- Refunds
Do you still have questions about the accounting? Please click here.
Invoice processing steps
1. Payment notice
First things first: Your end customers will not receive a PDF invoice in the attachment to the confirmation email, but a payment notice. This contains all important information such as payment method, payment status and payment date. The payment notice is not an official document. This purpose is fulfilled solely by the invoice, which is of course still available to you and your customers.
You can download the payment notice from your bookingkit account in the order details view:
And here is a sample payment instruction:
2. Invoices
Invoices are sent to your customers as .pdf files automatically with the booking confirmation. You can insert or change the text that appears on them along with all other relevant information generated automatically under Settings-> Invoice Layout.
Your end customers can still download the invoices in the service overview. In the bookingkit backend, they are available as usual in the order detail view. As soon as you change an item in the order, e.g. add an additional participant, and the invoice is then opened again for the first time by your end client or yourself, a new invoice is created, which corresponds to an invoice correction.
In the course of the new invoice, a new invoice number is of course also created. For example, if RN4-VNFAUX is the original invoice number, the new one will be as follows: RN4-VNFAUX-1.
The current invoice is always available to your client in the service overview. In accordance with the principles of proper accounting, you have access to all invoices ever created in the backend.
The payment method, payment status and payment date are not listed on the invoice. These are only shown on the payment notice.
3. Cancellations
Cancellations and refunds are certainly part of your everyday business life and as you know there are various ways of cancelling and refunding in bookingkit. But how exactly is this affected by our billing logic?
Cancellation of the entire order:
If you cancel an entire order, your end customer will receive a cancellation invoice in the cancellation confirmation. This is of course also available to you as a provider in your bookingkit account under "Orders" > "Canceled orders":
Partial cancellation of an order
If you only cancel individual participants of an order, but the order as such continues to exist in bookingkit, your end customer will receive a corresponding new, adjusted invoice in the cancellation email.
Refunds
If you also arrange a refund, e.g. monetary or by value voucher, your customer will receive a credit note for the refunded value in the cancellation email next to the cancellation or new invoice.
And here is an example of a credit note:
Important note when using the "Refund" button: Please note that if a service is canceled without a simultaneous refund, no separate credit note will be created.
If only a refund is triggered without reference to a specific service, this will only appear as a separate item on the payment notice. The solution here would be to create a separate credit note outside of bookingkit instead.
Cancellation of an already paid order without refund
If you receive an order with payment on-site, you can manually mark it as paid. For orders paid online, the money will be automatically transferred directly to your Stripe wallet. Once a payment is marked as paid, there is a flow of funds. If you cancel without a refund - i.e. do not refund the money received in any way - this will show up on the invoice as an "accounting charge" in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. The money is still with you and was paid by the customer, so this must of course be shown accordingly on the invoice.
4. Things to know
For orders with invoice payment and reservation, no payment notice is sent. Invoices must be sent so that we can correctly map these two cases for accounting purposes. As usual, your customer will, of course, receive all the necessary information to settle the open item, such as IBAN, the reason for payment, etc. Of course, your customer can download the invoice and all other relevant information in the service overview at any time.
Other relevant settings for your end customer invoices could be the tax rates. You should also define the voucher type of your value vouchers. (Multi-purpose vs. single-purpose vouchers)
5. Important note on the calculation of VAT
Please note that in our invoice documents, the VAT amounts are added up horizontal along the invoice. In this example, 50 x 1,12€ = 56€.
There are two ways of calculating VAT on invoices. The vertical and the horizontal method.
With the vertical method, all net amounts are added together first and then the VAT is added at the end. With the horizontal method, the VAT is added for each individual item and then added together. This is how we do it.
There is no specification in the law or in other guidelines as to which method should be used. Accordingly, both are accepted by the tax authorities. Our method is therefore just as correct as the other. The rounding difference is simply the consequence of the different calculation methods. There is no right or wrong here either.
6. How can I subsequently change the invoice for orders?
Of course, this is no problem with bookingkit. You can easily adjust the invoice details. To do so, call up the respective order in your bookingkit account and click on "Edit".
There you can change the contact and billing data. If your customer pays on the spot, you can also add further services to the order there.
Finally, click on Save and the invoice is changed accordingly. You can now send it again to your customer's email address together with the order confirmation by clicking on the Send order confirmation button.
Please also note that a new invoice is created each time the invoice data is changed, in accordance with the principles of proper accounting.
7. Note on the presentation of the invoice for orders via GetYourGuide (GYG)
For orders from GYG, the invoices will only show the total amount.
However, the VAT is not sent from GYG to bookingkit, so we cannot display any information about it on the invoice. Therefore this value is shown as 0,00€. In this case, we cannot calculate the VAT directly in the GYG system.
example:
