Night cap tracker

Why a spreadsheet gets this wrong

Three things trip up hand-counting, and all three are the sort of error you only discover when someone asks for your records.

The first is the window. Some jurisdictions count a calendar year, some count a rolling twelve months, and Western Australia's metro exemption is expressed as 90 nights within a 12-month period measured from the date of registration. A spreadsheet built around 1 January quietly reports the wrong figure in two of those three cases.

The second is the stay that straddles the boundary. A booking that checks in on 29 December and runs six nights does not put six nights into the old year. This tracker splits it correctly.

The third is forward bookings. The nights that put you over the cap are usually already sold. Counting only what has happened tells you about a problem after it is too late to avoid it, which is why the panel above shows what is already booked for later in the year separately.

Caps are not all the same shape

A cap can look like a single number and still behave differently. Some apply only to non-hosted stays, so nights with you on site do not count. Some exempt mapped precincts entirely: Byron Shire's 60-night cap does not apply in the Byron Bay town centre or Brunswick Heads, which stay at 365. Some are not caps at all but approval thresholds, where exceeding the number does not make you illegal, it makes you someone who needs a development approval.

That last distinction matters commercially. In the Perth metropolitan area, going past 90 nights of un-hosted letting does not end your business, it means you need development approval from your local council to continue. Hosts who read it as a hard cap have left money on the table.

Keeping records that would survive being asked for

If a council does ask, a screenshot of a booking calendar is a weak answer. What holds up is a dated list of stays that reconciles to your platform payout statements and your tax records, kept contemporaneously rather than reconstructed afterwards.

Use the CSV export for that. It gives you check-in date, nights and your own label, which reconciles cleanly against a payout report. If you run more than one or two listings, the honest answer is that manual tracking stops being viable and the counting belongs in your management software, where it happens automatically off the live calendar.

Common questions

Related

• Every night cap in Australia, compared
• What happens if you breach a cap
• Hosted versus non-hosted, and why it decides your cap
• Check a postcode