Notes

How to read a Bali villa management statement in ten minutes

Most owners read a villa statement the way you read a bank balance: bottom line, is it more or less than last month, close the PDF. That takes eleven seconds and tells you almost nothing.

Here are six checks that take about ten minutes on one month of paperwork. You need the statement, whatever the platforms show you directly, and a calculator. None of them requires an accountant and all of them are things you are entitled to ask about.

1. Is the top line gross, or is it a payout?

This is the check that matters most, and almost nobody does it.

Booking platforms pay out net. They deduct their commission before the money moves. So if a statement’s top line is built from what arrived in the manager’s account, the platform’s cut has never appeared anywhere as a number that anyone read. It is not hidden. Nobody in the chain has a reason to surface it.

The test. Ask for gross booking value per reservation with the channel named for one month. Add it up yourself. Compare it with the top line on the statement.

If those two figures are the same, the statement is reporting net as gross. Every percentage you have calculated from it — including your own sense of what you are netting — is wrong in the same direction.

Airbnb publishes its host service fees on a public page: most hosts on the single-fee structure pay 15.5%, which is the structure most professionally managed villas are on. Booking.com and Agoda publish nothing at all. So this is a layer you cannot estimate from the outside; you have to be shown it.

2. What base was the management commission calculated on?

Take the management commission amount. Divide it by the gross booking value. Does that give you the percentage on your contract?

If it gives you something higher, the commission was charged on a base that includes something you were not expecting. If it gives you something lower, it was charged on a smaller base than gross — which is better than your contract probably promises, and worth understanding rather than enjoying quietly.

Every published rate card in this market charges on gross. If yours does something else, find out what before it changes.

3. How many lines are there under operating costs?

One line called “operational costs” is not an account of anything. It may be entirely honest and you cannot tell, which is the problem.

What a proper statement shows: each cost as its own line, with the supplier named, and any markup applied to it shown separately. What most statements show: a number.

The test. Ask for supplier invoices for one month. Not a breakdown — the invoices. A manager rebilling at cost produces them in an afternoon. The response is the answer, and you have not accused anybody of anything by asking.

4. Is tax on the statement, and can you see the receipt?

Two Indonesian charges land on a let villa. The regional accommodation tax, capped at 10% by UU No. 1 Tahun 2022, charged on what the guest pays. And final income tax at 10% of the gross rent under PP No. 34 Tahun 2017 — final, meaning it is not reduced by expenses and not recalculated at the end of the year.

If neither appears on your statement, that does not mean they are not owed. Ask who is registered, who files, and for the filing receipts to be attached going forward. The most common failure here is not evasion, it is two parties each assuming the other one did it.

5. Nights sold, not just revenue

Revenue alone cannot tell you whether a good month was a rate month or an occupancy month, and those cost very different amounts to produce.

Occupancy drives the variable costs: cleaning between every stay, laundry, consumables, check-in labor, wear. Two villas with identical revenue net differently, and the higher-occupancy one usually nets less. A manager buying occupancy with discounting looks like they are winning on a statement that reports only the top line.

Ask for nights sold and average achieved rate, by month. If your manager reports one and not the other, you cannot tell which villa you own.

6. Is there a date, a currency and a rate?

Find the closing transfer. Then find: the date it was made, the currency it was made in, and the exchange rate used if it was converted.

“Monthly” is not a payment term. Money that sits somewhere for an undefined period is money you are financing, and a conversion with no published rate is a conversion you cannot check. Neither of these is usually anything worse than sloppiness. Both of them are worth one sentence in a contract.

What to do with what you find

Nothing dramatic. Every one of these six is a question, not an accusation, and a company doing the job properly will answer all six without difficulty — most of them from a system they already have open.

The value is not in the answers. It is in which of the six produces a delay.

All posts · Yield estimator · Fees, line by line