When a VRBO or Booking.com booking is disbursed in OTA+ and the associated fees are sent to the relevant holding account, an unpaid supplier bill is created for that booking source for that property. The next time a booking is disbursed from the same booking source for the same property, the fees disbursement is added to that existing unpaid bill with a new line item for the new booking. 


Therefore, once bookings checking out in a given month for a particular property have been disbursed, you should have an unpaid bill in data entry status sitting waiting to match against the invoice sent by VRBO or Booking.com.


You then need to confirm that the invoice from the relevant channel matches what has been withheld in OTA+, enter the bill number and correct dates, approve the bill for payment and then pay the bill when it is due.


Confirming and Loading Booking.com Bills:


Open your Booking.com extranet account and go to finance tab at the top of the screen. Scroll to the bottom and locate the current month's invoices.


Download each pdf and save to Google Drive or Dropbox to be able to load into OTA+.


In OTA+ open Suppliers > Unpaid Bills and locate the pending bill from Booking.com for that property. Click on the details box on the right hand side to open the bill.

If the bill amount in OTA+ matches the total showing on the Booking.com invoice, you can follow the instructions in this article to load the bill details and approve the bill for payment.


If the amounts do not match, this means the fees were not calculated or edited correctly when the booking was disbursed.


Make sure you make note of whether the amount was under-withheld or over-withheld and the exact difference. Edit the OTA+ bill to show the same amount as what is owing on the booking.com invoice and process the bill as per the standard process in the link above.


If the booking.com fees were under-withheld (the booking.com invoice was higher than the OTA+ data entry bill) then you need to transfer funds from the owner's ledger or contingency ledger to the booking.com fees holding account using a journal entry. If there are no funds in the owner's ledger or contingency ledger, you will need to see if there is a booking you can disburse or partially disburse to send funds to the owner's ledger. If there are no available current or checked out undisbursed bookings for that property, then you will need to transfer funds from one of your holding accounts and create an invoice to that property owner to get those funds reimbursed to you at the end of the month.


If the booking.com fees were over-withheld (the booking.com invoice was lower than the OTA+ data entry bill) then you need to transfer funds from the booking.com fees holding account to the owner's ledger or contingency ledger using a journal entry.


If there is a pending bill in OTA+ but no pending invoice for that property in booking.com, open the bill in OTA+ to check the relevant booking. Copy and paste the guest name or booking ID into Felix to open the booking. Check the booking was confirmed, charged and checked out in the previous month. If so we can check the reservation on booking.com. If commissions is showing check finance table for that property specifically to look for the invoice (occasionally invoices for particular properties do not appear on the group finance tab on the extranet). Once the relevant invoice is located, download PDF and save to google drive and follow the process outlined above.


Confirming and Loading VRBO Bills:


The difference with VRBO is that bills are sent for individual properties, yet in OTA+ all bills need to be loaded against a particular property. This makes VRBO a much more time consuming task, but is unfortunately unavoidable.


Log into your VRBO owner's dashboard and in the top right menu options, go to My Account > Booking Statements. You will need to download the pdf of the invoice in order to make payment, but will also need to download the Line-item invoice CSV.


Calculating Property Totals:


Once this has been downloaded and saved to your computer/the cloud, you only need to keep the following columns (delete all others):


Reservation External ID (Folio #); Property; Guest name; Commission


You then need to add the following columns:


GST; Total; Prop Total; OTA+ Total; Variance; INV


Use the Data > Filter functionality in excel to sort by property.


In the new GST column, enter '=[Commission column entry]*0.1' and drag down to all cells in that column.


In the new Total column, enter '=[Commission column entry]+[GST column entry]' and drag down to all cells in that column. 


Add up all Totals for each Property and save in the Prop Total column.


Enter the value showing on the OTA+ data entry bill in the column next to it (OTA+ Total).


In the Variance column next to that enter '=[Prop Total column entry]-[OTA+ Total column entry]' and repeat for each row that has Prop Total and OTA+ Total entries. 


In the INV column, only on rows with Prop Total entries, enter the VRBO invoice number with a -1 after it for the first property, -2 after it for the second property, etc. Please note, the invoice number will need to be shortened by removing all the 0's as there is a maximum character count for invoice numbers in OTA+, so if invoice number is HHA47B000009062, the invoice numbers will need to be HHA47B9062-1, HHA47B9062-2, etc.


Finally, check that the property totals add up to the correct total invoice owing to VRBO by manually adding up the sums showing and adjust the amounts if necessary to ensure the totals match.


You should end up with a spreadsheet which looks like the following:



You can now this spreadsheet to load and edit all the VRBO data entry invoices in the same manner as with booking.com above, using journal entries to fix under-withheld and over-withheld fees so that the VRBO Agent Fees holding account balance matches the amounts billed by VRBO. The only difference between booking.com and VRBO bills is that you don't have an invoice to load against the bill for VRBO as there is no invoice for each property.


Paying Booking.com and VRBO Bills:


Paying bills from booking agents works the same as paying other bills, except that you are not charging payments to the owner's ledger.


When you get to the bill payment screen, click in the Holding Account column of the Holding Account row and choose either the Booking.com Fees or VRBO Fees holding account for the relevant agent and then make the payment out of that holding account.




You can add booking.com invoice payments to an ABA file and will shortly be able to VRBO payments to a BPAY ABA file.