Yes, billing automation having just gotten smarter was a windfall for our operation. As a small property with few Staff members, all of us hold many roles on a daily basis. We have no accounting or finance department, no IT department, to name just a few. When billing automation rolled out, automatically sorting charges into bills by stay dates and whether they are owned by an OTA or a Guest erased many of the accidental billing issues we had to correct when a Guest was incorrectly charged for a future stay or for an OTA-paid stay, billing the Guest’s credit card instead of the virtual credit card.
I would never want to go back to where we began. I would, however, like to understand why there is not an automated method to close OTA bills like there is for closing Guest-owned bills when they’re at a $0.00. I do not put this task on my Front Desk Staff member because s/he may often be redeployed to assist Housekeeping when we have high Guest turnover during the weekends. Instead, I do this from my office given we have no back office or personnel to do stuff like this in a back office. One bill at a time, I close each OTA bill when the reservation status has reached Due to Checkout or Past.
Another OTA-related issue no one seems to be able to solve due to the way in which tax brackets are applied and rounded is the $0.01-0.04 variances, credits or debits on at least half of our OTA reservations that must be adjusted off to achieve a $0.00 balance on the bill. We have three tax brackets applied, 6% Florida State sales tax, 1% Pinellas County sales tax, and 6% Pinellas County tourism development tax, a collective 13%. However if any one or more of these brackets result in a tax amount that is rounded up or down to the nearest dollar while one or more of the other tax brackets being applied to the same room rate is rounded up or down to the nearest dollar, this results in either a credit (refund) or debit (payment) that must be applied to get the bill back to a $0.00 balance.
Now that Booking.com has changed its policy for the charging of virtual credit cards [VCC], I can at least look at most future reservations and attempt to get a headstart on these adjustments when looking down the Billing screen for Booking.com to see the occasional pennies to be adjusted. For all other OTA reservations and those from Booking.com that have not yet reached the no cancellation period, I have to wait until the day of arrival when the automated and scheduled payment is posted against the VCC before I can even see where adjustments are needed. The only other means would be to look to see for what amount the VCC has been pre-approved when looking on the Payments screen, then looking at the room/tax amount that will be due at the time of the Guest’s arrival, and with a bit of math, determining if an adjustment is needed, but that adds even more minutes to these manual tasks.
Doing this is entirely manual and requires the posting of an external payment using “Exchange rounding difference” as the type and the manually entering the associated reservation number and Guest name for which the adjustment is being applied. There’s no means to link the external payment (which may be a refund or a payment) to a room reservation. On average each month, I am posting close to 100 adjustments, a number that can go up or down as our room rates go up and down. Daily, about 30-45 minutes of my day is spent posting adjustments and closing OTA bills. These hours add up by the end of the week, time I could better spend managing our business instead of managing menial bookkeeping tasks like these. At the end of each fiscal week, each fiscal month, and each calendar, month, I have reporting to create for our hotel’s owner and his business partner. Leaving OTA bills open and unadjusted does not seem like the appropriate or generally accepted accounting practice.
Am I the only property to have issues like this and if not, how are other properties managing this? Is it not possible to create a checkout summary screen like the Guest reservation checkout summary screen when clicking the Departures donut on the dashboard so I can check boxes down the left margin for all the OTA reservations that need their bills closed? When I asked about this at the time billing automation rolled out, I was told that the ability to close open bills with a $0.00 was limited to only Guest-owned bills.