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Reconciling reservation payouts

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Freddie Blunt

Hi there,

 
I am hoping to automate client invoicing through using Hostaway's API and my accounting software's API, Xero. 
 
My full stack developer has accessed both APIs and is struggling to match up reservation data with financial data. The only field to combine both seems to be the payout amount, which is obviously not going to be 100% accurate, especially as we grow and payment volume increases. This is even more challenging when Airbnb and Booking.com roll payments together (e.g. two reservation payouts are received as one payment amount). 
 
I'd love to speak to any fellow property managers that have solved this and scaled their accounting function to automatically reconcile booking payouts against reservation IDs within Hostaway.
 
I can't be the only one that has come across this before!  
 
Any help or tips much appreciated. 
 
Many thanks!
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    Maria

    Hi Freddie, just to add more to Celeste's answer. You can also retrieve all the financial fields of a reservation from the Financial Reporting endpoints of our API https://api.hostaway.com/documentation#financial-reporting. Those can help you with the integration with Xero

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    Celeste
    • Edited

    Hi Freddie,

    As you know we don't have an integration with Xero yet but with the help of our API we should be able to help you with what you need. 

    For Airbnb: to get the Airbnb total paid amount we have a field in the reservation object. This is to get how much Airbnb paid so far. You can also use the "Airbnb payout" field to understand how much Airbnb should pay for a specific reservation.


    For all other channels: we don't get the payout info from the channels but you could use the invoicing section (charges, specifically) and use those amounts. If the charges are managed by Hostaway then the values will be correct. 

    Please let me know if this can help 

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    Freddie Blunt

    Thanks Celeste and Maria - unfortunately this doesn't really help me as there is no data collected by Hostaway to let me know the *actual* amounts paid out by Airbnb. Often, payments get rolled together including 2-3 bookings e.g. a payout of £1,500 but 3 bookings (£300, £500 + £700) and there is no way of identifying easily which payouts relate to which bookings. The cash is landing in our account but we have to manually calculate which bookings these are associated with and reconcile this way, which is extremely time consuming. As far as we can tell, there is nothing within the reservation data or financial reporting data tables which indicate *actual* payout amounts from Airbnb. In Airbnb, in the transaction history, you can see which payouts relate to which bookings. I can provide screenshots if necessary. 

     

    I have a second question relating to owner statements data available within the API too. It appears that when we add expenses charges, this data is not available until an owner statement is saved. Is this correct? Ideally, we would like to be able to see historical individual expenses data add add this to a property / booking so that we can create custom PDFs for our owners. Is this possible?

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    Maria

    Hi Freddie, the reservation field AirbnbTotalPaidAmount field is automatically updated when they make a payout. We get a webhook notification from Airbnb and we update the reservation fields. You can trust that field to be the payout that Airbnb has deposited in your account for that particular reservation. Also, we have plans in our roadmap to integrate Airbnb's transaction API as well next year. 

    Regarding your question about expenses, you are right. This is how it works today but we have a working project now on separating expenses from the statement that will allow you to retrieve those independently. We are aiming to have this ready through Q1. 

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    Avat Services NIP 5273027762

    hi, I am also interested in the solutyion on this, so not sure if you managed to ghet that done. However, it seems to me the only valid way to reconcile from airbnb would be to use payement date versus checkin date for a valid (not cancelled booking). If amounts match, you can mark all related bookings as paid for.

    Regarding booking.com payments, I'd use a similar reasoning , but I believe it is paid on checkout dates and the month theyr relate to. 

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