Ask ten London landlords why they left their last short-let manager and most will give a version of the same answer: the statement. A gross figure that never quite matched the Airbnb payout. A cleaning charge that looked suspiciously round. A line marked "admin" that nobody could explain. Fee opacity — not bad service, not empty calendars — is one of the biggest drivers of distrust between owners and agents, and it survives because statement formats are rarely published for anyone to inspect. So we have. Below is a line-by-line walk-through of the illustrative Big Ben Suite monthly statement for a two-bedroom London flat: every line, every deduction, and — just as importantly — every deduction you will not find.
Why management statements breed distrust
A short-let management statement is a simple document pretending to be a complicated one. Money comes in from the platforms; the manager takes a fee; the rest goes to you. Yet across the industry, three habits turn that simple arithmetic into a monthly source of suspicion.
- Hidden cleaning markups — the guest is charged one rate for cleaning, the supplier is paid another, and the difference quietly becomes agent revenue that never appears anywhere as a fee.
- Vague deductions — "admin", "sundries", "maintenance provision" — lines with no invoice behind them and no stated method for challenging them.
- Gross figures that don't reconcile — the statement says one number, your Airbnb dashboard says another, and the explanation involves the word "timing".
Each of these is fixable with one design decision: publish the statement format, define every line, and commit in writing to what happens when a number is wrong. That is what an open-book statement is. Here is ours.
The statement, line by line
This is the worked example we publish on our open-book page, for a two-bedroom London flat. One caveat before the numbers, and it applies to every figure in this post: this is an illustrative example, computed from our published 10% rate and published cleaning tiers. It is not a specific owner's actuals. Any real engagement is subject to property survey and compliance-file review. London properties only.
| Line | Amount | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue | £4,800 | Illustrative monthly gross for a 2-bed, stated after the OTA platform fee has already been deducted by Airbnb or Booking.com |
| Management fee (10%) | −£480 | Flat 10% of gross — the only fee we take. No markup elsewhere |
| Net deposited to you | £4,320 | Gross minus the management fee. Nothing else is deducted |
| Memo: guest-paid cleaning | £490 | £140 per turnover × 3.5 stays in the month — charged to the guest at booking, at supplier cost. It never touches your net |
The gross line: £4,800, and what makes it checkable
The gross line is the month's booking revenue after the platform's own fee — the number Airbnb and Booking.com actually pay out, not the headline nightly rates added up. That distinction matters, because a statement built on pre-fee revenue always looks better than the money that arrives, and the gap is where confusion breeds. The important property of this line is not its size but its verifiability: it exists on two documents at once — our statement and your own platform dashboard — and those two documents must agree. If they can't be compared, the statement is asking for trust; if they can, it is offering evidence.
The management fee: −£480, and nothing else
Ten per cent of £4,800 is £480, and that flat 10% of gross is the only fee we take. No markup elsewhere. There is no setup fee, no exit fee, and no minimum term beyond 30 days' rolling notice — three absences worth as much as the headline rate, because setup and exit fees are how a low headline gets clawed back at the edges of a contract. For context: typical London short-let managers publish rates of 12–25%. The rate itself is defined once, as a single published constant, and every calculator, quote and statement draws from the same number — which is why the statement cannot quietly drift from the website.
The cleaning line: £490 that never touches your money
In the illustrative month, cleaning comes to £490 — £140 per turnover across 3.5 stays. Our published policy on it is one sentence long: "Charged to the guest at booking, at supplier cost. You pay £0, we add £0 markup." So why show it on an owner statement at all? Because the cleaning margin is a classic invisible fee. When the guest is charged more for cleaning than the supplier is paid, the difference is agent revenue that appears on no fee schedule. Publishing the pass-through as a memo line makes the arithmetic auditable: the amount charged to guests and the amount paid to the supplier are the same number, and you can ask to see both.
The reconciliation rule: when a line is wrong, you win
Every promise above would be decorative without a stated rule for disagreement. Ours is published, and it is deliberately one-sided:
"Your gross on our statement matches the payout on your own Airbnb and Booking.com dashboards to the pound. If a line ever disagrees with your platform, the platform wins and we correct it."
Note what this rule does: it makes your own dashboard — a document we do not control — the authority over our statement. There is no "timing difference" defence, no reconciliation meeting, no discretion. The same page adds a second commitment: "Figures are deterministic — never estimated by software." Every number on the statement is computed from platform payout data and published constants — the 10% rate, the cleaning tiers — not modelled, smoothed or forecast. A deterministic statement can be recomputed by anyone with the inputs, which is the entire point.
Audit your current statement in five minutes
- Put last month's statement next to last month's platform payout screen. The gross figures should match to the pound — if they don't, ask for the reconciliation in writing.
- Find the cleaning line. Ask for the supplier invoice. If the guest paid more than the supplier received, the difference is an undisclosed fee.
- Circle every line that is not the management fee or a documented, invoiced cost. "Admin" and "sundries" are questions, not answers.
- Divide total deductions by gross. If the result is higher than the headline rate you signed up to, the gap is the opacity — and it compounds every month.
