Comparison
Most small accommodation businesses start with a spreadsheet, a notebook, or both. It works — until a double booking, a lost invoice, or a season where you cannot say what you actually earned. This page compares manual management honestly with running the same operation in a property management system.
| Ruma | Spreadsheets / manual | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | From €39/month | Free — until errors, lost time, and missed bookings |
| Double bookings | Channels block automatically the moment a booking arrives | You update every platform by hand and hope you were fast enough |
| Availability overview | One visual calendar for all rooms and properties | Scrolling rows and tabs; easy to misread dates |
| Invoices & tourist tax | Generated from bookings, taxes calculated, PDF export | Typed manually per booking; errors accumulate |
| Revenue & occupancy reports | One click, any date range, export to Excel/PDF | Hours of copy-pasting at the end of the season |
| Guest history | CRM with profiles, stay history, and notes | Scattered across chats, emails, and memory |
| Team access | Staff accounts with role-based permissions | Shared files or one phone everyone calls |
| Access from anywhere | Web app + mobile app on Google Play | The file lives on one computer |
| Risk of losing data | Backed up in the cloud | One corrupted file or lost notebook away from chaos |
| Time spent on admin | Minutes per day | Hours per week in high season |
Move to Ruma when a double booking would cost you more than €39, when tax season means days of manual work, or when you list on more than one platform.
Pick Spreadsheets / manual
A spreadsheet is genuinely fine when you have a single room, one channel, few bookings, and invoicing is not required.
The usual triggers: listing on a second platform (double-booking risk), needing legal invoices or tourist-tax reports, or spending more than a couple of hours a week on booking admin.
Yes — you can add current and future bookings when you start, and connected channels sync their bookings automatically from day one.
If you take bookings from OTAs and must issue invoices or collect tourist tax, a PMS typically pays for itself with the first prevented double booking or one saved tax-season weekend.
See also: Ruma pricing · all FAQs