Property Management Time Tracking Case Study: How SixThree8 Doubled STR Capacity with ShiftFlow

One spreadsheet. 15 properties. 2.5 hours of weekly payroll pain.

Bruce had a system for payroll. It just didn’t scale.

Every Friday, cleaning crews texted their hours from different short‑term rental locations across Coachella Valley. Bruce manually matched paper timesheets to properties, calculated rates, and prayed he hadn’t missed a clock‑out error. 2.5 hours later, payroll was done until someone flagged a mistake Monday morning.

“We were managing 15 STR properties,” Bruce explains. His background (Fortune 500 executive and hospitality veteran) told him there had to be a better way. “When guest issues need fixes in minutes, our back office shouldn’t be the bottleneck.”

The breaking point: A cleaner forgot to clock out. Forty‑five minutes of unbilled time slipped through. The error cost $112, and Bruce had no way to verify clock‑in/clock‑out times against actual property assignments.

That’s when they found property‑based time tracking: GPS‑verified clock‑ins tied to specific homes, plus mobile scheduling software built for cleaning crew management in vacation rental operations.

Setup took under 2 hours. By the next payroll run:

• Payroll dropped from 2.5 hours to 30 minutes (80% reduction)
• Daily capacity doubled from 2 to 3 up to 5 to 6 property turnovers
• Same team, zero new hires (2× throughput)

Here’s how GPS time tracking and property‑level workforce management transformed their entire STR operation.

Snapshot

• Company: SixThree8 (Coachella Valley, CA), boutique short‑term rental property management
• Founders: Stephanie & Bruce
• Portfolio: ~15 homes, growing intentionally for service quality
• Occupancy: Near 100% in season; ~73% off‑season; slowest months rarely dip below ~41%
• Rates: ~$250 to $2,000+ per night, driven by amenities and bed count
• Year 1 revenue: Six‑figure bracket. Individual homes $48K to $100K+ per year
• ShiftFlow impact: Payroll 2.5 hours → ~30 minutes; daily turnovers scaled from 2 to 3 up to 5 to 6 (≈2×)
• Implementation time: under 2 hours setup, immediate results

Results: 80% payroll time reduction. 2× daily capacity. Same team, zero new hires.

Results summary

Estimated annual value: At a $50/hour manager rate, saving ~100 hours ≈ $5,000/year in admin time alone. Increased capacity creates room to onboard more properties without adding staff.

The origin story

SixThree8 started when an interior designer, Stephanie, kept getting asked to do “just one more thing” for clients: manage the entire estate. The first call was a nine‑bedroom, eight‑bath property. “We didn’t really have any management experience. The business kind of fell into our laps,” she says. The name SixThree8 followed her across addresses and even lines up with parts of Bruce’s birthday. “It’s been good to us.”

Bruce brought a different lens: Fortune 500 and government leadership, plus hospitality and teaching. “Some days I miss nine‑to‑five. Other days I love being out, solving problems in real time.”

There’s no such thing as a typical day

“Every day is an adventure. You don’t have time to brood; you move,” Bruce says.

Managing short-term rental operations and vacation rental turnovers requires relentless execution: morning brief, midday execution, evening debrief. Stephanie runs pricing and portfolio analytics (“I price with three screens like a day trader”) and briefs team leads. Bruce handles field operations and the back office: scheduling, payroll, accounts.

Curveballs are part of the gig. “In corporate you often have time to think. In short‑term rentals, a guest issue can require a solution in minutes,” Bruce says.

The business by the numbers

Coachella Valley performs. “Off‑season we’re around 73%; in season we’re close to 100%,” Stephanie says. Nightly rates range from ~$250 to $2,000+, and the biggest demand levers are amenities and bed count. Year 1 landed in the six‑figure bracket, with single properties generating roughly $48K to $100K+ per year.

Acquisition evolved from word of mouth to a self‑hosted direct‑booking website. Direct bookings now represent roughly 50 to 75% of reservations (up from about 25 to 50% previously), and Airbnb’s share declined in their mix accordingly.

The SixThree8 operating system

SixThree8 runs a simple loop that scales better than headcount: brief → execute → verify → improve.

• Morning brief: align on bookings, turnovers (“turns”), risks, and pricing moves for each home.
• Midday checks: see which turns are on pace, redirect pods where time is tight, and confirm any owner requests.
• Evening debrief: capture what slipped and remove friction before tomorrow.

The ritual is intentionally unglamorous. It keeps the guest experience calm, the team focused, and owners confident that surprises are handled the same way every time.

The turning point: from spreadsheets to ShiftFlow

Early payroll ran on paper timesheets and a spreadsheet. It worked until teams and properties multiplied.

Before ShiftFlow, Bruce maintained a weekly payroll sheet with pay rates and hours keyed in by hand. With a small roster, that was manageable. Growth added complexity: multiple crews at different homes, missed punches, and ambiguous stop times (“Did they clock out at 2:30 or 3:30?”). Accuracy and fairness mattered. Thirty to forty-five minutes here and there across a few shifts adds up and erodes trust.

