The open balance check should be part of your daily working schedule, so you can check and fix any open balance existing for your property.
Follow these steps to ensure a smooth balance check:
- Ideally at the end of every day you create such a filtered reservation list, using the Advanced filter.
Here is a screenshot:
- Next step is to remove any status filter to see reservations of all statuses, incl. Cancelled and Checked-Out.
- Then sort by the departure date and have a look at all reservations with departure date in the past/before today. Most likely they should not have an open balance - what happened there?
A couple of examples for amount negative or positive balances: Did the guest stay at the hotel, but was not checked out in the system? Did you forget to charge a no-show fee against the pre-paid amount? The open balance of departed reservations can have many reasons...
Positive balance: Payment posted, but no service – most of the times due to cancellation or no-show
Negative balance: Service posted, but no payment or folio closed to AR