Overview
Depending on your relationship with the payer, a deposit can often be less than the total booking amount because it has fees or transactions deducted. Another scenario is that you could be set up with "gross deposit" or negative deposit (i.e., withdrawal), which means that the fees are charged at the end of the month, and each nightly payout is for the full amount of payments.
Creating Deposits
In the top OwnerRez menu, open Tools > Deposits.
Click on Deposits, and you'll see a simple list with a Manually Record Deposit button above it. For some users, nothing will show in the Deposits list right off. That is because the first phase of deposits was manual only, and unless you use Stripe or Lynnbrook Group (please note: does not include "Lynnbrook Classic"), it will continue to be manual for the time being. You will need to manually record deposits by selecting from your recent payments and refunds and creating a deposit that matches your bank records.
Manually Creating Deposits
Go ahead and click the Manually Record Deposit button. You'll see a page showing all of your most-recent payments and refunds, inviting you to select the ones that were deposited together.
The fields at the top ("Deposited On" and "Amount") are used to record when the deposit hit your bank account and the total amount. This amount should be the exact "to the penny" number deposited into your bank account.
Below there, you should select the payments and refunds that make up the deposit. The combination of the payments and refunds you select should match the deposited amount.
After saving the deposit, you'll be taken back to the Deposit list, where you'll see the newly recorded deposit. Clicking on the recorded deposit will show you what you recorded. If you'd like to change the deposit, you can do that, but you can only change the "Deposited On" and "Total Amount" fields. If you made a mistake selecting payments and refunds, you'd need to delete the deposit and start over by manually recording a new one.
Fees and Adjustments
Fees and adjustments are always a part of the vacation rental industry. Due to fees, credit card payments are often not entirely deposited to your bank account, and we have built a process to handle that fee problem.
Fees are automatically factored out of the deposit total as you select transactions based on the fee amount on each payment and refund. For instance, let's suppose you have three credit card payments that are part of a single deposit, each of which has a credit card fee. When you select those three payments on the deposit screen, the total gross, fee, and net amount will show at the bottom of the list of transactions. It would look something like this:
Many users don't record credit card fees on each payment because it is difficult to locate that information, and we have designed a solution for that.
Suppose you select payments and refunds that don't add up to the deposit amount at the top. In that case, the system will automatically show you the difference at the bottom and warn that an "adjustment" will be created on the deposit to denote the difference.
For example, let's consider the same deposit above but with payment records that have no recorded fee. When we select the payments, notice the warning box at the bottom calling out the $128.50 difference and that an "adjustment" will be created automatically with the deposit.
Wondering what an "adjustment" is? An adjustment is simply an extra amount taken from a deposit that does not align with any payment fees recorded in OwnerRez. Adjustments can happen for several reasons, including:
- Reserve funding - your processor requires that you maintain a certain balance with them, and to fund that reserve, they remove the amount they need from your daily deposit.
- Chargeback - a guest disputed a transaction, and your processor is taking that money back via a deposit with other transactions mixed in. Chargebacks must be adjusted manually for disputed bookings by OwnerRez users.
- Off-platform payments or refunds - you processed a payment or refund on the processor's (or gateway's) control panel directly and bypassed OwnerRez, and the deposit includes those extra transactions.
- Unrecorded fees - you might have fees taken out of each transaction but not recorded in OwnerRez. This is very common because OwnerRez cannot get the fee data from most processors. Only fees from Stripe and Lynnbrook Group (please note: does not include "Lynnbrook Classic") are automatically recorded in OwnerRez. Your deposit might include those other fees.
- End-of-month bulk fee debits - if you have "gross deposit" where the processor takes out your fees at the end of the month, you might end up with a large negative deposit (i.e., withdrawal) for the bulk fees being charged. The entire "deposit" in OwnerRez would then be considered one large adjustment.
The difference between a fee and an adjustment is that a fee is a specific fee amount linked to a single payment or refund. An adjustment is not linked to payments or refunds and can be any amount of money for any purpose. Deposits can have both fees and adjustments at the same time.