Once we have pushed your account live at the start of the month, we then need to turn our attention to trust accounting.
The first step is for you to provide us with your opening balances.
You need to pick a date and provide a justification of the balance of the trust account at the end of that day. The opening balances need to exactly match the balance in the trust account. We can't move forward with your trust accounting setup without this - and we can't assist with any account or auditing enquiries if you can't provide this information accurately.
Ideally the date we use is the day that all owners have been paid out from your previous system for the previous month.
For example, if we're going live with you on August 1 and you finish paying out your owners for July bookings on August 2, then we would choose August 2 as the transfer date and ensure we are using the balance showing in the trust account as of the end of August 2. That is the starting point for everything else.
The opening balances are made up of the following:
- net receipts (i.e. after any credit card fees) for all deposits for future bookings
- net receipts for all current or past bookings that have not yet been disbursed to owners
- any balances being held for owners (i.e. not disbursed to them in previous months). This may include any contingency funds you always retain from owners, or any funds they have deposited to pay for future repairs or maintenance
- any holding account balances that are being held in the trust account, e.g. guest credits
If you have been using an alternative trust accounting system, you should be able to download the balances according to that system for that day, which makes the job much easier.
If you have not been using a trust accounting system, we recommend the following:
1. We will provide you with a spreadsheet onto which you will need to load every booking that hasn't been disbursed as of the agreed transfer date and the net amount sitting in the trust account for those bookings
2. On a linked spreadsheet, you tally up the total deposits for each property and add on in a separate column any funds being held for owners, giving you a total balance for each property
3. You then add on at the bottom any holding account balances, giving you a total which should match the balance in the trust account.
4. If the balances don't match, we need to implement a solution. If the totals on the spreadsheet are greater than the balance of the trust account, you need to work out where to remove funds from in your figures, because we cannot load into OTA+ a negative balance for any property or holding account. If the spreadsheet totals are less than the balance of the trust account and you cannot work out the cause, then we can load the difference into a 'Suspense' holding account.
