Deposit management with negative items / Deposit Added Automatically as tourist tax

Hello everybody!

We would like to inform you about an improvement that affects the management of damage deposits, especially in reservations with automatic check-in or unattended reception.

Currently, in Unified it is not possible to add items with a negative amount, which prevents you from using the items to reflect damage deposit returns.

In our case, we manage the deposits in this way:

• When the reservation is created, we manually add a preconfigured item called "Deposit" with the corresponding amount. Thus, the customer is shown this charge in the webapp and cannot access the apartment if he/she has not paid it.

• At the end of the stay, if there has been no damage, a refund of the amount is made, and to reflect it correctly in the reservation we add another item called "Refund Deposit" with the same amount but in negative.

This system allows us to:

• Keep track of deposits collected and returned from the item report.

• Easily identify if there are deposits collected and not returned (if the total balance of deposits in the report is positive).

If we cannot use negative items, the only alternative would be to manually delete the bond item, which prevents us from leaving a trace of the operation and makes us lose accounting and operational traceability.

In addition, we believe that it would be very useful to be able to configure an automatic deposit from settings, in the style of the tourist tax:

• To be added to the reservation automatically according to the channel, type of accommodation or rate.

• That it appears in the client's webapp as a separate concept from the total outstanding amount of the stay, to avoid confusion.

• That if the deposit is not paid, the customer cannot access the key/lock code.

This would save us from having to manually add the deposits, especially in last minute bookings, and would avoid having to explain over and over again why there is an additional charge even if it appears in the booking channels.

Lastly, I would love to know how other accommodations handle this. If anyone has a different way of working with bonds....