring anything," Mike says. "You're going to be our guest."
Mike and his partner started with two homes of their own. Mike had spent seven years running an event rental business and a few years investing in long-term rentals, where his own property manager taught him how trust accounting works. Within six months, they were signing outside owners. Today Breezy Beach Stays manages about 70 homes and has around 250 Google reviews.
No spreadsheet phase, on purpose
Most managers find trust accounting software at 15 or 20 properties, after the spreadsheets break. Mike never built the spreadsheet. "I don't know how you can do it with a spreadsheet," he says.
When the two founders listed what the business needed, an accounting platform built for short-term rental bookkeeping sat right next to the PMS. "I knew that we didn't want to be co-hosts. I knew that we wanted to be full, by-the-book, trust accounting property managers." Clearing was the first platform he tried, and he has stayed on it since.
The operations side went to Hospitable. It runs the unified inbox and channel sync for every listing, and its native smart lock integration sends door codes automatically. "I really hardly have any issues with door codes," Mike says.
He also chose to keep the two jobs in separate tools. "The PMS should do PMS things. The accounting software should do accounting software things."
How Hospitable and Clearing prove every dollar
With thousands of guest bookings each year and more than half a million dollars in annual direct booking revenue, Breezy Beach Stays needs its booking records and bank deposits to line up across channels.
Hospitable is the starting point. It brings Breezy Beach Stays' Airbnb, Vrbo and direct booking data together into a single dataset and automatically sends it to Clearing. Clearing then takes in the bank deposits from the OTAs and Stripe and reconciles each one against the booking records Hospitable provided. When a deposit and a booking don't agree, Clearing flags it so Mike's team can find out why. The result is a clear trail from every guest booking to every dollar in the bank, and from there to every line on an owner statement.
"Here's the source data. Here's the bank account data. Here's Clearing in the center saying, yeah, this agrees with this," Mike says. "By the time we get done with the booking reconciliation process, we know that every dollar we received in our bank account is appropriately matched up with a booking."
About 40 rules handle the rest: line items that never count toward reconciliation, fixed merchant charges, and payout quirks like OTA commissions billed in a batch, which Clearing splits back out booking by booking. Once the rules were set, about 80% of bookings started reconciling on their own.
Hospitable keeps the guest journey connected
For Breezy Beach Stays, Hospitable does more than supply booking records for reconciliation. It brings Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com and direct reservations together, centralizes guest communication, and automatically sends door codes through its native smart lock integration. That gives Mike’s team one place to manage reservations and guest conversations, while Clearing handles the accounting alongside it.
Together, the platforms connect the operational and financial sides of each stay: Hospitable manages the reservation and guest communication, and Clearing reconciles the booking against deposits and owner statements. See how the Clearing and Hospitable integration works.
Owners check to the penny. Breezy Beach Stays can prove it.
"Your owners are going to dissect the owner statements to the penny, as they should," Mike says. Some of his owners are CPAs. Others look at the top and bottom line and decide something feels off. Both get the same answer: the Hospitable data, the bank deposits, and the statement, side by side, tying out.
When a question comes in, Breezy Beach Stays can produce a report that shows exactly where each dollar went and why. "That's a huge value our owners get," Mike says. "I think that's super undervalued in this industry."
When an owner wants independent proof, Breezy Beach Stays goes one step further and shares the Hospitable booking data itself. "This is directly linked from the platforms, third party, not our numbers," Mike says. "And here is what's on the statement, and here's what's in the bank accounts. Everything matches up."
The automation layer: built on Clearing's API
Clearing's built-in automation does the first pass. Mike runs about 40 rules covering recurring merchants, fixed charges, and line items that should never count toward reconciliation. When an OTA bills a batch of commissions in a single charge, Clearing splits it back out, booking by booking.
Then Mike built on top of it with Clearing's API. Twice a day, a scheduled automation pulls every uncategorized transaction from Clearing and looks for the matching purchase or work order in ClickUp, Breezy Beach Stays' operations hub. If they agree, it categorizes the transaction, attaches the receipt, and locks it in Clearing. "That's replacing what used to be tedious human work," Mike says. Category matching, which his virtual assistants used to do by hand, is now fully automated.
Between Clearing's automation and his API workflows, about 80% of the books close before his bookkeeper steps in, which matters at a couple thousand transactions a month. "Now my bookkeeper can really focus on higher-level things." At month-end, an AI review reads the same data through the API and double-checks the work before statements go out. Breezy Beach Stays also pulls Clearing statements via the API into its owner portal, so owners can see their statements alongside their bookings and maintenance receipts.
The scoreboard: more homes, less month-end
About 3.5 times the homes, a fifth of the month-end.
Mike's time on month-end
- At about 20 homesMike did the books himself. "I'd be up till night, and I'd be miserable."2 to 3 days
- After hiring a bookkeeperA little over a year ago.About 1 day
- Today, at about 70 homesHe reviews owner statements before they go out, with very few changes. Still one bookkeeper: "I have no intention of growing that number."About ½ day
The full month-end workload now sits with his bookkeeper and the automations, and her hours go to higher-level work rather than matching transactions.
Calculated from Mike's estimates.
Mike's advice: systematize before it's needed
"Try to anticipate bottlenecks before they become bottlenecks," he says. "If you do plan to be a 100-property short-term rental management company, you have to operate your business like that from the beginning."
He is candid that powerful software takes some setup. "You're going to put a little bit of work in up front, but you're not going to hit the roadblocks that you would hit with other software. You are going to be able to do everything that you need to do." And on cost: "Spreadsheets would be cheaper, but you'd spend more in labor and work and time."
Questions, answered
Yes. Hospitable brings Airbnb, Vrbo and direct booking data together and automatically sends it to Clearing. Clearing then reconciles those bookings against your bank deposits, so the figures behind every owner statement trace back to a booking and a deposit.
Much of it. About 80% of Breezy Beach Stays' bookings reconcile automatically, and custom workflows on Clearing's API categorize transactions, attach receipts and lock entries twice a day.
Before holding owner funds. Breezy Beach Stays started on Clearing with its first outside owners, so it never had to migrate out of spreadsheets.
No. Clearing is not a property management system. Your PMS runs operations, and Clearing keeps your books in order alongside it.
Close month-end like Breezy Beach Stays.
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