GDPR is coming So what is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)? It's an EU regulation that becomes law on 25 May 2018 that aims to increase the data protection of all EU citizens. A whole industry has sprung up of GDPR "specialist" and there is now much media coverage. As usual there's much mis-information floating around not helped by ambiguities and deliberate vagueness of some parts of the GDPR regulations. So we think the specific understanding of GDPR will take some years to mature as authorities enforce and challenge companies compliance. Practical Impacts What does it mean for the hospitality industry and in particular the hotel sector? It means that hotel business must take steps to understand how they handle, store & process any personal information. That clearly includes personal information for guests and prospective guests. Even if you operate your business outside the EU but interact with EU citizens you need to take action. The EU and ...

Did You Know? UK and EU VAT / Sales Tax rules mean that when you take a deposit or advanced payment for services, such as a stay in your property, that creates a tax point. This means you need to report the payment in the current VAT period and produce an invoice detailing the tax allocation. This can be quite complex, error prone and time consuming process.  Even more so if you have to deal with different Tax Rates for different invoice items. More information from HMRC  https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-instalments-deposits-credit-sales Example You take a booking in April for 1 room, 2 guests with breakfast for 5 nights starting in November at £630 and right now you take 50% deposit of £315. A tax point has been created and you need to report the receipt of £315 on your current VAT return and issue an invoice to the guest.  Lets assume this is the breakdown of the chargeable services: room rate : £96 * 5 = £480 (gross, inc VAT) breakfast : £15 * 10 = £150...

There's always something extra you want to note down about a booking, maybe a guest has specific dietary requirements, wants a car hire arranged, is arriving at an unusual time. Well the Guestbook note feature makes it easy to add a bit extra info to a booking. Sometime it's the little things that have the greatest impact. In this case a little yellow dot on the availability calendar. Not all notes are born equal, in some cases we want to mark a note as important. Adding an important note to the booking will activate the magic yellow dot on the availability calendar.  Not only is this a great visual reminder but hover the mouse over the booking on the calendar and see the note pop-up. Hopefully you won't miss that little special something to keep the guest happy. From the booking edit page click the Add Note button and ensure the Important Note checkbox i ticked. Then when that booking is visible on the availability calendar you'll see yellow dot.

Base Rate Templates. With the recent release of Guestbook 247 Kaprun invoicing has just become even easier. We've worked to make it simple to split a booking base rate into one or more invoice lines. So for instance if a booking base rate includes a room rate and breakfast fee attracting different tax rates you can now define this once in a base rate template and apply it to selected bookings. Guestbook will generate an invoice containing separate lines for the room rate and breakfast. The template can define a mix of invoice items with fixed or percentage based amounts. Guestbook 247 will take care of allocating the base rate across the different invoice categories and tax rates. So taking our bed and breakfast example the template rules would look like: breakfast €15 inc 12% tax per night room rate 100% of unallocated base rate (after breakfast amount) inc 15% tax per night You can define multiple base rate templates to cover different requirements and set one to be...