Revenue Reporting and Popular Accounting Practices

Overview

Bookings are made to represent a holiday and/or order for extras. Bookings have a reporting group setting and it is common to put holidays, seasonal stays and owners invoices in separate reporting groups. Note although we use the term owner invoice this is also a booking.

Many parks don’t raise actual invoices in GemaPark, a booking has a single reference number that stays with it and all booking documents through the life of the booking.

However, GemaPark does have the ability to raise accounting invoices for bookings. See the accounts invoicing document for more information on how to do this.

If accounting invoices are raised each booking can have one or more associated invoices and credit notes.

Payments and refunds are made against a booking and are linked to bookings not accounting invoices. The booking balance is taken from the value on the booking less the payments/refunds made against it.

Popular Accounting Practices

Pay VAT on payment receipt

Most payments happen before the booking is delivered. This means what the payments are for can change in the run up to the booking, if the user changes their holiday options. Accounting for the revenue once the booking has been fixed allows you to avoid raising transactional invoices each time a booking is changed.

The Tax Point is set to Arrival or Departure date.

Payments are logged to a deposit account and often average VAT is paid on all payments. E.g. 20%

Sales are reported to the sales accounts using one of the methods below.

The sales accounts are paid off from the deposit account and an adjustment can be made to the VAT owing based on the difference between the 20% paid and the actual percentage of the sales account.

Use the payments report to get details of all payments and refunds made and the methods of payment.

Note: You should include the Agent Held Commission from the payments report in the payments you record. The agent held commission would not be received as cash but is included in the value of the booking and should be included in the VAT calculation. The VAT charged by the agent on the commission can then be offset as a VAT on costs when you do your VAT return.

Account for sales on Arrival or Departure date of a booking

The bookings report is used to pull the booking data on arrival or departure date whichever you prefer. The bookings report provides an actual breakdown of the items sold and the VAT for adding to the sales accounts.

Remember to also pull the bookings report for cancelled bookings as these can still have revenue on e.g. cancellation fees. These are included on the bookings report on the date they would have arrived or departed

The sales accounts are paid of from the deposit account and an adjustment can be made to the VAT owing based on the difference between the 20% paid and the actual percentage of the sales account.

In this scenario you don’t need to use GemaPark invoicing. If you want to raise ad hoc invoices to give customers you can do so but remember the revenue on the invoices report will also be included in the bookings report.

Consider closing the bookings once you have reported their revenue to prevent them being further edited. In Admin>Company Setting you can restrict the number of days that a payment, refund or invoice can be backdated by. This can be overridden by anyone with a System Administrator or Accounting role.

Account for Revenue on a daily basis

The value of the booking is broken down by day and allocated to the period you are reporting on.

Note: currently the revenue is shared equally across the days of delivery in the Revenue reports whereas in Analysis the actual cost of the given day is used where know it.

The ‘Revenue By Nominal Code’ report gives you the total revenue and VAT for each type of revenue for the period selected.

The ‘Revenue By Nominal Code Detailed’ gives you the revenue and VAT for each type of revenue for the period selected as a line per booking per revenue item and so allows you to investigate the revenue report and see how it links to the bookings. Note the detailed report can contain many rows and so should be run over smaller periods of time to prevent it timing out.

Revenue is earned on the dates of stay for holidays and holiday discounts and separately the dates of delivery for each extra, as recorded on the booking form.

If a booking is cancelled the revenue is earned on the cancellation date.

Note: Editing a booking, including cancelling it, will change the data in these reports. If using these reports before a booking is closed be sure to rerun them to check for changes since the last run until the bookings are in the past and not going to change.

In Admin>Company Setting you can restrict the number of days that a payment, refund or invoice can be backdated by. This can be overridden by anyone with a System Administrator or Accounting role.

Consider closing the bookings once they are in the past to prevent them being further edited.

Account for Revenue using Invoicing

You can raise accounting invoices for bookings. If you do this the invoice becomes a fixed record you can use to report revenue without fear of it changing. If the booking changes after it has been invoiced, you can invoice or credit the difference and the new invoice will have a new invoice date so editing past bookings will result in current invoices.

Invoicing is generally done on departure to prevent raising a tax point earlier than necessary.

For more information on invoicing see the accounts invoicing document.

The Invoice/Credit Notes report, detailed template, gives you the details of each invoice with a line per invoice line item.

We can provide fast export versions of this report to match the import format of your account system if needed.

Debtors and Creditors

The Debtors report provides details of bookings that don’t balance, i.e. have paid too little or too much. Your debtors /creditors total plus your payments total should equal your total booking value.