ShiftFlow centralized time and scheduling around the work itself. Team members clock in and out at the property; timecards carry GPS pins and simple “job codes” (labels for property/tasks); and managers get a live team view per home. Outliers stand out immediately, missed punches get corrected in minutes, and payroll prep drops from 2.5 hours to a 30‑minute review and export from the timesheets page. Cleaner signals also changed staffing: they could split crews into small pods (two‑ to three‑person sub‑teams), route mid‑day via mobile scheduling, and set owner expectations using actual turnover durations. In short: property‑based workforce management for cleaning crew scheduling and labor management.

“Used to take 2.5 hours to do payroll. Now it takes about 30 minutes. We see every team member at a specific property with exact times. If someone forgot to clock out, we correct it and save 30 to 45 minutes of salary right there,” Bruce says.

“Efficiency jumped over 50% once we added ShiftFlow,” Stephanie says. “No more manual math, no more pay errors. Reports drop straight into accounting.”

Operational throughput changed too:

“Before, the whole crew went to one house. Now we split and stack. The same team can cover five or six homes a day, up from two or three,” Bruce says.

What made the difference: property‑level clock in/out, GPS, job codes, scheduling, payroll‑ready timesheet reports, and document workflows, all in one place.

The human side

There are still 10:30 p.m. surprises. “That’s when I ask: why are we doing this?” Bruce laughs. Stephanie’s counter is all operations mindset:

“If I feel that way, my next question is: how do we make it more efficient? Where’s the friction? That’s why we keep introducing new channels and AI‑powered tools; if it saves time and prevents errors, we try it.”

ShiftFlow became the control panel that lets them brief, execute, verify, improve, with data rather than hunches.

What they’ve learned

1. Protect the guest by protecting your team. Clear workflows reduce stress on the people who greet problems first. Property‑level time tracking and team views let managers move people before a small issue becomes a big one.
2. Price like a pro. Constant tuning keeps occupancy high without discounting value. Amenities and bed count move revenue.
3. Grow on purpose. Cap growth to keep standards consistent. Owners stay because the experience does.
4. Own your demand. Direct booking is a hedge and a growth channel when platforms shift. Frame any platform dip as your mix, not the market.

Why ShiftFlow mattered

SixThree8 didn’t hire more people to double capacity. They unlocked the team they already had.

• Time tracking that travels with the job: team members clock in/out by property with GPS and job codes.
• Scheduling that matches reality: Split crews, re‑route in minutes via mobile app with scheduling, see real‑time availability.
• Payroll without panic: clean, exportable timesheet reports reduce errors and run time dramatically.
• Owner‑level visibility: how long turnovers actually take, so pricing and staffing match reality.

“It’s like night and day. We can see exactly how long each property takes to clean. If there’s an outlier, we fix it. That control is how we added more houses without adding chaos,” Bruce says.

Chaos handled

Festival weekends write their own scripts. One year, a guest fell into a glass shower and it shattered into pebbles. The home was capped at twelve; they counted closer to twenty inside. “Safety first,” Stephanie says. “Then fix it fast and keep the rest of the stay calm.”

Another weekend, every toilet clogged and water flooded the floors. Bruce pulled on rubber boots and a hazmat suit, grabbed the shop vac, and pumped about thirty gallons out of the house. The owners appreciated the response, even if they didn’t love the bill.

Post-festival cleanups can be their own adventure: so many cans, plus the occasional oddity we can’t detail publicly. Bruce joked you’d have to sign an NDA. These are the moments when real-time crew visibility matters: see who’s on, where, and for how long; then dispatch a nearby team with mobile scheduling to contain the issue before owners ever feel it.

Their philosophy: grow carefully to protect service quality. “Clients come to us for service, not scale,” Stephanie says.

Behind the scenes: typical STR software they rely on

Alongside ShiftFlow, SixThree8 uses a familiar stack many operators will recognize.

• PMS and direct booking: Hospitable centralizes multi‑channel calendars and automates guest messaging, with built‑in direct‑booking sites for fee‑light repeat business.
• Dynamic pricing: PriceLabs generates daily rate and minimum‑stay recommendations from market and listing data.
• Listing analytics and ranking insights: IntelliHost offers performance diagnostics and pricing suggestions to improve placement and conversion.
• Ops and inspections: Breezeway provides mobile checklists, photo proof, multilingual workflows, and task coordination for turns, inspections, and maintenance.

Ready to cut payroll time by 80%?

If SixThree8’s story sounds familiar, you might be spending too much time on payroll spreadsheets without real-time visibility into crew performance, and growth may feel blocked by manual processes. You’re not alone.

ShiftFlow is purpose‑built for property‑based teams:

If you manage STR cleaning crews across multiple properties, ShiftFlow eliminates the chaos of spreadsheet payroll and gives you real‑time visibility into every turnover.

• ✅ Clock in/out by property (not just “shift start”)
• ✅ GPS verification of on‑site work
• ✅ Live crew visibility across all active jobs
• ✅ Payroll‑ready timesheet exports
• ✅ Mobile scheduling to split and redirect teams mid‑day

Market context: Why Coachella Valley pulls travelers

Greater Palm Springs is a year-round desert resort region made up of nine cities. Demand surges around marquee events like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach in April, the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in March, the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January, and the PGA Tour’s The American Express in La Quinta each January. Winters are mild and sunny (often upper 60s to low 70s by day), which pulls travelers escaping colder climates. Short-term rentals are a meaningful slice of lodging here, and specific rules can vary by city.

Frequently asked questions