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The deposit functionality has been refactored to be fully payer-based. All deposit related processes – including collection, validation, consumption and balance control are now driven by the Payer No. This Payer can either be a Business Central Customer or an LS Central Member (Guest). All information about deposits can be found in the Reservation Deposits page.
You can access this page in three ways :
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From the Deposit Due link in the Summary FactBox on the Hotel Reservation Card
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From the Deposit Policy field on the Hotel Reservation Card (under the General FastTab)
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From the Invoice Management page, where the Reservation Deposits action is available
Deposit Policy
Within the LS Hotels system there is this deposit schedule, deposit due, deposit policy flow. But you can also collect and manage your deposits without this setup. But just to clarify the basics for this flow to work you need to have a Deposit Policy and set it on a rate code, that will then trigger the deposit schedule lines, that will combine in a deposit due amount.
A Deposit Policy allows you to create different deposit rules that define how and when deposits should be scheduled for collection.
You can assign a deposit policy to a Rate Code. When a rate code with an assigned deposit policy is used, all reservations created with that rate will automatically generate a deposit schedule based on the selected policy.
Any changes made to the reservation before it is set to In House status (checked-in) will automatically update the deposit schedule accordingly. Once In House, the deposit schedule will no longer be updated. At that point, the guest has arrived, and deposits (prepayments) are expected to have already been collected.
The deposit flow starts with a deposit policy. If a reservation rate has a deposit policy setup, deposit schedule entries are created.
Collection
The deposit schedule serves as a guideline only. No automatic financial transactions or collections are performed by the system, they are collected manually. You can use the action Collect Deposit from the Deposit Schedule FastTab to collect the deposit based on information from the deposit schedule line. Same way if you need to refund a deposit based on information from the schedule you click the Refund Deposit action from the Deposit Schedule FastTab.
Note: The only difference using these actions instead of the ones from the Deposit Enties FastTab is that when opened it will have all information, like Invoice type, Payer No and Deposit amount already set on the collection page and uneditable.
You can also collect deposit without using the deposit schedule as a guideline. To do so you click the action Collect Deposit from the Deposit Entries FastTab. From there the collection deposit page opens where you can specify the Invoice Type of the deposit, the Payer No. (who is the payer for this deposit) and lastly the deposit amount. It can be any amount, no greater than the payer balance shown in this page.
Consumption
Deposit consumptions are only done in the Night audit process for account methods "Accrual Accounting" and "Checkout Accounting". This is set from the Hotel Setup page under Night Audit FastTab. The "Blank" accounting method does not run night audit and therefore the deposit consumption is done throught the sales invoices using deposit account directly on the sales invoice line or through POS using the statement postings.
The Night Audit processes Detailed Revenue Entry lines based on the reservation date and status. Only reservations with a status of In House or Checked Out are processed by the Night Audit. When processing the revenue lines it will check if there is deposit available to consume based on payer no./invoice type. So deposit for "Stefan" will only be consumed by revenue line set to payer No. "Stefan". It will continue consuming for each revenue line until either there are no more revenue lines left to process or until the deposit as been fully consumed.
The deposit consumption is posted to the Reservation Payment Entry table and the Deposit Consumed table, you can find this table from theHotel Invoice Management page - General Ledger List - Acions - Deposit Consumed. This Deposit consumed table will contain all consumptions the night audit has done.
When running the Hotel Job, Night Audit process, manually, you can specify a "Start Date for Posted DRE" which acts like a from date and "Date" that acts like a to date. The Night Audit will then process all applicable revenue entries within that date range.
The night audit creates a General Journal when processing the revenue lines, and the batch name for all deposit postings is called NIGHTAUDITPAY and will be
See also more detailed information about the Night audit process here.
Refunding
In case you need to refund the deposit previously collected, a Refund Deposit button is available from both Deposit Entries FastTab or Deposit schedule FastTab on Reservation Deposit page.