Your cabin is a business, not a rental.
We do monthly bookkeeping for short-term rental owners with your business tax return included, plus a $497 Diagnostic Review to see where your books stand. If your average guest stay is a long weekend, the tax code may not treat your cabin as a rental at all. Most owners find that out in April, when it is too late to do anything with it.
Sound familiar?
What short-term rental owners actually deal with.
Airbnb and Vrbo deposit you net. Nobody has tied those payouts back to what guests actually paid, what the platform kept, and what was collected as tax.
Two or three cabins run through one account, so you could not say which one earns its keep after cleaning, management and debt service.
You do not know whether your cabin belongs on Schedule E or Schedule C, and that answer decides whether you owe self-employment tax on it.
Someone told you the losses can offset your W-2 income. Nobody told you what you have to document, all year, to actually claim it.
Your CPA sees the year for the first time in March, by which point every decision that mattered has already been made.
What we actually do
Honest scope, built for how cabins actually run.
Books kept per cabin
Gross bookings, platform fees, cleaning, management, supplies, repairs and debt service tracked against the specific cabin that produced them. A full calendar and a profitable cabin are not the same thing, and only one of them shows up here.
Payouts untangled
The platforms pay you a net number after their cut and after any tax they collected on your behalf. Booked as deposits, your revenue is understated and your fees disappear. We reconstruct gross, fees and taxes collected so the return starts from the real number.
Honest about scope
We keep the books and file the returns. We do not perform cost segregation studies, appraisals, or audited statements. Plenty of cabin owners should have a study done. If you are one, we will say so and work alongside whoever does it.
Several cabins, an LLC or two, a property that went into service mid-year: bring it to the fit call. We would rather tell you honestly than take on work we cannot do well.
A cabin that books every weekend can still lose money after cleaning, management and the note. The calendar is not the P&L.The Smoky Mountain way.
Based in East Tennessee
We live where your cabin is.
Sevierville, Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge sit in our own service area, and the local filings are their own small trap. Sevier County charges a 3% lodging tax on overnight rentals outside the city limits, due monthly by the 20th, and it applies to your cleaning and pet fees, not just the nightly rate. Inside Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Sevierville or Pittman Center, the city takes its own instead.
The part that catches owners: even when Airbnb or Vrbo remits the tax for you, the county still expects you to have a lodging account open with the Trustee. There is a business license and a state sales tax registration behind that too. None of it is difficult. It is just quietly missed, usually by an owner who lives somewhere else and assumed the platform handled everything.
We work with cabin owners across the Smokies and with remote owners nationwide. We will not come walk your property. We will keep your books, wherever you are buying.
Answers before you ask.
Is my cabin income Schedule E or Schedule C?
Usually Schedule E. It moves to Schedule C, and picks up self-employment tax, when you provide substantial services of the kind a hotel provides: housekeeping during the stay, meals, a concierge. Standard cleaning between guests is not substantial services. The distinction is worth real money, because Schedule C income carries roughly 15.3% self-employment tax that Schedule E income does not.
What is the 7-day rule everyone talks about?
Under the passive activity regulations, an activity is not treated as a rental activity when the average period of customer use is seven days or less. Most Smokies cabins clear that easily on weekend and long-weekend stays. On its own it changes nothing. It only matters alongside the next answer.
Can my cabin losses offset my W-2 income?
They can, if the average stay is seven days or less and you materially participate in the activity. Meet both and the losses are non-passive, which is what lets them offset wages or other income. You do not need real estate professional status for this; that is a separate rule people routinely confuse it with. What you do need is contemporaneous records of your hours. This is fact-specific and it is worth deciding before the year is over, not after.
Schedule E versus C, passive versus non-passive: are those the same question?
No, and conflating them is the most common mistake we see. Schedule E or C decides whether you owe self-employment tax. Passive or non-passive decides whether a loss can offset your other income. A cabin can sit on Schedule E and still produce non-passive losses. Both questions have to be answered, separately.
Do I still owe Sevier County lodging tax if Airbnb collects it?
If the platform is remitting it, you are not filing that return again. You are still expected to open a lodging account with the County Trustee, and to hold a business license and a state sales tax registration. Inside the city limits of Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Sevierville or Pittman Center the city administers its own tax instead of the county.
Do you do cost segregation studies?
No. That is specialist engineering work and we do not pretend otherwise. For a cabin that has just gone into service it is often worth doing, and it pairs with the rule above. We keep the books, file the returns, and work alongside whoever performs the study.
Do you track each cabin separately?
Yes. Every cabin gets its own tracking in QuickBooks so bookings, platform fees, cleaning and management land against the property that produced them. Reported as one lump, the books tell you the portfolio made money. They do not tell you which cabin is carrying the others.
Get the Rental Property Bookkeeping Checklist.
The monthly routine two CPAs use to keep rental books clean: per-property tracking, repairs versus improvements, deposits and escrow handled right. Free, one email, no hoops.
Pricing
One package, three levels
Every level includes bookkeeping and your business tax return. What you pay depends on how many cabins and accounts you run, so we quote it after we have looked.
Ready to know which cabin actually pays?
Book a free fit call. We will talk through how your cabins are set up and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.
Book a fit call See the Diagnostic Review
Rather not book a call? Email brooks@smokymountaincpas.com. Brooks answers every one.