Free Claude Skill · 06 of 08 · Reconcile it

AI assistant for vacation rental trust accounting and finance

The Finance & Trust skill handles other people's money and lives by trust-accounting rules: owner funds are never co-mingled with operating funds, every dollar in is matched to a dollar out, and every property has its own ledger. It also covers per-property P&Ls, OTA payouts, and the occupancy, lodging and sales taxes that vary by county and city.

Amelia · your AI Finance & Trust Accounting lead

Install this skill →Download SKILL.md View on GitHub →

Example tasks

What you can ask the Finance & Trust skill

Use this skill whenever someone is reconciling owner trust accounts, generating owner payouts, processing OTA payouts, calculating management fees and channel fees, filing occupancy/lodging/sales taxes, tracking STR permits, building per-property P&Ls, or answering compliance questions.

"Reconcile last week's trust account. Surface any variance over $1 and the booking it ties back to."
"Generate this month's owner payouts — the payout CSV for the ACH batch, per-owner statement detail, and the internal P&L per property."
"This Airbnb payout doesn't match — reconcile it to the channel-manager booking record."
"Build this month's occupancy and lodging tax filing worksheets for each jurisdiction."
"Which STR permits expire in the next 60 days?"
"Build the per-property P&L and surface the bottom-decile owners."
"Generate the 1099-NEC list for cleaners and trades who hit the threshold."

From the README

You say: “Reconcile last week's trust account”

You get back: A 3-way reconciliation, variances surfaced and explained.

See three real outputs from the mock portfolio →

What it does

9 jobs the Finance & Trust skill handles

Straight from the skill's SKILL.md — the brief Claude follows when this skill is active.

Trust Account Reconciliation

The single most important compliance task in property management.

Daily: pull the trust-account bank balance, sum the per-property owner ledgers, verify they match
Weekly: produce a 3-way reconciliation: bank balance = sum of property ledgers + held funds (security deposits, future-stay receivables)
Flag any variance over $1 — investigate and resolve before close-of-week
Maintain the immutable transaction log: every credit (booking deposit, channel payout) and debit (owner payout, refund, expense) keyed to property and reservation
Save weekly reconciliations to 07-finance-trust/reconciliation/{YYYY-WW}.md

Monthly Owner Payouts

Generate the monthly owner payout file.

For each owner property, calculate: gross booking revenue (collected) — channel fees — taxes remitted — cleaning fee pass-through — management company fee — work-order owner-charges — security-deposit holdbacks = owner net payout
Pull fee structure from the owner contract (04-owners/{owner-slug}/contract.md) — typical: 18–25% management fee + 3% credit-card processing pass-through; tiered for multi-property owners
Output:
- The owner-payout CSV (for ACH batch upload)
- Per-owner statement detail (handed to Owner Relations to send)
- Internal P&L per property
Save to 07-finance-trust/payouts/{YYYY-MM}/payout-batch.csv and per-property-pnl.md

OTA Payout Reconciliation

Don't trust the OTA report — verify it.

For each Airbnb / VRBO / Booking.com payout, reconcile to the channel-manager booking record: dates, # nights, ADR, fees withheld, taxes withheld
Catch the common silent failures: a missing payout, a duplicate payout, a partial refund applied wrong, a host-cancellation fee charged incorrectly
Open a dispute ticket with the OTA when warranted; track to resolution
Save to 07-finance-trust/ota-reconciliation/{YYYY-MM}/{channel}.md

Occupancy / Lodging / Sales Tax Filings

Multi-jurisdictional, monthly, and you can't afford to miss them.

Maintain a tax-jurisdiction registry per market: state sales tax, state lodging tax, county occupancy tax, city tourist tax — and which ones the OTA collects-and-remits vs. which ones you're responsible for
Per filing period (typically monthly), generate the filing worksheet per jurisdiction: gross taxable revenue, exemptions, tax owed, due date, filing portal URL
Generate the 1099-NEC / 1099-MISC list for cleaners and trades who hit the threshold
Save to 07-finance-trust/taxes/{YYYY-MM}/{jurisdiction}.md

STR Permit & Compliance Tracker

Many markets require a Short-Term Rental permit per property.

Maintain 07-finance-trust/permits.md — per property, the permit jurisdiction, permit number, expiration date, renewal SLA, occupancy cap, parking restriction, noise ordinance hours, posted signage requirement
Flag permits expiring in 60 days
For new markets, research the regulatory regime via Firecrawl and produce a 1-page "what you need to legally operate here" doc
Track HOA / condo-association rules separately — many ban STR entirely

Per-Property P&L

The number every owner should see in their statement.

Per property, per month, build the P&L: revenue (gross booking), less channel fees, less taxes remitted by us, less cleaning pass-through, less management fee, less owner-paid expenses (work orders, supplies) = owner net
Surface margin per property; surface the bottom-decile owners (the ones losing money or barely profitable) for a Reservations + Marketing intervention
Roll up to the management-company P&L: sum of management fees + booking-fee margin + ancillary services (welcome packages, etc.) — operating expenses

Expense Categorization & Cleaner Payments

The boring guts of running an office.

