Year-End Checklist: Will Your Hours Hold Up?

1. Total your hours so far, honestly

Add up what you have actually logged, not what you think you have done. If the number is materially lower than you expected, that is useful information while there are still months left in the year — and useless information in April.

2. Total everyone else’s hours

Count your cleaner’s turnovers, your co-host, your handyman, your manager. If you are relying on the 100-hour test and anyone is ahead of you, you have a problem you can still act on: take more of the work back, or change what you are outsourcing for the remainder of the year.

3. Recalculate the average stay

Nights rented divided by number of bookings, year to date. If it is drifting toward seven days, a single long winter booking could push you over. Knowing that before you accept the booking is the entire point of checking now.

4. Audit the quality of the log itself

A log can have enough hours and still be weak. Look for:

• Entries with vague descriptions that would mean nothing to a stranger.
• Long stretches with no entries at all, which read as gaps rather than quiet periods.
• Suspiciously uniform durations.
• Anything that looks like investor activity rather than operations.
• Missing evidence for the larger entries — receipts, invoices, messages.

5. Talk to your CPA before December, not after

A CPA can tell you in October that you are short and what your realistic options are. In April they can only tell you what happened. If you are planning a cost segregation study, or you are unsure which test you are relying on, that conversation is worth having while the year is still open.

6. Fix the tracking for next year while you care

Whatever went wrong this year — forgotten entries, no record of the cleaner, a log that lived in three places — fix it in January rather than resolving to do better. STR Tracker logs an entry in seconds, tracks other participants alongside you, and shows both thresholds live so October never comes as a surprise.