Problem

• Revenue and expenses are distributed across time, platforms, and categories

• Costs behave differently (fixed, per-stay, percentage-based) and change over time

• Cancellations distort operational metrics if treated naively

• High occupancy does not always translate to high margin

The goal was not to build a dashboard, but to create a system that preserves financial truth over time.

Approach

I designed and built a lightweight revenue intelligence system in Notion, structured around a small set of primitives:

• Reservations – including explicit handling of cancellations

• Financial months – treated as the unit of analysis

• Expense catalog – modeling fixed, variable, and percentage-based costs

A key design choice was separating rates from instances. Expenses are referenced from a catalog rather than hard-coded into each month, allowing changes in cleaning fees, utilities, or HOA costs without retroactively altering historical data—similar in spirit to absolute references in spreadsheets.

System Capabilities

• Month-level rollups for revenue, expenses, and net margin

• Derived metrics such as ADR and per-stay costs

• Cancellation-aware logic to avoid inflated operational expenses

• Clear separation between structure and data to keep the system adaptable

The emphasis throughout was on legibility: the ability to trace any number back to its source and understand why it exists.

Outcome

The system made it possible to compare months meaningfully, test pricing strategies, and identify cases where increased bookings reduced profitability due to cost interactions. More importantly, it shifted decision-making from intuition to margin-aware reasoning.

Reflection

This project reflects how Interweft approaches systems design: start from first principles, respect real-world constraints, and build structures that surface insight rather than obscure it. The tools are simple by design; the value lies in the underlying logic.