Maine Cottage Keepers Partners with Clearing to Automate their Bookkeeping Practices
Discover how Maine Cottage Keepers automated their financial processes with automated bookkeeping and trust accounting through Clearing. Learn about their journey and the benefits experienced.
August 24, 2023
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Overview of Maine Cottage Keepers
Maine Cottage Keepers is a locally owned & operated property management and vacation rental company in Maine, USA. Founded by Pat Lapomarda, Maine Cottage Keepers is dedicated to delivering exceptional experiences for both homeowners and guests. With a blend of personalized approach and technical savvy, they provide a fully hands-free guest experience, supported by real people living in the MidCoast & Sebago Lakes regions of Maine using integrated technical solutions. They offer comprehensive property management services, including marketing, bookings, revenue management, cleaning, maintenance, and inspections that they have worked hard over the past several seasons to hone their business model and adapt it to the new post-COVID reality. Their local expertise and tailored strategies ensure effective property marketing and attract the right guests. With a strong focus on guest satisfaction, Maine Cottage Keepers’ streamlined, value-added customer service and enables memorable vacations. Whether homeowners want a hassle-free rental experience or guests seek an unforgettable getaway, Maine Cottage Keepers delivers professional, reliable, and rewarding vacation rental management.
Maine Cottage Keepers’ Goals for Financial Management
When Maine Cottage Keepers first met with Clearing, they were struggling with finding an efficient way to manage their books, and reconcile their accounts. Their goals were clear:
- Generate Efficient Bookkeeping: Simplify the process of reconciling bank account deposits with booking information and accurately capture all financial data in QuickBooks.
- Automate Data Capture: Automate the collection and organization of booking information to ensure accurate and streamlined financial records.
- Enhance Reporting Capabilities: Generate detailed reports that provide valuable insights into unit-level economics for better decision-making and strategic planning.
- Integration with Existing Systems: Seamlessly integrate with their existing tech stack to enhance capabilities and facilitate a smooth transition of financial data.
Challenges Faced Prior to Implementing Clearing
Prior to implementing Clearing, Maine Cottage Keepers had spent countless hours manually reconciling bank account deposits with booking information. This process was also prone to errors, requiring significant manual effort and a comprehensive review each month. Being that Pat, Maine Cottage Keepers’ founder, was tech savvy, he embarked on a journey towards creating his own solution, but was met with many challenges along the way. Building connected systems can become very challenging very quickly, especially with many different sources of financial information that change over time.
Without an automated system, Maine Cottage Keepers also encountered discrepancies and inaccuracies in their financial data. Manually capturing and organizing booking information lead to data entry errors or missed entries, resulting in incomplete or inconsistent financial records. Eventually, Pat met Clearing, and the rest was history. Pat became an early user of the solution, and has been instrumental in helping design the future of automated bookkeeping and trust accounting for Short-Term Rental property businesses.
“Clearing has revolutionized our financial management processes, providing us with an automated and streamlined bookkeeping and trust accounting solution. As a tech professional, I had been building my own solution, but kept investing time into it. Once I found Clearing, I have completely replaced my home-grown solution and finally experienced the significant time savings and accuracy improvements in our bookkeeping and data reconciliation we had been seeking. It has transformed our operations, allowing us to focus more on delivering exceptional experiences to our guests and homeowners.” - Pat Lapomarda, Founder at Maine Cottage Keepers.
Solving Maine Cottage Keepers’ Challenges with Clearing
By leveraging Clearing's platform, Maine Cottage Keepers overcame their previous hurdles and achieve streamlined their financial operations, automated their bookkeeping, improved accuracy of their financial data, and enhanced their homeowner reporting capabilities. The following is a summary of the solutions they achieved with Clearing:
- Automated Bookkeeping and Data Reconciliation: Clearing automated the process of reconciling bank account deposits with booking information, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
- Accurate Data Capture and Integration: With Clearing, Maine Cottage Keepers can seamlessly capture and integrate booking information into their financial system. This automation minimizes data discrepancies and ensures that all relevant financial data is accurately recorded and reflected in their records, providing a more holistic view of their financial performance.
- Granular Insights into Unit-Level Economics: Clearing's reporting capabilities allowed Maine Cottage Keepers to gain detailed insights into the financial performance of each rental unit.
- Seamless Integration with QuickBooks: Clearing seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks, allowing for a smooth transfer of financial data between systems. However, Maine Cottage Keepers was so impressed with the capabilities of Clearing, that they actually reduced their tech stack expenses by removing their subscription with QuickBooks. They now only use Clearing for all their financial management needs.
- Scalability and Growth Support: Clearing's scalable solution ensures that Maine Cottage Keepers can efficiently manage their growing number of bookings and properties, finally bending the cost curve in their financial management area.
In summary, Clearing's platform provides Maine Cottage Keepers with the tools and capabilities needed to automate bookkeeping processes, enhance accuracy, and gain valuable financial insights of their vacation rental business.
“Partnering with Clearing has been a game-changer for us. No longer do we need to spend time on repetitive tasks like tagging transactions to units and can use that time to drive more value out of each dollar spent. The platform's granular insights into unit-level economics have empowered us to make these data-driven decisions and optimize our rental financial strategies. We can easily share these strategies with homeowners we work with and grow both of our businesses. Thanks to Clearing, we have achieved remarkable efficiency, scalability, and financial success in our vacation rental management business.” - Pat Lapomarda, Founder at Maine Cottage Keepers.
To find out more about how Clearing can help improve your Short-Term Rental financial management, automate your bookkeeping, streamline your Trust Accounting processes, and more, feel free to reach out to us through our contact page - or Book A Demo Today!
Clearing is a Financial Technology Company, not a bank. Deposit Accounts are issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, Member FDIC.
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