PM Modules - Create and edit payments for an owner statement

In order to create payments and invoices for all the people you need to pay, such as rental owners, check-in agents, cleaning staff, and yourself, you will first need to have all these recipients with their payment strategies set up in the system, and have created an owner statement. Now you will be able to create payments for your recipients and let the system know for which payments you have transferred the money. 

Read about:

• Create a payment report
• Edit parts of a payment
• Add items to a payment
• Create payments and partial payments
• Partial payments and tracking money transfers

Create a payment report

1. Go to your Main Menu in the top left corner and select PM Modules
2. Click Owner statements from the left menu bar.
3. Go to your Statements, and click Details:
   
4. Once you have set up your owner statement, you will see a button to Create Payments.

💡 Note: Remember that you will only be able to create payments if you have created your recipients and their strategy. This is the concept the system needs to know in order to pull out the correct numbers for each payout.

Then follow these steps:

1. First, you will need to select a Recipient.
2. Now the system will automatically start generating a payment report for the selected recipient based on the payment strategy that you previously defined for them.
3. Once the report is finished, you will be presented with a Payment Draft that will break down all earnings of this particular recipient for each booking received during the owner statement's set dates, and you can edit and modify it as you wish.

Edit parts of a payment

If you want to edit any part of the payment of one recipient, you can do so at any point before creating the invoice. You should also keep in mind that if you edit the payment of one recipient, you will have to edit as well the payment of the other recipient that earns any money from the same concept in order to balance out the operation. You need to understand a booking as a whole cake that has to be distributed into pieces. Every piece of cake can have a different size, but the sum of all pieces must always add up to 100% of the cake.

Reasons for editing a payment manually could be:

• You need to add a one-time maintenance cost (e.g. to change the ceiling lamp).
• You need to delete the cleaning fee from 1 booking as the client complained about insufficient cleaning, so you discount the cleaning fee for them.
• You need to modify the commission percentage of the rental agency for 1 booking (e.g. imagine during Covid you decided to lower the prices in order to get reservations, and according to the discount applied on your prices, you decide to lower your commission as well - to make even efforts between you as a manager and the rental owner).

🔎 Example of how to edit the payment: Let's say you as the rental agency usually charge a 12% commission (of the booking price) to the rental owners to manage their vacation rentals, but for one of the reservations accounted for in the current statement you decide not to charge any commission to the owner. In this case, you will need to edit the payment of this one particular booking in two different places:

• In the payment document of the owner: Modify it from 88% to 100% of that booking’s rental price and
• Edit the payment document of the agency from 12% to 0% of the booking’s rental price (or simply delete it, depending on whether they want to keep a record of the booking or not).

➡ Remember, the total percentage always has to be 100%

Add items to a payment

You will always need to double-check the payment report. In case there is anything you would like to add, scroll down to the bottom, and click Add Item. This could be anything that is not related to the booking and not paid directly by the guest, such as an expense, fee, service, or a booking that is not generated automatically from the bookings received in Lodgify.

💡 Note: The Concept Type you need to select, depends for example on whether you need to invoice the amount to the owner, or instead just need to get the money back from the owner (e.g. you bought a lamp for the owner and got the store's invoice already under the owner's name).

• Add a Booking, a Fee, or a Tax that will be included in the recipient's invoice
• Add Other (for income), or an Expense (for any expense) that will not be included in the recipient's invoice.

💡 Note: When creating Expenses, the amount always has to be negative.

 As added items are external to bookings, no strategies are applied and therefore no percentages are applied either. 

🔎 Example 1 of how to add an item: There was an additional expense of 125€ for a broken lamp in the rental, which is not related to a booking, the cost of the service will be covered by the owner, but the maintenance company has created the invoice under the rental agency's name.
In this case, you will need to do the following:

1. Add an Expense of -125€ to the payout of the owner. Go to the statement and select Create Payment. Then choose the owner from the drop-down list. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Add item. ➡ Select Expense as Concept type, choose the rental where this fee occurred, add a description, and Fixed value of -125€.
2. In order to balance this out in your statement, you need to add a Fee of 125€ to the payout of the rental agency. Go to the statement and select Create Payment. Then choose the rental agency from the drop-down list. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Add item. ➡ Select Fee as Concept type, choose the rental where this fee occurred, add a description, and Fixed value of 125€. 

💡 Note: In case the rental agency had bought the lamp for the owner and got the store's invoice already under the owner's name, you would still need to create an Expense for the owner, but for the agency, the added item would be Other.

Create payments and partial payments

Once you are happy with the payment report click Looks good, create Payment. You will be able to see each payment in the owner statement. You just need to click See Payments.
⚠ Important: Please be aware that creating payments in your owner statement does not mean that there is actually any money movement. This will simply make sure that you have the exact amount that you need to pay to your recipients and can create an invoice. The actual money transfer will always need to be handled externally via your bank etc.

Finally, you will also be able to download your payments and add attachments to them for later reference (such as invoices, transfer receipts, etc.).

💡 Note: Once you are finished creating the payments for every recipient that takes part in the owner statement, the amount in the Net Income and the amount in Paid Out in the summary of payments of your owner statement should match exactly! Therefore, it is super important that you consider yourself a recipient so all your earnings are reflected, and you can see at a glance if there is an incoherence between your income and your payments. Learn about the reasons that the Net income and the Payouts don't match.

Partial payments and tracking money transfers

In case you want to know whether you already made the payment transfer to one of your recipients or not, or you only want to pay out a partial amount of a booking to one of your recipients, you can do so with Partial Payments. This would, for example, be the case if you also have rentals that you offer for longer periods of time and the guest pays on a monthly basis. You would then want to pay the rental owner also on a monthly basis, with partial payments instead of the full booking amount. Simply tell the system how much you transferred to the recipient, and the Owner statements module will save this information and tell you if there is something remaining to pay to them.

💡 Note: Even though the reservation is long term, the reservation is contemplated only in the statement of the period in which the check-in date was, so if you want to pay the owner in partial payments, you would need to do so always from the payout document of the statement corresponding to the check-in date of this particular booking. This will help you keep track of what is paid and what is due at all times.

To track your money transfers, follow these steps:

1.  Go to one of your owner statements and click See Payments.
2. Here you will see the list of all payments you have created for this owner statement. To tell the system how much you actually transferred to the recipient, you can click on Details.
   If it is partially paid, you can also Mark as paid.
3. Now click on Partial payments, and select Add/see partial payment. Then insert the amount that you have transferred to the recipient.
   💡 Note: If you have paid the recipient the full amount of the booking, click Mark as Paid.

💡 Note: The Payment Value will indicate the percentage of the booking value that has been paid to the recipient, and all partial payments will be marked in yellow in your list of payments, so it is easy to track which bookings still have outstanding payments.

Once you double-checked that all your payments are correct, you can start creating invoices for your recipients.