Keeping a customer deposit or overpayment for future stays

Sometimes a customer may cancel a reservation (for a good reason) and want his deposit kept for a later stay, or they might have a credit balance due to an overpayment or bad-weather credit that you want to hold for later.

You should always "zero-out" reservations that are canceled or checked out, and you don't really want to just leave the balance on the reservation where you might forget about it anyway. So the way to handle this is to transfer the reservation deposit or extra payment to the Customer's balance (outside of the reservation). The balance will stay with the customer's record, and when that customer checks in again it will pop up a reminder that they have a credit balance that could be applied to the new reservation.

To transfer a deposit, follow the steps below. For transferring an overpayment that's not a "Deposit" transaction type, use the same steps but use "Transfer Payment" instead of "Transfer Deposit".

1.	Bring up the Reservation Transactions for the reservation in question (e.g. New/Edit Transactions).

2.	If necessary, clear out or credit back any charges that the customer doesn't owe, so you have the proper credit (negative) balance due.

4.	It will show the "From" portion at the top with the current reservation information. Leave this as it is.

5.	Click "Find Customer" and locate the correct customer record, select it and click "Use" (it will automatically search with the last name to help you out, if you have a recent version of the program).

6.	The customer name will be filled in, and also the presumed amount to transfer will be shown. (If the amount is not correct, there may be some charge or Dep Applied transactions still present that are keeping it from being available, or else you need to select the other kind of transfer in step 3.)

7.	Change the amount and/or description if desired, then click "Save".

8.	A warning will indicate that it's going to the customer, which in this case is OK, so click "Yes".

That's it -- if you transferred the entire amount, the balance should now be $0 for the reservation. If you go back to the customer's record, though, you'll see that the customer still has the credit balance.

Now when you make a new reservation for them (or when they check in), repeat the steps above -- except that in step 4 you need to change the "From" selection to "To", since you're transferring the amount to the reservation, from the customer.