Not all bookings will be fully paid by the time the period the booking checks out in is closed.
The trust system requires that money must exist in the system before it can be credited to the owner.
This means that all bookings must be fully paid and the payments transferred to trust before the bookings can be transferred to trust.
The easiest method to manage bookings where payments will be received after the period the booking checks out in is to use Accounts Receivable accounts. This is done by:
- Adding payments to bookings for the outstanding amounts using accounts receivable payment methods this is usually done when the booking is made and payments are typically dated on the check in or check out date of the booking.
- These payments are transferred to trust which debits an Accounts Receivable account for the payment amount.
- Once payments are received they are reconciled off the Accounts Receivable accounts using the Reconcile Accounts Receivable page inside RoomBoss.
System has multiple Accounts Receivable Payment Methods / Accounts so you can manage money owed across for example Expedia Collect AR, Agoda AR…..
The way bookings that have outstanding Accounts Receivable amounts are managed will depend if the manager will pay the owner for these bookings prior to receiving payment themselves.
Case 1: Manger will pay the booking revenue to the owner prior to receiving payment (ie. while Accounts Receivable amounts are outstanding):
In the case bookings are transferred to trust in the check out month, before the payment has been received. Account entries appearing to the owner in the month the booking checks out as they would for any other booking.
Case 2: Manager will not pay the booking revenue to the owner prior to receiving payment (ie. after Accounts Receivable amounts are reconciled):
If this is the way you will operate please ask us to set up your account to require all Accounts Receivable amounts on a package to be reconciled before it is Trust finalised (ie. prevent money being credited to the owner until reconciliation has taken place). When operating in this way:
For bookings that check out in a month but are not transferred, on their report for the month, the owner will see:
Settlement pending, income and expenses will appear in a future statement.
Once payments are reconciled and the booking is transferred to a later month the owner will see a message on the check out month:
Booking settled after the period was closed, income and expenses appear in your April 2019 statement.
And the account entries will appear in the month the booking is transferred to (in the example above April 2019).
How to Reconcile Accounts Receivable Payments
For both Case 1 and Case 2, the process for managing the payments and reconciliation is the same.
A typical example might be a number of Expedia Collect bookings in May:
- Add full payment to the bookings using the Expedia Accounts Receivable payment method.
- Date the payments the date you wish the Accounts Receivable amount to be dated (typically the check in or check out date of the booking)
- Transfer these payment to trust (this will create debits on the Expedia Accounts Receivable account dated on the payment dates).
- Process trust for this booking as normal and close the May trust period.
This has left us with an outstanding amount on the Manager Ledger – Expedia Accounts Receivable account, we can see this on the Omni Report, in this case we have 218,500 JPY outstanding:
We are expecting a payment from Expedia, but how do we reconcile this and take account of commissions etc once the payment arrives?
Navigate >> Trust >> Trust Reconciliation
All Accounts Receivable payments that have not yet been reconciled will show on this page. In the above image we have set the filter by payment method to Expedia Accounts Receivable showing us 4 payments for a total of 218,500 JPY. Using the checkbox we can choose the payments we want to reconcile and click next.
In most cases the amount we are paid for these booking will not be the full value so in order to proceed we need to balance the total value of the payments by adding values for commissions, bank fees etc (accounts here are customisable). Once balanced we can choose a reconciliation date (in an open period) and click Reconcile.
We can now see on the Omni Report, there is now nothing outstanding on the Expedia Accounts Receivable account and we can see the debits on the OTA fees and bank fees accounts.