Each month, as part of your month-end accounting tasks, you must reconcile your clearing accounts. What is a clearing account? Clearing accounts are used to record and recognize payments received by guests but not yet paid out or deposited to your bank account. In your chart of accounts, there are separate clearing accounts for Airbnb, Stripe, and Booking.com guest payments and payouts. This allows you to be aware of what guest payments have been made against bookings, and it helps you reconcile the deposits once they have cleared the bank. See the example below for the flow of transactions.
The sequence of transactions are as follows:
VRPlatform creates a payment transaction, and directs guest payments from each channel to the designated clearing account in its configuration settings on the Mappings page in the Reservation Payments automation.
A payment journal entry is generated by VRPlatform's Payment Journal Entries automation for the payout deposit recorded to your bank account. This payment journal entry must matched to the deposit in the bank feed, or the deposit will be duplicated in your books. Match the deposit to the journal entry by selecting "Match" in the action column in your bank feed.
Once the deposit is matched to the journal entry in the ADDED OR MATCHED column of the bank feed, it will display "Matched to" and the list the corresponding journal entry. Never match the deposit to an invoice or payment. The deposit must be matched to the journal entry to prevent the deposit from being duplicated in your books.
To reconcile your clearing accounts, perform the following steps:
In Quickbooks, select Transactions from the sidebar menu, select Reconcile, and choose the clearing account you wish to reconcile first.
Sort the transactions by payee by selecting the PAYEE column so that all payments and journal entries related to the guest name appear together.
There must be one payment into the clearing account (deposit column) and one journal out of the clearing account (payment column) for each guest payment made, netting to zero. Select each corresponding payment and deposit for each guest. To confirm that the correct number of deposits are selected for the month, compare to your bank statement.
Once all payments for bookings have been matched to their corresponding journal entries, and the account nets to zero, select the green icon "Finish now" at the top right hand corner of the screen to complete the month-end reconciliation.
Perform steps 1-4 for all clearing accounts.
Note: If you notice that some guests are missing either a payment entry or a journal entry, please read the article "Troubleshooting clearing account reconciliation issues."