Trust Accounting for Short-Term Rentals in Australia and New Zealand

If you manage short-term rentals in Australia or New Zealand, trust accounting isn’t just a nice-to-have. In many cases, it’s a requirement, and it’s one of the easiest parts of the business to mess up when you’re juggling multiple channels, payouts, refunds, cleaners, and owner disbursements.

This guide breaks it down in plain English: what trust accounting is, why it matters, and how to set up a process you can actually stick to. Then we’ll share how a new Hospitable integration helps New Zealand and Australian hosts and property managers handle this properly.

What is trust accounting?

Put simply, trust accounting is how you handle money that belongs to someone else (usually an owner). The core idea is separation: owner funds shouldn’t mix with your business funds - and every transaction needs a paper trail.

If you want a one-sentence definition:

Trust accounting = keeping client funds separate and traceable, so you can show exactly where money came from, where it went, and why.

In Australia, trust accounting obligations come from state-based regulation and licensing rules, and they can vary depending on where you operate and your business structure. NSW guidance, for example, explains requirements around receiving client money, holding it in trust, and meeting audit/record-keeping obligations. Queensland outlines trust account requirements and audit expectations for trust money as well.

(Not legal advice - if you’re unsure whether you’re required to run a trust account, check your state regulator or get professional advice.)

Why this gets harder with short-term rentals

Long-term property management already has trust accounting complexity. Short-term rentals add extra layers:

• payouts arriving in batches (often covering multiple reservations)

• different payout schedules across channels

• changes, cancellations, partial refunds, chargebacks

• cleaning and maintenance costs that need to be allocated correctly

• owners expecting clear, consistent statements every month

If you’re doing all that across spreadsheets and bank feeds, it’s not a question of if something slips, it’s when.

The 5 questions you should always be able to answer

Here’s a simple gut-check. If you’re doing trust accounting well, you can always answer:

1. Whose money is this? (which owner/property)

2. Why are we holding it? (which booking/fee/expense)

3. Where is it right now? (which account)

4. What changed, and when? (audit trail)

5. Does it match the bank? (reconciliation)

If any of those questions are hard to answer quickly, that’s usually where problems start.

Common trust accounting mistakes (that bite later)

1. Mixing business and owner funds. Even temporarily. It makes reporting messy, creates confusion, and can introduce compliance risk.

2. Treating OTA payouts like “the source of truth.” OTA payouts are often net of fees and batched across bookings. If you don’t map payouts back to reservations cleanly, owner statements become guesswork.

3. Reconciliation that happens “when we have time.” Reconciliation is the control that catches small issues before they become big ones.

4. Owner statements that are either too vague, or too chaotic. Owners want transparency. They don’t want a puzzle.

Where Hospitable comes in (and what’s new for Australia and New Zealand)

Hospitable helps you run the day-to-day of hosting: messaging, automation, calendars, task workflows, the stuff that keeps operations smooth and guests happy.

Trust accounting in Australia and New Zealand is a separate, specialised requirement. That’s why we’ve added an integration with BookingTrust, a trust accounting platform built for short-term rental businesses operating under trust accounting rules.