How Leisr Stays Scaled to 110 Units While Cutting 36K in Yearly Costs

Ethan Layer, Managing Partner at Leisr Stays, helped grow the company into a 110-property operation spanning North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Running Hostaway as their PMS and QuickBooks Online for accounting, Leisr Stays had the right tools to manage the portfolio. The financial operations holding it all together, though, ran entirely through Ethan.

For the first few years, that meant bill pay, expense tracking, and vendor communications all landed on his desk. About two years ago he brought on virtual assistants to help with guest communications and Amazon ordering. But the finances stayed with him. As the portfolio grew 40-50% every year, that arrangement stopped being sustainable. About a year ago, something had to change. That's when Topkey came in.

The Challenge

A Cost That Grew with Every Property Added

Before Topkey, Leisr Stays was spending at least $3,000 a month on financial operations with nothing to show for the efficiency. The biggest cost driver was Ethan himself. At 20-25 hours a month spent on financial work, he estimated $1,500-$2,500 of that monthly figure came from his own time alone, time that should have been going toward growth, owner relations, and building the team.

On top of that, a fractional accountant was spending 10-20 hours per week depending on the season on data entry and reconciliation work the operations team could have handled. Every property Leisr Stays added meant more invoices, more receipts, and more hours. There was no ceiling in sight, just a cost that kept climbing.

Delegation Was Too Risky

The logical answer was to hand the work off. But without a structured process, that was easier said than done. The manual nature of the work made it nearly impossible to delegate without Ethan losing visibility and control. As he puts it, "If we would have been doing it the way we were doing it back then, today, it would have been almost my entire job." It was not a people problem. It was a process problem. Without the right system, even a capable team cannot be set up to succeed.

Expense Tracking That Couldn't Keep Up

On the expense side, receipts were emailed to accountants with no property-level tagging. There was no way to see in real time what had been spent or where. About 1 in every 10 transactions required someone to chase down context or a missing receipt. And because there was no direct sync between their tools, transaction data had to be entered manually into both Hostaway and QuickBooks Online, twice the work, twice the opportunity for error.

Accountants were spending time on work that should have belonged to the operations team. The people who should have been closing the books were instead doing the data entry that got the books ready to close.

Month-End Close Was Ethan's Problem to Solve

Month-end was the moment all of this friction became most visible. Before books could open, Ethan needed to spend at least three days chasing down receipts, filling out spreadsheets for accountants, and tracking down descriptions for transactions that had gone undocumented. "Sometimes that would take me two or three days to get to because I might need to spend a couple hours chasing down different receipts," he recalls.

The downstream effect was owner statements that were slower and less accurate than they should have been. In property management, inaccurate owner statements damage the trust the whole business runs on.

A Bill Pay Process Held Together with Venmo and Texts

Vendor payments were just as fragmented. Ethan was paying contractors via Venmo, Zelle, and ACH invoice links with no standardized process for any of it. Cleaners and contractors would text him directly to request payment. Collecting W-9s and ACH details meant routing vendors through separate digital signature tools and manual forms. "We were mostly doing either Venmo, Zelle, or paying with ACH through an invoice link. And I'm getting texts from cleaners about, hey, can you send me this," he says.

There was no single place where vendor relationships, payment history, and compliance documentation lived together. Most payments were a one-off.

The Solution

Building a Team That Could Own the Finances

The first thing Topkey changed was who owned the work. Today Ethan spends about two hours a month in Topkey, approving and overseeing. His Director of Operations handles larger expense approvals and their VA handles the day-to-day: coding transactions, tagging expenses, processing bill pay. Ethan's role shifted from doing the work to directing it. "I'm managing the process, but not doing a lot of the actual coding or bill pay," he says. That shift was only possible because the process became structured enough to hand off.

On the bookkeeping side, Leisr Stays had outgrown their fractional accountant and transitioned to Keystone Bookkeepers. Keystone came in already familiar with Topkey as part of their preferred tech stack. Topkey works alongside bookkeepers. The right bookkeeper combined with the right system creates a financial operation that scales without adding headcount.

