Stayntouch PMS Bill Routing
When routing has already been invoked, orange text that says ROUTING will be prominently positioned underneath BILL & CHARGES on the right hand side of the stay card.
In the stay card below, we can tell there is currently no bill routing in place, because there is no label that says ROUTING in orange text underneath BILL & CHARGES on the righthand side.
Let's attach a company card to this reservation by typing in its name or ID and selecting it. If the entity has default billing information configured, you will get a popup after associating it to the stay card prompting you to choose if you would like to apply the default billing information to the reservation or not.
Selecting the red DON'T APPLY button will not set up the bill routing and must then be handled manually.
Selecting the red X button in the top left to close the popup will also not set up the bill routing.
Selecting the green APPLY TO RESERVATION button will automatically set up the bill routing for you in accordance with the entity's default settings.
Once you click the green button, you will see routing has been applied. This is confirmed by the orange ROUTING indicator underneath BILL & CHARGES.
When you click the BILL & CHARGES button, you can then see that Bill #2 has been automatically created, and it has a blue company card icon to the left of the bill number indicating it belongs to a company entity. If it was a travel agent, that icon would be a purple globe, and if it was a guest, it would be the person icon you can see on Bill #1.
After clicking on Bill #2, on the right side of the screen, you can see that the bill entity has been set to the company name with a routing indicator. As a note, sometimes, entity default routing will include a payment method and will automatically set the default payment method for Bill #2. In this example, the company does not have a default payment method set with their billing information, so it has defaulted to No Payment Type.
If you wish to view the bill routing details that have been applied, you can click the blue BILL ROUTING button toward the top left of the Guest Bill screen.
Should you decide that you no longer require the routing you've previously set up, you can easily remove it from the reservation by clicking on the red X/DELETE button to remove it.
You can edit existing routing by clicking on the instructions.
You can see the company is covering room and tax on bill number two in the Billing Information popup. You can close this window and click back out to the stay card in the top left of the screen. Here, since the guest has not yet checked in, you can see that the GUEST TO PAY amount has reduced from the total stay cost to the amount the guest is personally responsible for. In this example, it reflects a hotel fee that is set to automatically post during the guest's stay but will not be paid for by the entity based on the billing information. Therefore, that fee will remain on Bill #1 for the guest to pay, and that is the amount reflected here.
When routing is involved, sometimes you will want to see a detailed breakdown of the anticipated charges and estimated total on a specific bill number. On the Guest Bill screen, you can view which charges are anticipated to post and the expected balance on each bill before the charges have actually posted during night audit by pulling a ProForma Invoice. To start, click on the blue INVOICE button.
Then, you must change the bill layout to ProForma Invoice using the BILL LAYOUT dropdown, and then select EMAIL or PRINT. This will retrieve the ProForma Invoice for the bill you are currently on.
You can also navigate to other bill windows by clicking on them and follow the same steps to retrieve a ProForma Invoice for that bill.
On a ProForma Invoice for Bill #2, we can see the company name in the top left corner, indicating they are responsible for these charges. The guest's information has moved to the right side for easy reference. The charges shown here are only the ones that have been routed by setting up the billing information and sometimes might also include posted charges that have been manually moved to this bill.
As we learned earlier, we can see that there is no bill routing in place, because we do not have the ROUTING label in orange here underneath BILL & CHARGES.
To apply routing manually, navigate to BILL & CHARGES, and then click on the blue BILL ROUTING button toward the top left side.
When you click on BILL ROUTING, there is a green button to ADD ROUTES in the top right corner of the popup window.
If you click ADD ROUTES, you can choose an entity that is already associated with the reservation on the left side. In this example, these are the primary and accompanying guests that are associated with the stay card. If we didn't have any accompanying guests associated with the stay card, we would just see the primary guest. The primary guest is denoted with the darker filled in person icon. The accompanying guests are denoted with the line drawing of a person.
If there was a company card or travel agent card associated with the reservation, you would see those entities here as well—denoted with their respective icons. You can also search for a non-attached entity, another guest reservation, or an account from the search bar in the top left.
Then, select the billing group that includes all or most of the charges this person or entity has agreed to pay for. Please note, your hotel's billing groups will likely not be the same as this test hotel's. The billing groups are configured from the menu under Settings in accordance with what is most commonly requested for your hotel. In this example, Room, Tax, and Pet Fee is the best option, and we'll only have to add the minibar as a separate charge code.
When adding billing information, the system will default to adding a new bill window for this entity and these charges. However, if you wish to set up routing to an already open bill window, you can select it from this dropdown.
