How to manage gift vouchers in a PMS / administration?

Firstly, there's no standard way to manage vouchers in your PMS setup. Our experience, however, has taught us there are several effective ways to manage vouchers in your PMS. Basically, there are two ways to properly manage and identify gift vouchers as discussed below.

Selling and receiving your own gift vouchers
In case your business offers its own gift vouchers, it's important to create a specific product for that in the PMS system itself. The product accordingly needs to be linked to a balance sheet ledger account code. In other words: when a gift voucher is sold, this automatically results into a liability. This requires special attention on checking whether you are obligated to pay VAT on the sold gift voucher or not. This varies per country.

When a guest makes a payment with (redeems) that gift voucher, you want to deduct the liability from the balance sheet. Our advice is to create a separate payment method in the PMS specifically for gift vouchers. This payment method can be linked to the same ledger account code as the product for the gift vouchers. In short, the liability is deducted from the ledger and should balance back to zero.This way you'll (re)gain a better insight into the total amount of gift vouchers which were redeemed and those which need a future service in return.

Receiving third party gift vouchers
Another scenario may be that you'll receive gift vouchers from third parties. In this case you need to create another payment method in your PMS, subsequently for third party gift vouchers. These vouchers should be linked to a balance sheet account (non-current asset). This should ideally be the same ledger as the ledger that is used for the sold gift vouchers.

When a guest makes a payment with a third party gift voucher, the balance sheet ledger account will be posted debit. In other words, a claim will be created in the administration. When receiving the money from third parties, you can use the same ledger to reconcile the payment. It enables keeping track of the amount of money still having to be received from the provider of the voucher.

Depending on the possibilities of your PMS system, you might need to deal with gift vouchers a little differently. If you have any questions regarding question, feel free to contact us at support@omniboost.io.