holiday home accounts managing software

wub

Hi my first post! i own a holiday home that i rent out, most for weekends. i use agents to take the booking and they take a commission. i manage the bookings, with an online calendar and an actual calendar ( paper) as a back up. my problem is managing the payments from the agents, especially as i have just reached the VAT threshold, £85'000 P/A and now have to account much more accurately.

So given there is 52 w/e's in the year, and i am booked up for a year in advance, going forward, i have deposits in, that might relate to a booking that's going to happen in say 12 months, i have final payments if for bookings, which is generally a month before the booking, but could be months ahead of a booking, i have alterations to bookings, ie adding or subtracting amounts due to more or less guests and i have cancellations. To further add to the complications of keeping track of all this, my accountant tells me that for accounting purposes, "the sale" has not taken place until the stay date and as i'm becoming  VAT registered, this is the point the VAT invoice is raised.

But my agents invoice me for their commission, when they take a booking. So from a vat point of view, in theory, i can claim the vat back on the booking of a sale that has not in fact, taken place yet and might not for a good few months? Both my book keeper and my accountants, seem to have little experience in this or can not find or suggest any programs that might help manage this. All they can find is software for big companies, that have hundreds of properties and cost hundreds per month to use. I only have one property.

It seems to me, whats required is a program, that's designed for holiday letting, that links payments to a holiday period. Ie lets call it "weekend 48" and then allow the user to assign payments to that "Sale / holiday period" and then the user can see if all payments are in  towards that holiday period, then calculate the turnover, as the holiday periods actually happen and the VAT payments due.

There are hundreds of thousands of holiday homes in Uk alone, so surly there is something out there that does this? Any advice out there?

Oh and i just need to say, i dont really want this linked to a holiday home booking system, as i have already spent weeks trying to find one that will allow, 3 agents iCal links to update the booking calendar, there does not seem to be any? Plenty allow Booking.com or Airbnb etc, but none have the ability to allow 2 or more links from independent letting agents. So i ended up using Supercontrol, as they said they do allow these links, but then it turned out they don't!, so i had to use  their work around, which is to have another online calendar (i used Teamup) which does except more than one iCal link, then the 3 agents iCal links, update that calendar and then that Teamup calendar sends one update to Supercontrol calendar!

I never in a million years thought this management side of a holiday home in this day and age would be so complicated for one house.