Creating and Managing Folios
To effectively track charges and payments, you must initially establish a folio. Such a folio could pertain to a specific booking, a company, or an external customer.
Standard folios
Standard folios are most common within the system. Essentially, they are the bill of the guest and usually contain all accommodation charges, any payments made, and more. Here are the operations you can perform with them:
- Addition of new charges and payments.
- Rectification of existing charges (which includes editing and voiding operations).
- Application of discounts on charges listed in the folio.
- Split of charges across multiple folios for a booking or a company. There are a couple of supported models for this split:
- Equal split among selected folios.
- Proportional split among selected folios, where a unique percentage is specified for each folio that determines the portion to be transferred to it.
- Transfer of charges and payments between folios of other bookings or companies.
- Void of payments.
- Complete voiding of a folio, which cancels all charges and payments.
- Duplication of a folio within the same booking or company, maintaining the original charges.
- Deduction of advance payments or deposits from folio payments.
- Entry of recipient data, whether an individual or a company.
- Specification of a payment deadline for the folio.
- Addition of notes to a folio.
- Closure of a folio, which may be accompanied by the issuance of an invoice.
- Re-open of a closed folio
Working with Advance payment Folios
Advance payment folios are used when you have collected a pre-payment and you need to provide a separate invoice for that pre-payment. When issuing an Advance payment folio, the system will automatically create a pre-payment charge in the folio equal to the amount of the payment and then deduct it from the main accommodation folio. For a folio to be an Advance payment folio it has to: have a payment, be closed and genereted in one of the following ways:
- Having a payment in a Deposit folio and transforming the deposit folio into an Advance folio
- You can also generate an Advance payment folio through a Standard folio where you have 2 options:
- generate an Advance payment folio based on an existing payment in the main folio
- generate an Advance payment folio based on a percentage of the total or selected charge in the main folio
Managing Deposit Folios
Deposit folios are designed for you to record received payments for which you are not required to issue a separate invoice and eventually, you will either return that amount to the payer, or use the amount to pay-out one or more bookings. Some examples of use cases are collecting a security deposit for damages or consumption, or receiving a pre-payment for a large group, which later you need to distribute across several folios for the group. For a folio to be considered a Deposit folio, it must be open, have a payment posted and no charges.
- Addition of new payments.
- Nullification of payments.
- Transfer of payments to other folios.
Closed Folios / Invoices
Many of the above actions are only possible while the folio is open. It is required folios to be closed once all modifications are done, guests leave or require an invoice. Once a folio is closed, many of the actions are resticted and you can only:
- add new payments
- void existing payments
- use the 'Re-open' function
- Void the whole document
- generate a Correction folio
Working with Correction Folios
Often you may need to do changes to already issued documents. Those can span from changing billing details, voiding an accidentally posted charge or apply a discount. Those changes can be made with correction folios, more commonly knows as Credit/Debit notes/invoices. You can perform these operations:
- generate a Full-correction, basically nullifying the original invoice
- generate a partion correction to modify only part of the original invoice