Switching accounting systems can feel like a big project. In practice, setting up VRTrust comes down to five steps.

Most teams connect their systems and configure the basics in about an hour; more complex portfolios are usually fully live within a few days, with help from our Customer Success team if you want it.

This article walks through what each step involves. VRTrust has a built-in onboarding checklist to help you through these steps in order, provides suggestions, and tracks progress across your team.

Connect the tools you already us: your property management system, Airbnb, your payment processor, and your bank (via Plaid). Once connected, reservations, payouts, and bank transactions start flowing into VRTrust automatically, so you're not entering the same data twice.

Add your property owners and their listings into VRTrust. Each listing needs an active ownership period on file so that transactions, payouts, and statements attribute correctly to the right owner. Take a moment to double-check ownership start dates and member splits before moving on, since these drive downstream accounting accuracy.

Set up your chart of accounts: the categories (like management fees, maintenance, or payout distributions) that every transaction and statement line will reference. Once your accounts are in place, choose your default revenue reporting preferences.

Set up your management commission structure and any recurring or per-reservation fees: flat rates, tiered rates, channel-specific markups, or conditional rules. Once configured, VRTrust calculates these automatically on every reservation going forward.

Map your general ledger accounts to your owner statement template so revenue, expenses, taxes, and fees land in the right place for every owner, formatted the way you present statements today, or customized to your liking.

Before VRTrust takes over day-to-day accounting, enter your current trust, operating, and owner balances. This keeps your books accurate from day one and makes sure every reconciliation ties out correctly going forward. You can enter these manually or import them in bulk via CSV.

Once your accounts are mapped, invite property owners to the Owner Portal. They'll see statements, payouts, and balances in one place, without you having to email PDFs back and forth.

Most teams connect their systems and configure the basics in about an hour using the in-app checklist and our built-in chat support. If your portfolio has multiple entities, custom fee structures, or a large number of listings, our Customer Success team will walk through setup with you directly. Most implementations are fully live within a week.

If you have questions about any step, reach out to our support team using the in-app chat window. We respond as quickly as possible to every message.