Beta: Automatic Sending of Bills

Hi Laura,

please enable it for all Hey Lou Properties.

Thanks!

Hi Laura!

Can you enable this feature on:

Clarion Hotel Draken 

Clarion Hotel The Hub 

Clarion Hotel Sign 

Hobo Oslo

Home Hotel Victoria 

Quality Hotel Strawberry Arena

Strawberry Hotel (demo env.)

Many thanks! 😁🙏

I would like to test it 

Smarthotel Forus would love to join!

Please add Frenchospitality Gogaille to the beta

Sign us up please!

Best regards

​@laura.asplin please add

WestCord Fashion Hotel Amsterdam, Hotel Jakarta Amsterdam, WestCord Hotel Delft, WestCord Art Hotel Amsterdam, The Market Hotel Groningen

Hello,

We would like to join.

Here are the properties concerned :

• Arago
• Cloître
• Corneille
• Fernand
• Sept Dormants
• Gambettes

Thank you !

Hi everyone, 

I am happy to confirm that the automatic sending of bills feature passed our final internal quality gate. There are a couple of known issues that I would like to make Beta customers aware of:

• German translation of configuration option refers to check in, rather than check out
• Kiosk flow: when guests pay a balance as part of the kiosk check out flow the bill is not closed or emailed automatically.

We will be investigating these two issues further but will start the Beta with these known issues. I will be working through the list of interested properties and enabling the feature this afternoon. Keep an eye on your DM as I will send you a message to confirm enablement on your property.

Once enabled you will need to enable the feature in your Accounting Configuration if you want all bills closed and balanced at check out to be emailed automatically.

Full details of the feature and video can be viewed here.

Hey Laura,

great to hear that it will be enabled soon.

Question to # 2
 

• Kiosk flow: when guests pay a balance as part of the kiosk flow the bill is not closed or emailed automatically.

This mean that if a guest is paying the total amount during kiosk check in Mews will not close the bill yet but will be available at a later stage, correct?

I am just asking because most of our check ins does use Kiosk. 

Thanks

Linus 

​@Linus.Bihn apologies I should have been clearer that I was specific talking about the check out flow, not check in. If the guest pays during check in the bill will be balanced and closed automatically at check out. The issue comes when the guest takes a payment during the check out flow at Kiosk, those bills are not automatically closed (and therefore not automatically emailed). 

If you are capturing payment during the check in flow, these bills will remain open until check out and as long as no further payment is taken at the kiosk during check out the bills with be automatically closed and emailed.

The fact these bills are not automatically closed through this flow is an issue with the current functionality and not an effect of this feature.

Thank you ​@laura.asplin  for your reply.

Then this is working for guest paying at the kiosk during check in which is more important to us than the payment at checkout 😎

We only send the bills that are automatically closed at check out, so the recommendation would be if there are any bills you do want to be sent automatically either deselect the box at check out or close them manually prior to check out.

When we receive the booking from Expedia the bill owner is the guest and the vcc for the payment is attached to the guest and not to the Expedia profile. How can I solve this?

I can see you have set up some Billing Automations. As I understand some channel managers do not send the prepaid flag correctly and this means the ‘prepaid in OTA’ condition in the Billing Automation does not work. I think this article can help with setting these Automations up to route Expedia Collect bookings to the company. https://help.mews.com/s/article/can-i-distinguish-expedia-collect-from-hotel-collect-bookings?language=en_US

same issue. We have tried to set up the billing automation but it would not work as we expected it. We only use Expedia Collect. 

Does anyone know how to solve this? 

Another customer flagged they also had some issues and they used this article to help fix it: 

As I understand some channel managers do not send the prepaid flag correctly and this means the ‘prepaid in OTA’ condition in the Billing Automation does not work. I think this article can help with setting these Automations up to route Expedia Collect bookings to the company. https://help.mews.com/s/article/can-i-distinguish-expedia-collect-from-hotel-collect-bookings?language=en_US

This is what another customer shared with me about resolving the set up with Expedia Collect: 

What I have done instead is the following: I disabled “granular reporting” in the Marketplace/SiteMinder integration, set up the companies and travel agencies as defined here, and created the billing automation “Expedia Collect” with conditions for the Expedia Collect travel agencies and the specific rates.

I also disabled the condition “Reservations prepaid in online travel agency (OTA)” because:
 

“Mews uses a ‘Prepaid’ flag, which can be set to either true or false by the channel manager. There are known inconsistencies with how this flag is handled. In particular, SiteMinder does not always send this value, and this is part of an ongoing internal discussion between Mews and channel managers.”

Hello Laura,

we have four locations and would like to test the beta version for the Sante Royale Resort Rügen location. If everything works well, we would be happy to add the other locations as well.

May I ask how I can activate the automatic closing of invoices? Is this also part of the beta version? If so, could you please enable it for us as well?

Kind regards,
Mehmet

Hi Mehmet

Thanks for your note. I have added your Sante Royale Resort Rugen property to the Beta so you should be able to enable the feature in the accounting configuration at your leisure. As mentioned on the original post this will send the bill automatically to the bill owner so you need to ensure you are using Billing Automation to route things like OTA bills to the company. In regards to enabling the automatic closing of bills this article should help: https://help.mews.com/s/article/Closed-balanced-bill-logic-at-check-out-in-Mews-Operations-FAQs?language=en_US

Let me know if you have any questions.

Laura

Hi ​@laura.asplin 
hope Beta test is still ongoing. We would like to test it in Maritim Hotel Berlin
Best regards
Louisa

Hi Laura,

thank you for the quick implementation. I’ve already activated it.

I have a question regarding the automatic closing of invoices. As I understand it, the feature only works at check-out. In our case, invoices such as accommodation, tourist tax, and parking fees are already paid upon arrival.

At the moment, there is no function that automatically closes fully paid invoices in general. Are there any plans from MEWS in this regard, or perhaps already a solution available? This happens quite often, as staff sometimes forget to manually close paid invoices during the check-in process.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Kind regards,
Mehmet

Hi Mehmet

Our recommendation is to leave the bills open until check out in case anything changes and then it can be done without rebates. Therefore all our features focus on the closing of bills at check out rather than check in. Even if you invoices are paid upon arrival you could leave the balanced bills open and they will be automatically closed and emailed at check out.

If the staff forget to manually close the paid invoice during the check in process, why is that a problem if they are then automatically closed at check out?

Laura

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your supporting us with the Beta so far. I wanted to share the results we seeing so far:

45 properties have enabled the feature in their Accounting configuration.

Within those 45 properties we have seen a reduction in the number of bills manually sent of 83%. 

Keen to hear any feedback you have on the feature. I will be reaching out to the properties that have not seen any reduction in sent emails to understand why.

​@laura.asplin we LOVE it! makes live a lot easier…

can you get those numbers for our properties?