Connecting the Financial Stack

Hostaway Integration

Topkey intergrates with Hostaway as the financial layer for the Leisr Stays portfolio. Property-level tagging in Topkey maps directly to the portfolio structure in Hostaway, eliminating the manual double-entry that had previously required someone to type expense data into both systems separately. Field staff and VAs can now tag expenses to the correct property without ever touching Hostaway directly.

QuickBooks Online Integration

All transactions sync from Topkey into QuickBooks Online automatically. The manual step of forwarding receipts and context to accountants is gone. Before Topkey, accountants were waiting on Ethan for transaction descriptions before they could do anything. Now the data flows in clean and current, allowing his team to do their job.

Bringing Expenses Under Control

Expense Management and Tagging

Every transaction is now tagged to the correct property at the point of purchase, creating a level of visibility Leisr Stays never had before. Field staff and virtual assistants can accurately code expenses without any accounting knowledge, eliminating the back-and-forth that used to slow down month-end processes. Ethan and his team have real-time insight into what is being spent across all 110 properties, making it easy to spot unusual expenses, monitor budgets, and maintain financial control as the portfolio continues to grow. Most importantly, cash leakage has been completely eliminated, ensuring every dollar is accounted for and tied to the right property from day one.

Amazon Business Integration

Amazon is Leisr Stays' highest-volume vendor. Before Topkey, Amazon orders were a reconciliation headache: multiple packages, multiple charges, and no automatic connection to the property that received the purchase. Topkey's Amazon Business Integration was the solution his team was looking for. Now transactions are auto-tagged to the correct property via purchase order. "Every Amazon transaction is probably two to five times quicker than it was in the past. And we have a handful of Amazon transactions every single day," Ethan says. With those savings compounding daily across their highest-volume vendor, the impact adds up fast.

American Express Corporate Cards

Ethan did not have to switch card programs to use Topkey. Their existing American Express cards connected directly, keeping every reward and cashback benefit already in place. When a new team member joins, a virtual card can be spun up instantly, already tied to the accounting system. "You just spin that up and it's already connected to your accounting systems, and they can start spending right away in a controlled environment," he says. The result is a controlled spending environment from day one, without the friction of physical cards or manual setup.

Streamlining Bill Pay

Leisr Stays' vendors are now paid through Topkey. Onboarding a new vendor means sending a single link: the vendor signs up, provides their ACH details, and the payment process is set. "Now we can just send a link to the vendor, and they sign up and get all the details we need, and then we process the payment,"

Ethan says. W-9 collection happens inside Topkey as well, replacing the separate digital signature workflows and manual forms that used to sit outside the financial system entirely. Ethan is no longer in the chain for day-to-day payment approvals, and the texts from cleaners have stopped.

A Process Simple Enough to Delegate

How the Team Is Structured

The Director of Operations and VA handle day-to-day coding, tagging, and approvals on the property management side. The division of labor is clear: field staff submits, back office codes, and bookkeeper reconciles.

Built-In Controls and Approvals

What makes delegation possible is not just a simpler process. It is the control layer Topkey puts in place. Spend limits and categories are set per card. Approval workflows let Ethan review and sign off without doing the work himself. Real-time visibility means nothing moves without a record. Delegation works because the system enforces the guardrails, not because Ethan is watching.

Trainable by Design

Once the system is set up correctly, plugging in a new team member does not require an accounting background. The process is structured enough that non-accountants can handle daily financial work without meaningful error risk. "Once you get past the initial setup phase and make sure everything's syncing properly, it doesn't take a lot of time to teach somebody actually how to do that," Ethan says. That trainability is what makes the whole model scale, and what allows Leisr Stays to keep growing without the financial ops becoming a bottleneck again.