If you prefer the routing not to apply to the default date range, you can adjust the date range using the calendar options provided. Typically, the FROM date is preset to the reservation's arrival date, or to the current date if the arrival date is in the past. Conversely, the TO date is automatically set to the booking's departure date.
The entity you have selected will be displayed here. If you wish to edit the entity, you can click the purple pencil icon.
Should you wish, you have the option to designate a payment method for the billing window to which these charges will be directed. However, if you choose not to add it at this moment, rest assured you will have the opportunity to do so at a later time.
A credit limit can be set if this entity is only covering charges up to a certain amount.
When you are satisfied with your settings, click the green SAVE ROUTE button.
In this example, now that we have set up the bill routing, the only charges that are going to post to Bill #1, which is still the responsibility of the primary guest, Inez Johnson, are the resort fee, its taxes, and any incidental charges, excluding the pet fee and minibar charges.
We can still view the room rate, dates, and package shortcut displays of what is anticipated to post for rates and packages for the booking on Bill #1, but ultimately, what has been routed will automatically move to Bill #2 when it is posted during night audit or manually by a user.
If we click Bill #2, we can see on the right side that Felicia Herrera is the responsible entity for this bill, and that routing is set up to automatically move charges here with this orange ROUTING indicator under her name.
As a reminder, if you want to see a detailed breakdown of the anticipated postings for either bill window, you can retrieve a ProForma Invoice when you are on the respective bill by selecting the blue INVOICE button and changing the bill layout to ProForma Invoice.
You can add a new bill manually by selecting the orange + button to the right of the open bills.
Click the payment method and entity dropdown on the far right side toward the top of the bill window.
In the popup window, use the ENTITY dropdown to specify the entity responsible for this bill. Then, set a PAYMENT TYPE if one is not already selected, and click the green ADD button. Now, you have a bill that you can easily move posted charges to.
To set up bill routing to another guest reservation, on the Billing Information popup window, use the search bar to search for, locate, and select the other guest reservation we wish to set up routing to. You can search by name or confirmation number. Alternatively, you can search by company, travel agent, or account name or number, but you must toggle over to ACCOUNTS & CARDS to see those results.
Select the appropriate entity, account, or reservation to proceed. As a note, you cannot set up routing to checked-out reservations.
If we navigate to the Guest Bill screen on Edna Black's reservation, you can see there is now a section labeled INCOMING BILLING INFORMATION in the top right corner. The orange chevron arrows indicate that we can expand this to see more details.
When expanded, we can see the room number, first and last name, and details of the routed charges that are anticipated to post on this Guest Bill.
Before doing so, you must ensure all of the guests that you wish to split charges between have been added as accompanying guests on the stay card. You can see in this example reservation that we have four guests staying in this room, and that we have already added the three accompanying guest names. This means we are ready to proceed with setting up the split charges.
If you wish to split charges equally, select the Split charges between guests checkbox.
If you wish to exclude an entity from the split, deselect the checkbox next to that entity's name, and this will update the count of entities selected to form the equally split routing. When the correct entities are selected, press the purple button labeled SPLIT CHARGES EQUALLY.
You can select the appropriate billing group or charge codes to split equally on the right side.
If you wish, you can modify the date range for the routing to be applied if it is a multi-night reservation, so that the split only applies for a certain date range.
Clicking the purple pencil button will allow you to deselect or select additional entities if you wish to make changes to which guests the split applies to.
If you select + NEW PAYMENT METHOD, this will allow you to pre-set a payment method for each of the entities at this stage. If a payment method is not set now, you can do this later on.
When you are happy with the settings, select the green SAVE ROUTE button. The bills for each entity will be created. If the primary guest is part of the split route, Stayntouch PMS will create a new bill for the primary guest that is part of the split route. Bill #1 will remain in the primary guest's name and will be independent of the split route bills. Any non-split charges will post there.
To edit the split charges routing, simply click on it from the Billing Information popup window.
Always make sure to click the green SAVE ROUTE button when you make any changes. If you don't want to make changes, you can click CANCEL.
You can also delete the split routing instruction with the red X button. This will remove the automatic splitting of charges, but the bills that were created will remain open unless closed.
In this example, we split the charges equally between three guests. We still have Bill #1, which is generally going to be considered the primary guest's responsibility and not part of the split, but Bills #2, #3, and #4 have been created for each of these three guests respectively. Since we selected payment types when creating the routing information, you can see the different payment methods are listed for each bill.
On each bill, you can see the responsible entity and the payment method on file in the far right corner.
