Most small properties run their first bookings on a spreadsheet, and that's a reasonable place to start. A spreadsheet is free, everyone already knows how to use one, and with a few rules it can carry a small property further than people expect. Without those rules, it's how double bookings and forgotten balances happen.
Download the free reservation template (CSV). It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Delete the three sample rows and it's ready to use.
The columns, and why each one is there
- Guest Name, Phone, Email: who to contact when something changes. Phone matters most; it's what you'll actually use on arrival day.
- Room: which room or unit. Use the same name every time ("Room 1", not sometimes "R1"), or you can't sort by it reliably.
- Check-in, Check-out: dates in one format, every row. The template uses year-month-day (2026-11-05). It looks unusual, but it's the one format no spreadsheet misreads: 05/11 is 5 November in India and the UK but 11 May in the US, and it sorts in the right order even when the sheet treats it as plain text. Check-out is the morning they leave, not their last night.
- Status: confirmed, checked-in, checked-out, cancelled or no-show.
- Source: Direct, Airbnb, Booking.com, a travel agent. You'll want this when you're deciding which channel is worth the commission.
- Amount, Amount Paid: the total for the stay and what's been received so far. The difference between them is the balance to collect at checkout.
- Commission: what the booking site keeps. Without it, you can't tell what a booking was really worth to you.
- Notes: early check-in, an extra bed, a deposit held.
Rules that make a spreadsheet safe to run
One row per stay. Not one row per night, and not one tab per month. A stay that crosses into next month is still one row.
Never delete a cancelled booking. Change its status to cancelled. Deleted rows are how you lose track of a refund you still owe, or a deposit you kept.
Sort by room, then by check-in, before confirming anything new. This is the double-booking check. With the sheet sorted that way, each room's stays sit in date order, and any stay whose check-in date is earlier than the previous stay's check-out date is an overlap. Ten seconds of sorting before you reply to a guest is worth more than any amount of "being careful."
Update it the moment a booking happens. The sheet is only as current as its last edit. When we ran our own properties, Airbnb and Booking.com were reconciled by hand once a day, and a same-day booking slipped through that gap and caused a double booking, that's the full story of how it happened. A spreadsheet can't close that gap for you; only updating it straight away can.
Keep payments in the same row as the stay. A separate "payments" sheet drifts out of step within a week, and then checkout means reconciling two lists in front of a waiting guest.
Signs you've outgrown the spreadsheet
A spreadsheet stops being the cheap option when it starts costing you time or bookings. Common signs:
- More than one person needs to edit it, and you've had a "who changed this?" moment.
- You're on two or more booking sites and spend time each day copying dates between them.
- Your cleaner learns a room's status from a phone call or a WhatsApp message, not from anything they can check themselves.
- Checkout means working out the balance by hand from notes.
- You've had a double booking, or a near miss you caught by luck.
None of these mean a spreadsheet was a mistake. They mean the property got bigger than the tool.
Moving off it without retyping everything
If you do move to property management software, your spreadsheet isn't wasted, it's your booking history. Hostberg's bulk import takes a pasted or uploaded spreadsheet and matches the columns for you; this template's headings are the ones it recognises, so the columns line up without any manual matching, and nothing is saved until you've reviewed it.
From there, the same information lives on one booking calendar, with room status on a housekeeping board and balances tracked per stay. For what that costs, see pricing, one price per property, paid once.