Accountant guide, part 1: your overview and how the books work

This is part 1 of 4 of the Xenia accountant guide: 1. Your overview and how the books work · 2. Setting up the books · 3. Posting, vouchers and the ledger · 4. Bank reconciliation and statements.

This guide is for the accountant, whether you are on the hotel's staff or work for it from outside. It takes you from your first sign-in to a posted month: setting up the books, posting guest bills, writing journal vouchers, reconciling the bank and printing the statements. It uses a made-up hotel, Sunrise Hotel in Lagos, so no real figure or person appears.

Get in

The owner invites you by email with the Accountant role. Follow the link, add your name, phone number (with the country code) and a password of at least 10 characters with upper and lower case letters and a number, agree to the terms and choose Create account and join. The link works once and expires after a week. Then open Security and turn on two-step sign-in: the books are what a thief would most like to change, so a stolen password must not be enough.

Your menu

The accountant's menu is short on purpose:

• Overview: what needs doing today.

• Folios: find any guest's bill and see every charge, payment and void on it.

• Accounting: the books themselves (parts 2 to 4).

• Reports, Outlet reports and Daily report: how the hotel, the bar and the restaurant traded.

• Night audit: the nightly charges for guests who stayed past check-out.

• Audit trail: the permanent record of sensitive actions.

• Notifications and Security.

The overview

Your overview is a list of the jobs that wait for you:

• Folios to post: settled or closed bills that are not yet in the books, and how much they hold. This is your daily worklist.

• Owed by guests: what open bills still owe, and how many bills that is. It opens the reports.

• Vouchers: drafts and vouchers waiting for approval, or All clear.

• Statements: a shortcut to the income statement, balance sheet, VAT report and trial balance.

• Bank reconciliation: for each bank account, how many statement lines are not in the books and how many book lines are not on the statement.

• Quick links: the ledger, a new journal voucher, the chart of accounts and the default accounts.

How the books work

You do not type the hotel's takings into the books. They arrive in a set order, and each step is a place you can check:

1. The front desk, bar and restaurant record the day on guests' bills (folios). Every charge, discount, void and payment is on the bill, with who did it.

2. A bill that is settled or closed waits to be posted. It appears under Folios to post.

3. You post it. Each bill posts exactly once, as one balanced entry: charges go to revenue, VAT and service charge each to their own account, and payments to cash or the bank.

4. Everything else is a voucher. Bank charges, salaries, rent and corrections are journal vouchers you write.

5. The bank is reconciled against its statement, so the books agree with the money.

6. The statements read from the ledger: nothing is typed into them.

Accounting has eight tabs that follow this order: Chart of accounts, Bank and cash accounts, Default accounts, Post folios, Journal, Ledger, Reconcile and Statements.

Next: Part 2: setting up the books.