Resolving customer balances not matching reservation balances

Sometimes you may see a Customer balance that doesn't match the Reservation balance (for instance a negative customer balance but a $0 reservation balance).

There are 3 possible causes of this.

1. The same customer may have more than one reservation, and the balance is coming from one of the others.  

From Customer Details, check Reservation History to see if the balance is coming from other reservations.  There may not be any problem -- perhaps you just didn't realize there were balances on other reservations.  

Otherwise, check any reservations showing an unexpected balance to see if there are missing or extra transactions.  This could also be a symptom of issue #3 below (try that first if something looks wrong), or it may need to be manually corrected (keep in mind that any changes will affect reports for the dates of any changed/deleted/added transactions).  

If a transaction appears to have been put on the wrong reservation, then it's possible to simply Move the transaction to the correct reservation (assuming you're using version 11.0 or later) -- see the "Move to a different reservation" function under the Transaction History function from Reservation Details or Customer Details.

2. It may be due to a transaction that's on the Customer instead of the Reservation (i.e. it was entered through Customer Details, even though there's a warning not to do so).  

Through Customer Details, go to Transaction History.  Scroll over to the "Reservation" column where it lists the date of each reservation.  If there's no date in this column for a transaction, then it was mistakenly put on the Customer.  

- If it's a duplicate transaction (e.g. you also see it properly on the Reservation, in Reservation Transactions), then you may need to delete the extra non-reservation copy in the Customer's transactions (understanding that this may affect reports).  

- If it was simply put in the wrong place and needs to be moved to a Reservation (especially if it's a processed credit card transaction), then while in Transaction History you can simply select the transaction and click "Move to a Different Reservation or Customer" (assuming you're using version 11.0 or later).  If using an earlier version, the Move function is not available -- you will have to go back to Customer Details, New / Edit Transactions and use Transfer Pmt (or Transfer Dep) to transfer the amount to the Reservation.

3. It might be due to a synchronization issue in the database.  

Go to Maintenance / Database Maintenance, and run all 3 "Report and repair...Orphaned..." functions.  If it reports any orphaned transactions, then you need to decide whether each one is a duplicate that should just be deleted, or whether it needs to be fixed (linked back to the customer or reservation it belongs to).  First Delete any that should not be fixed, and then use the "Fix" function to repair the linking for the remaining transactions.  Note that this is best done on the Master workstation if you're networked, followed by "Request a full database refresh" on each client computer to make sure they're in sync (orphans are most often caused by network synchronization problems, so any orphan probably indicates that the databases aren't synchronized).