As a owner of multiple properties, credit card reconciliation is a mundane but daily mandatory tasks for me. Most of us will take the deposits from credit card companies as granted and will consider that there can’t be any issues in deposits from credit card settlements or any errors from credit card settlement companies. However, my experience leads me to believe that hotel management companies and owners should do their own checks and analysis and ensure that the –
- Credit card settlements are done for exact amount as hotel collected from guests through credit cards
- The charges from credit card companies are as per the contract.
My recent two experiences further enforces my belief. In one of the incidents, during daily checks, we noticed around $4500 not deposited in our bank account. We waited for couple more days but the amount did not add up. While contacting Shift4, a case was opened and Shift4 confirmed that batch ID XXXX was showing as suspended containing net count of 44 transactions. It came out that one of the transaction of $68.61 had some error and whole batch was suspended due to that. We could finally get the transaction removed from batch and resubmit and get the batch settled. However, such incidents further emphasizes need to check credit card deposits on daily basis and match with the actual amount collected.
On a separate incident, my credit card processor company was charging higher rates for one type of cards. We negotiate better rates while signing new contracts with credit card processors however, then ignore to check if the lower rates are actually received or not.
Such checks are easy to do but manual. In HelloGM, our goal is to automate the process to check credit card settlement deposits on bank accounts daily basis and match with the amount collected. Any discrepancy will be highlighted and a notification will be raised to the concerned person. This will relieve owner/manager from such manual checks on daily basis so they can focus on high growth items. Automation through one task at a time!!