A Bookkeeper and a Growing Portfolio
Despite her deep expertise in vacation rental accounting, Lara could see that the processes that worked at ten properties weren’t scalable. Every month brought more reservations, more owner transactions, and more complexity to track.
"It would literally take me days and days of spreadsheets just to track all the advance deposits, cancellations, and payments every month," Lara recalls.
When Spreadsheets Hit Their Breaking Point
The problem wasn't accuracy, it was sustainability. Lara had built a meticulous system on custom Excel templates, manual exports, and painstaking reconciliation of every advanced deposit and reservation payment across hundreds of monthly transactions.
Everything balanced. But it took up more time than it should. Lara would often have to take breaks between days-long sessions of working on the books. "I'd have to go figure out what I didn't know the answer to and come back."
For the owner of A&J, Jessie Dumont, that meant a close cycle that stretched into weeks, statements going out as individual email attachments, approvals tracked loosely, and a bookkeeper under mounting pressure. Waiting for answers became a bottleneck.
One day, Lara decided she had to speak up. “Eventually I said: we have to make a decision. Something has to give. We can't do this the way we are anymore.”
The challenge: every option with strong enough accounting features required replacing the property management system that Jessie relied on for guest communication. That wasn't a trade she was willing to make.
Keep the PMS, Replace the Process
VRTrust offered something the other options couldn't: accounting depth without operational disruption. It integrated directly with Hostaway, the company’s existing PMS, giving Lara the reconciliation and reporting infrastructure she needed while leaving Jessie's workflows untouched.
"VRTrust being able to replace the accounting piece without replacing the PMS was a strong selling point," Lara says.
The guest balances report alone replaced the most labor-intensive part of Lara's monthly workflow. "That report is basically what I was doing manually," she says. "Now I can work through it quickly and post corrections in real time."
The owner statement workflow transformed how the two of them work together: instead of email attachments and informal sign-offs, statements now live in a shared system. Jessie reviews each one and hits publish. Lara gets the green light.
"It holds us both accountable," Lara says. For Jessie, this provides financial visibility she didn't have before. They can both see the same data, in real time, without waiting for an email.
What Changed with VRTrust
The results showed up immediately. Month-end, once a multi-day marathon of manual reconciliation, now fits into a focused single-day workflow. The custom spreadsheet system Lara had maintained for years has been replaced with a user-friendly system of record.
"Everything I used to keep track of in spreadsheets and QuickBooks is now in one place. I can quickly see when a reservation was paid, refunded, or matched without digging through exports,” she says. “VRTrust saves us time, keeps everything organized, and my brain doesn't have to be a computer anymore."
For A&J, cleaner accounting has meant more than faster closes. Today, more than 170 owner statements move through a shared, auditable workflow. Every reservation, payment, and owner balance is traceable in real time. Questions that used to require a back-and-forth between Jessie and Lara now have answers built into the system.
"Now she can go in and see why I'm asking the questions," Lara says. "If there's a balance I'm flagging, I can show her: here it is, here's what's matched, here's what isn't. That's a lot easier than asking her to trust me on a spreadsheet."
A Bookkeeper’s Advice, a Shared Workflow, and a Scalable System
For years, Lara had adapted the accounting process to keep pace with her client's growth. New spreadsheets, new workflows, and new workarounds helped the business reach 170 properties, but they also made month-end increasingly difficult to manage.
Today, the process scales with the business instead of creating more work for Lara and Jessie.
With a shared system, automated reconciliation workflows, and complete visibility into reservations, payments, and owner balances, what was once a reactive month-end process has become a predictable, collaborative workflow.
That experience is one of the reasons Lara became a VRTrust Accounting Partner. She now recommends the platform to other vacation rental managers who have reached the point where their accounting processes can no longer keep up with their business.
Her advice is simple: “If your bookkeeper is telling you something has to change, listen to them. This is what the right infrastructure looks like.”
Jessie’s decision to act on that advice didn't just solve a process problem. It gave her a bookkeeper who can move faster, communicate more clearly, and show up to the relationship as a true financial partner.
For property management companies like A&J Home Concierge, growth eventually demands more than spreadsheets. It demands systems built to support what's next.