A Financial Operation That Pays for Itself

Before Topkey, Ethan's own time was the biggest cost driver in Leisr Stays' financial operations. At 20-25 hours a month on financial work, he estimated $1,500-$2,500 of the monthly cost came from his time alone. After incorporating Topkey into his workflow, he now spends just 2 hours a month.

The Director of Operations and VA own the daily work, Keystone handles the books, and Ethan oversees in two hours a month. The $3,000 a month in savings adds up to $36,000 a year, and unlike before, that number does not grow with every property Leisr Stays adds. "By far, like tenfold for sure," Ethan says of the return on investment.

That is not a number he arrived at casually, it reflects what it actually cost to run finances the old way.

The Results

50 Hours/Month Back Across the Operation

Across expense management, bill pay, and month-end close, Leisr Stays gets back 50+ hours a month. Ethan's personal contribution to that figure dropped from 20-25 hours to two. The work that used to fall on him or the accountants now sits with the operations team, where it belongs. That freed time goes toward growing the portfolio, managing the team, and building owner relationships.

Month-End Close 3 Days Faster

Before Topkey, month-end was a project that sat on Ethan's desk for at least three days. Receipts needed chasing, transaction descriptions needed filling in, and accountants needed to wait before they could start. Now the team tags transactions in real time and receipts are captured at the point of purchase. "Our month-end can happen, cut off a couple days at least of that process typically," Ethan says. By the time month-end arrives, the data is already clean, and the books can close without him.

$36k/Year in Costs Eliminated

The $3,000 a month Leisr Stays saves comes from moving financial work to the right level. Ethan's highest-cost hours are freed. The operations team is back on higher-value work. Cash leakage has completely stopped. The accuracy improvement has had an effect beyond the balance sheet as well. "The accuracy is very important to build trust," Ethan says. "It allows our owner statements to be a lot more accurate." Owner statements are more reliable, and that reliability builds the kind of trust that keeps homeowners in the portfolio.

Financial Operations Built to Scale

When Leisr Stays was growing, the financial infrastructure underneath it was not. Every new property meant more manual work, more hours, and more cost with no system in place to absorb it. Today that has changed. The Topkey workflow handles the volume regardless of how many properties get added. The team is already in place, the integrations are already running, and the process does not break when the portfolio grows. Ethan can add properties without adding financial ops headcount, and the cost of running finances no longer climbs with every door added.

More Time Spent Growing the Business

The hours Ethan used to spend on bill pay, expense tracking, and chasing down receipts are now going somewhere else entirely. He is focused on sales, owner relations, marketing, and building the team. For a company growing 40-50% a year, that reallocation of time is not a small thing. The work that used to pull him into the weeds is handled. He can stay where his time is actually worth the most.

Why Topkey: Built for This Industry

Ethan had used general expense tools at a prior company like Ramp and expensify. He chose Topkey because it was built specifically for the nuances of vacation rental management, not adapted from a generic corporate spend platform.

When Leisr Stays needed support, their Topkey customer success rep was responsive and solutions-oriented. The feedback loop was not just "here is your answer." It was a genuine back-and-forth that turned operational challenges into creative solutions inside the product. As Ethan put it, his rep was "not only here's feedback, but has been able to turn that into creative solutions as well." That kind of support is what makes implementation stick and the system actually work in practice.

The Foundation That Lets You Grow

The Leisr Stays team didn't just save time. Ethan built something that works whether he's in it or not. The system scales because it was set up correctly from the start.

Topkey did not require Leisr Stays to change how they operate. It connected what was already there: Hostaway, QuickBooks Online, and American Express, and made everything work better together. At 40-50% growth per year, the question was never whether Leisr Stays would scale. It was whether the financial infrastructure underneath it could keep up. Now it can.

"Clear financials and accounting is a core piece of this business. If you don't have that figured out, it's really impossible to scale with quality," Ethan says. For property managers still running finances the old way, that is the point.

If you're managing 50 or more properties and still at the center of your own financial operations, see how Topkey works.