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Contractors · 5 min read
The stay itself is usually the easy part. The headache often comes afterwards: the missing receipt, the booking that went on someone's personal card, the invoice in the wrong company name, the cost nobody can match to a job. Multiply that across a few crews and a few months and it becomes a real drain on time. A little set-up before the first booking saves hours of chasing later. This guide covers how to keep contractor accommodation paperwork simple — and where you need an accountant rather than a blog post.
By Offer2Stay · Updated October 2026
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Get offers for your crewNone of those steps is a disaster on its own. Together, over dozens of bookings, they cost real time and make it hard to see what accommodation is actually costing each job.
The single most useful thing you can do is agree, in advance, how bookings are made. Is everything booked centrally by the office, or can site managers book for their own crews? Which card or account do bookings go on? Is there a limit above which someone needs to approve?
There's no single right answer — a small firm might have one person book everything, while a larger one gives site managers freedom within agreed rules. What matters is that everyone knows the rules, and that bookings don't end up on personal cards by default.
Tip: Write the booking rules down in a short message to everyone who books. It takes five minutes and prevents most problems.
For each stay, make sure you can get the documents your accounts team needs. Check this before you book, not after — it's much harder to get a corrected invoice weeks later.
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Put the job number, client or site name on every booking. When it comes to costing a job, checking margin or recharging a client, you'll be glad every stay already says which job it belongs to.
This is especially important if you recharge accommodation to clients. A booking that clearly shows the dates, the site and the people who stayed is much easier to pass on than one you have to reconstruct from memory.
How accommodation is treated for tax and VAT depends on a number of things: your business structure, whether the people staying are employees or subcontractors, the type of stay, how long it lasts and whether the cost is recharged. The rules can be detailed, and the right answer for one business may be wrong for another.
We can't advise on any of that, and you shouldn't rely on a blog post for it. Your accountant can — and it's worth asking them before a long contract starts, rather than discovering at year end that something should have been handled differently.
Where you can, book a stay for the whole job rather than a night or a week at a time. One booking means one invoice, one set of dates and one record to check, instead of a pile of small receipts to match up.
If the job's length is uncertain, book the firm part and agree extensions with the host as you go. Extensions to an existing booking are still much tidier than a series of unrelated short stays.
If you're starting from scratch, a light-touch process is usually all you need. Write down who can book and on which account. Agree a limit above which someone else approves. Ask that every booking includes a job number. Make sure invoices come in the company's name and go to one shared inbox or folder rather than individual email accounts.
Then check it now and again. Once a month, look at what was booked against which jobs, and see whether anything is missing an invoice or a reference. Catching gaps monthly is far easier than untangling a year's worth at the end. For firms that book regularly, a trade account can take some of this work off your hands by putting the team and its booking rules in one place.
A few things about how Offer2Stay works make the paperwork side simpler:
Posting a request is free, there are no guest booking fees, and you only pay when a host says yes.
Yes. Offer2Stay supports invoicing for contractor bookings.
Companies that book regularly can apply for a trade account, which is set up for a team with its own booking rules.
It depends on your circumstances — check with your accountant.
Yes. The total you agree includes cleaning and fees.
Include your job or PO reference when you book and when you request your invoice, so the cost lands against the right job.
Find your stay. Let hosts make the offer.
Name your price for UK stays. Guests post what they need; hosts send private offers around the calendars they already run on Airbnb and Booking.com.