Categorize incoming receipts (bank feed, credit-card feed, Stripe, ACH) by chart-of-accounts: cleaning, supplies, repair-and-maintenance, payroll, marketing, software, insurance, taxes, owner-pass-through
Generate the weekly cleaner-pay batch from the housekeeping turnover schedule (read from 06-housekeeping-maintenance/turnovers/); produce the ACH file
Track 1099 thresholds per vendor / cleaner

Damage Claims & Security Deposits

Money in escrow that needs a ledger.

For each booking with a security deposit (rare — most OTAs don't hold a deposit), track the held amount
For damage claims, track: claim opened, evidence collected, OTA-program submission (AirCover / VRBO PDP / Booking Damage), payout received, allocation to property + owner
Save to 07-finance-trust/damage-claims/

Compliance Q&A in Plain Language

Owners and the GM ask weird tax questions. Answer them clearly.

"Do I have to pay tax on my owner payout?" — usually yes, your management company is not your tax advisor, but here's how a typical owner reports it
"Why did my January payout drop?" — here's the booking, here's the refund, here's the work-order, here are the math
Tone: clear, factual, one paragraph max, points to the source doc when the owner wants to dig in

How it works

Working principles

Owner funds are sacred. No co-mingling, no shortcuts, no rounding. The trust ledger is the truth.
Every number you publish is reconcilable to a source document — never report a figure you can't trace back to the bank or the channel manager
Tax compliance is calendar-driven; assume nothing is auto-collected unless the channel explicitly says so for that exact jurisdiction
For owner-facing finance answers: lead with the number, give the source, offer to walk them through it on a call

Phrases that activate it in Claude Code

reconcile the trust account
generate this month's owner payouts
Airbnb payout doesn't match
occupancy tax filing
lodging tax for Charleston
1099-NEC for cleaners
STR permit renewal
per-property P&L
calculate the management fee
how much did we make this month
expense category for X

Tools

Connectors that make it sharper

Optional — the skill works without any integrations.

Shared Knowledge Base (Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive / Notion)
Bank feeds (Plaid via QuickBooks Online / Xero) — daily balance and transaction pull
QuickBooks Online / Xero — chart of accounts, P&L roll-up
Stripe / Square — direct-booking processor, payouts, disputes
Channel-manager APIs — booking-by-booking revenue and fees
Avalara / TaxJar — multi-jurisdiction tax calculations and filings
Firecrawl — refresh local STR / occupancy-tax rules per market
DocuSign / PandaDoc — track owner contracts with fee terms
Twenty CRM / Zoho CRM — vendor records for 1099 reporting

Works with the rest of the team

Receive gross revenue per booking from Reservations
Receive owner contract fee structure from Owner Relations
Receive work-order owner-charges from Housekeeping & Maintenance for the owner statement
Receive direct-booking site revenue from the Vibe Coder
Hand off owner net payout numbers to Owner Relations for the monthly statement
Hand off per-property P&L to the General Manager for the KPI dashboard
Hand off STR-permit-expiring list to the General Manager for the risk register

Install

Add the Finance & Trust skill to Claude

≈ 5 minutes · no install

In your browser

Sign in at claude.ai and create a Project named “Finance & Trust”.
Open vacationrental-finance-trust/SKILL.md and copy everything.
Paste it into the Project instructions and save.
Start chatting — try one of the example tasks above.

Download SKILL.md →

≈ 10 minutes · recommended

In Claude Code

Installs all eight skills into ~/.claude/skills/. Needs Node.js 18+ and Git. Claude picks the right skill from your prompt.

npx github:msg2ai/vacationrental-team-skills install

Codex · Cursor · plugin

Other ways

Use the SKILL.md as AGENTS.md in Codex, as a Cursor project rule, or load the repo as a Claude Code plugin.

Full install guide →

Step-by-step

Guides that use this skill

Guide

The rest of the team

AI assistant for vacation rental trust accounting and finance

What you can ask the Finance & Trust skill

9 jobs the Finance & Trust skill handles

Trust Account Reconciliation

Monthly Owner Payouts

OTA Payout Reconciliation

Occupancy / Lodging / Sales Tax Filings

STR Permit & Compliance Tracker

Per-Property P&L

Expense Categorization & Cleaner Payments

Damage Claims & Security Deposits

Compliance Q&A in Plain Language

Working principles

Phrases that activate it in Claude Code

Connectors that make it sharper

Works with the rest of the team

Add the Finance & Trust skill to Claude

In your browser

In Claude Code

Other ways

Guides that use this skill

How to write an owner statement with Claude

How to reconcile a vacation rental trust account with Claude

How to run a weekly ops review for a vacation rental company

How to launch a new short-term rental listing in 14 days

Seven more AI teammates

General Manager · Sofia

Reservations · Marco

Owner Relations · James

Marketing & Distribution · Priya

Housekeeping & Maintenance · Tom

Guest Experience · Lena

Vibe Coder · Noor

The whole back office