If your front desk collects deposits for events or large group bookings that never turn into a reservation, you’ve probably worked around VAT for that deposit manually, or outside Mews entirely. We’re testing a new deposit flow that lets you record a VAT-compliant deposit against any payment, no reservation required.
This beta is for:
Properties in countries where tax must be declared at the point of receiving a deposit – for example Germany, UK or Austria
Properties that regularly take deposits for events, large groups or other scenarios where no reservation exists or will ever be created in Mews
Teams comfortable trialling a new billing flow ahead of general release
What it does
Allows tax to be declared on deposits without a reservation – add a deposit directly against any payment from the billing screen, by confirming a consumption date, description and tax rate. The new flow automates the manual steps within the existing deposit feature into a couple of clicks.
Automated cancellation flow – if a deposit has been added incorrectly it can be cancelled and the process or rebating the deposit is handled automatically.
Full audit trail – the deposit ledger shows the consumption date, description and net value, with tax correctly allocated to the tax ledger
One important point to note is that this is the first stage of development and we will be continuing to add more features, allowing you to link the deposit to availability blocks and reservations and automating the process of adding the deposits so your front desk don’t have to remember to process it.
What we’re asking
Does this fit into how your team handles deposits for events and group bookings?
Does it save time compared to your current manual workaround?
How to join
Comment on this thread to express your interest, and let us know your property name and country. We’ll review requests and follow up with selected properties to confirm next steps and enable access.
Hi @laura.asplin ,
this would be a huge step for all the deposits for we´re taking for our evetns and groups.
I had a look in our demo version, but its not active there yet. Would it be possible to enable it there first?
If so, it would be great to have enabled it in this demo environment (germany).
@Louisa_Ruhrberg this has been enabled for you. Please let us know if you have any feedback and if you want to enable it in any production properties.
Hi @laura.asplin,
during the Community was offline I have sent you an e-mail.
"due to the movement of the community I am writing you an e-mail regarding the VAT Deposits for Non-Reservation Payments.
We already tested it in the Demo environment and would like to test it now in the live environment.
Can you enable it for Düsseldorf first ?
We really want to enable it in all properties but want to test first if everything goes well with the interface to our accounting system."
Hi Louisa, apologies I have been travelling with work and at a conference this week. Thanks for the feedback. I will send via email a link where we can schedule a call to discuss these points in more detail.
I have looked at these points, please see notes below:
Automatically generated deposits do not have an accounting category and appear as “none” in the Order Items Report.
Thanks for flagging! I assume you would have expected these to be allocated to the same deposit accounting category as your existing deposits. If this is not your expectation let me know as we are already actively working on fixing this.
Why do some deposits end up in “Transactions” and others in “Revenue”?
Thanks for flagging, we will align this with the behaviour of the original deposit feature and ensure these appear in transactions. Again, working on this as a priority.\
Cancelled deposits are posted at midnight, not at the time of the actual cancellation.
Need to dig into this one a little more. In terms of accounting everything only allocates to a day anyway, but would you want to prefer to see the timestamp of consumption as the actual time it was actioned?
4.Before we created the deposit, we added an associated profile, which is not taken into account when generating the deposit invoice.
Looking into this and we will get it fixed.
Thanks for booking a call in, hopefully most of these will be fixed by the time of our call.
Also improvement idea - to add deposit feature for availability blocks!
Question; is there possibility to use this feature with invoicing? As most of the companies needs to have an invoice before paying the deposit, even if they are paying agreed xx amount (not reservation linked yet).
Hi @Reeta_Kari thanks for your message. I will enable this now for you. We are adding the option to link the deposit to the availability block, if you don’t see it in production already then you should see this at some point next week. Deposit invoices will be coming too, but this is lower down the list so it may be a bit longer before we see that come through. Our next steps are automatically processing the deposit when you add a payment to the bill if the bill items are in the future.
@Souhael_GUEDIRA at the moment deposit invoices are not available. We will be continuing to iterate the feature to add this, but it is not part of this first delivery phase. If you would still like the feature enabled please confirm the names of the properties that you would like it to be enabled in and I will get this sorted for you.
Hi Laura, Thanks for this info. This is good feature, but I noticed that our online bookings dont create the deposits automatically after this was added to us - can it be because of this? As before, it was working correctly (online bookings created the deposit item and closed the deposit bill)?
