Advanced Deposits Report

Since the report keeps a running total of advanced deposits, the bookings will "drop off" the report when the booking checks in and is no longer in the future  or if the Folio for the advanced Payment is in balance - the Payment taken has been balanced by an Item charged to the Folio, making the Folio Balance : $0.  The folio being in balance is one of the ways that this report has been left simpler and focused, as most properties don't wish the ARD to show future folios where the Charge has been equaled by the Payment.  If you need to find all Payments on future folios - regardless of whether payment has been made - then use the Item Analysis report for that, as it will show the folios with Payments taken that have caused those folios to be in balance. 

The running total of Advanced Deposits on this report is also displayed on the Manager's Report.

Here is an example:
On February 10 you take a booking for March 9 and your policy is to take two night's deposit, so you take $200 ($100 per night) and 'apply payment' to the booking. Your Advanced Deposits Report will list $200 from February 10 forth.

On March 9, the booking is checked in. At this point, the Advanced Deposits Report no longer shows the $200. It has been removed from your Advanced Deposits Report because it is now 'governed' by your booking. The folio now governs the $200.

Following this example, by March 10, the room rent for March 9 would have posted at $100 and thus, the $200 'advanced deposit' has now been reduced to $100 and after the second night's stay, the 'advanced deposit' has been used up entirely.

To run an Advance Deposits Report (ARD):

• Go to REPORTS | ACCOUNTING | ADVANCED DEPOSITS REPORT
  
• Click on Advanced Deposits Report
  
• Choose the report format: HTML, Excel or Text.
• Click Generate Report

The Advance Deposits Report (ARD) displays the following information:

• Book #: Confirmation # of booking.
• Status: The status of the booking: Confirmed, Unconfirmed.
• Folio #: Folio # of the booking.
• System Date: The date that the system was on when the payment was received.
• Arrival: Arrival date of booking.
• Guest Name: Name of Guest on booking
• Description: Description of Charge.
• Payment: Amount of payment received.
  

Note: how does the MyPMS Advanced Deposits Report relate to the traditional Guest Ledger?  We don't track each Payment and the allocate the part to the 'room rent' that would be an 'advanced deposit' separate from a payment for a bottle of wine or key deposit.  If MyPMS was to provide a traditional Guest Ledger of every booking, so that an Advanced Deposits Report  could show a log of payment/charge events for each event for each each booking, then every Payment (and edit of a Payment) and every Charge (and edit/removal of a Charge) would require the staff to make a specific ‘account’ attribution to properly track the payment (or part of it) as an Advanced Deposits  - both the initial and the clearing of the AD.  There are certainly PMS systems that require this accounting discipline of its users, and we know how to do it.  But forcing our market of independent hoteliers to require this level of ‘account association’ to all transactions actually increases their accounting costs, as the types of worker employed often improperly allocate charges and payments.  So, we believe that the solution we offer (and how it interfaces to GL systems such as QuickBooks) makes our approach less expensive, produces less errors, and less need for accounting supervision.

Reasonable folks can doubt our approach to the traditional ‘guest ledger’, but we have 25+ years of proof this approach works best for the vast majority of our customers.