There are several situations in which a new account is created in Ulyses Suite—automatically when checking in a reservation, and when we decide to manually create one for a "walk-in" guest who wants to consume certain services without needing to stay (for example, parking).
In the first case, these are room accounts and they can have N folios depending on the number of intermediaries involved in the reservation and the number of guests staying. In the second case, the account will generally have only one folio and will be associated with the company or client assigned. Thus, an account is nothing more than a container of folios and these, in turn, are containers of charges. The charges, finally, are products that add to or subtract from the balance of the folios.
There are several operations we can perform with accounts and folios, and in this article, we will focus on the most representative ones.
- Basic account information
- Add new folio to an account (Add folio)
- Import folios from another room
- Edit folio header
- Close folios
- Early departure management (Settlement)
- Revert early departure (Revert settlement)
- Advance payment management
- Room checkout
Basic account information
The basic account information is located at the top and in the left side panel. At the top, you can see data of the reservation associated with the account (# room, arrival, departure, guests, and an economic summaryof all folios).
From the side panel, you can view the open folios and the invoices associated with the account.
Add new folio to an account
To add a new folio to the account, simply click the Add folio button at the bottom left and select the guest or company to assign to its header.
Import folios from another room
You can easily import the charges included in the folios of another room through
- Folio details > More > Import stay
- Then, check if you wish to perform checkout for the selected rooms
After finishing the process, you will see how the charges from the selected room have been placed in the folio from which the action was performed.
Edit folio fiscal data
To edit the header of a folio, simply go to a folio and click Edit.
Note
Editing the data in the folio does not imply editing them in the client/company file
Close folios
To close a folio, simply go to the folio you want to close and click the Close button located in the More menu.
From there, you will need to enter as many payment methods with their respective amounts until reaching the outstanding value of the folio.
Early departure management
Whenever our clients wish to make an early departure, we must go to the reservation account and click the Settlement option located under Options.
From there, depending on the payment method configured in the reservation, the future charges of the company and client folios involved in the reservation will be displayed. Then, select the charges you want to settle for the selected period.
So, for example, if we have a 4-night reservation marked with Payment Method "Pay Agency Guest" and the client wishes to pay all reservation charges at check-in and we have a configuration like the following:
- Bill to: first 2 nights to company ABC and the last 2 to company CDE
Ulyses PMS will automatically generate a folio for ABC, another for CDE, and another for the main guest. In this situation, you only need to select which charges you want to pay in advance for the entire reservation.
In the next example, we want to make an early departure for a room that should leave on 08/06/2018 (a hotel with date 08/04/2018)
Then select the period you want to charge; as you can see, you have the following options:
- First night: Adds first night
- All stay: Adds the charges corresponding to the entire stay
- Specific dates (Specific date range): Adds the charges corresponding to the selected date period
Once you have selected the desired option, the charges will be added to the main folio. Now, to perform the checkout, you just need to click on checkout to trigger the corresponding process.
Note
To quickly locate the folio, we recommend going to the main Dashboard, selecting the In-house clients, and clicking on the corresponding folio.
Revert advance charges (Revert settlement)
Imagine that by mistake, we have completed a process of future charges (Settlement) that is incorrect, either because the correct charge dates were not selected or not all the charges we wanted to collect in advance were selected. In that situation, we will have to use the Revert Settlement operation.
From there, select the charges you want to remove from the folios so that they return to "future".
Advance payment management
Just as there are clients who want to make early departures, we will encounter situations where the client wants to pay for the stay totally or partially in advance. In those cases, we will use deposits.
Right after checking in the reservation, we will access the room account and add a Deposit through Add deposit under the More option as shown below. If the deposit is not created, we will have to create it beforehand.
Note
Whenever there is an intermediary in the reservation with unused Deposits, the folio will prompt you to consume it through the Add deposit button as shown below
Room checkout
The checkout of a room is a process that simply consists of confirming that there are no outstanding charges in the room (nothing is left to pay) and releasing the room so that the housekeeping team can take care of it.
Continuing with the previous example, room 304 has a balance of €486.
To be able to checkout, Ulyses PMS will ask us to close the folios first and then complete the process.
Once we have closed the folios with Balance>0, we can checkout the reservation
After performing the checkout, the room will be released and can be assigned to new reservations if desired.