Most short-let hosts can tell you their occupancy rate without thinking. Fewer can tell you whether that number is actually good, because occupancy on its own doesn’t say much. A listing booked 90% of the year at a bargain rate can easily earn less than one booked 60% of the year at a rate that reflects what the place is worth. The number that settles the argument is revenue per available night, and most spreadsheets never calculate it.
Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR: the three numbers together
Occupancy, average daily rate (ADR), and revenue per available night (RevPAR) are three different views of the same business, and they only tell the full story together. Occupancy shows how often the calendar fills. ADR shows what a booked night is actually worth. RevPAR multiplies the two and shows what every available night earned, booked or not, which is the number that actually compares one listing against another, or one month against the last. A host running several listings needs this per property and across the whole portfolio, not just as a single blended average that hides which listings are carrying the others.
The same-day turnover problem nobody tracks
Then there’s the problem nobody tracks until a cleaner calls in a panic: same-day turnovers. Two bookings back to back sound harmless on a calendar, but if guest one checks out at 11am and guest two checks in at 3pm, that’s four hours to clean, restock, and fix anything broken. Tight turnarounds are where reviews go wrong — a rushed clean gets noticed. A same-day-turnover detector that flags every changeover automatically, works out the hours actually available between guests, and marks anything under your own comfortable threshold means you find out from a spreadsheet on a Tuesday, not from a guest complaint on a Saturday.
What each booking channel actually pays you
The last blind spot is what each booking channel actually pays. A listing site’s headline commission is never the whole story once payment processing fees, promotional discounts, and currency conversion are added in. Tracking every booking by source — bookings, nights, gross, fees paid, and real payout — shows in hard numbers what a direct booking is worth compared with one that came through a listing site, which is the kind of thing that changes how much effort goes into building a direct-booking channel.
A caveat on local rules and compliance
A quick caveat before the last part: none of this replaces knowing your local short-let rules. Registration, licensing, night caps, and tax treatment differ by city and change over time, so any night-cap or compliance tracking a spreadsheet offers should be built around numbers you confirm with your own local authority, not numbers built into the template.
If you’d rather not build this yourself
If building all of this from scratch isn’t how you want to spend a weekend, the Short Term Rental Spreadsheet here is a 16-tab Excel and Google Sheets workbook with nearly 6,000 working formulas — occupancy, ADR and RevPAR per listing and portfolio-wide, an automatic turnover clash detector, true payout by channel, night-cap tracking, and a profit tab that separates fixed costs from per-booking costs. It comes with a filled-in demo workbook so you can see it working before you enter a single real booking.
Whether it’s one listing or ten, the goal is the same: stop guessing from a platform dashboard and a bank statement, and start knowing exactly which nights, which listings, and which channels are actually making the business work.