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 from one of the others.  From Customer Details, check Reservation History to see if the balance is coming from other reservations.  If so, then there may not be any problem.

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 on properly on the Reservation), then you may need to delete it (understanding that this may affect reports).  If it needs to be moved to a Reservation, then go back to Customer Details, New / Edit Transactions and use Transfer Pmt (or Transfer Dep) to transfer it.

3. It might be due to a glitch 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).