Using Quickbooks with Online Reservations

Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum

Help Support Bed & Breakfast / Short Term Rental Host Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Proud Texan

Well-known member
Joined
May 30, 2008
Messages
2,685
Reaction score
0
When it comes to accounting, I suck.
cry_smile.gif

This topic is for those who take online reservations AND use Quickbooks.
We use ReservationKey and Authorize.net to process our online reservations. I set up an automatic email to myself that contains all the information about the customer and the reservation. I've been real good about entering in customer information and getting them on the calendar. What I have been no so good about is remembering to create a sales receipt so that it will create a deposit in my checkbook. DW and I had to back track several months and locate receipts for which there was no sales receipt in Quickbooks. There was nearly 2K in unrecorded deposits. I told you I sucked.
On the plus side, we had more money in our account that we thought we had.
What tricks or diciplines have you learned that might help me not do this in the future. How do you do it?
 
Every Sunday DH sits down with his basket of receipts and enters all the data. It's a matter of organization with us. If all the receipts are kept in one place it's easier.
 
Every Sunday DH sits down with his basket of receipts and enters all the data. It's a matter of organization with us. If all the receipts are kept in one place it's easier..
I was anal about receipts and recordkeeping. Whenever I bought something, the first thing I did was come home and put it in the computer and file the receipt in the proper place. Something I have always done. Same with my mail and email. Deal with immediately then file it or delete the message and be done with it. Nothing ever in my in box or my trash.
rolleyes.gif

 
I bought quickbooks to do just this. It is still in the box, or wait maybe I downloaded it. I am also extreme in my orderliness, but receipts go into a file until sorted. I also no longer balance my check book. I know crazy, right. (To the penny I mean). Mostly because I don't use my checkbook much anymore, I put everything I can onto the business credit card (as another way to keep track of expenses)...gee am I sidetracking? okay bye...back to the business at hand.
 
Let me expand- we print out a guest form that the guest signs. To this we attach the cc receipt(s). Once/wk DH pulls all the receipts from the previous week and enters the info. He doesn't need to reenter the guest info, just a name to create the receipt.
Any advance deposits get recorded when the guest arrives. So, yes, there will be money in the checking acct that got deposited that does not yet have a corresponding guest receipt in QB. It all balances out at the end of the year after all of this year's guests have completed their stay.
Because we might have to refund the deposit, we don't record the money in QB until it is 'spent' by the guest. Kind of like a GC. So, that also means the lodging tax gets paid when the guest stays (we don't take the tax in the deposit unless it is only one night).
 
Whenever I process a batch after checkout, I paper clip all the receipts together and put them in a drawer. Every Wednesday I sit down and take those out of the drawer and enter them into quickbooks, then pay bills, then reconcile the checkbook if it's time to put together the transaction processing report and the bank statement.
I am using rezkey but not with the automatic payments, so I don't know what kind of receipt you would generate, but getting that into a 'to be entered' file might work. I also print out the rezkey info to keep at the check-in desk - if you do that, you might throw those into a 'to be entered' file for quickbooks. Maybe use the email you send to yourself?
 
Back
Top