Can this be used for a B&B?

Hey peeps, just signed up as I need to do basic booking for my B&B. However, not sure how to use this as I don’t have invoices I just have payments made by my guests and expenses I incur in the running of the business.

Thoughts…

K

Hi @Kerensa

Thanks for getting in touch. We do have other B&Bs and cash based businesses that use QuickFile to manage their accounts. Thankfully you don’t need to record every single sale and expense in your accounting software, what such businesses typically do is post bulk invoices either daily or weekly to capture the total income. There’s a guide here that I feel would be worth reading.

Accounting for daily takings

Please get back to us if you have any follow up questions.

You can tag money receive in bank or cash to sales account without issuing any invoice

Thanks, but that didn’t really help me at all. I have no idea how to fill in this stuff. I records kept by my booking service of all my guests, I don’t see how to transfer that information into an invoice. Think I will have to hire a book keeper after all :slight_smile:

Do you use another piece of software to keep a record of your daily takings such as bookings?

The link I posted above is basically how to record takings for a shop, which would be a similar scenario. Instead of creating individual invoices, you would record daily or weekly takings.

If you were to issue an invoice from QuickFile for bookings, then the invoice would need to meet the requirements set by HMRC (See here for VAT invoices and here for standard invoices). QuickFile will handle most of this, such as showing VAT, invoice numbering and due dates, but the actual lines can be entered by you when you create the invoice.

If you get most of money in your bank and pay expenses from bank then just get feed in to QF and tag it to relevant categories

I have seen this in other fields, the terminology sometimes masks what the product can really do. The “invoice” in QF it is just a tool for recording what money is due and what comes in. You don’t have to actually send physical or electronic invoices to people in order to use it.

Having said that, because QF lets you customise invoices you could relabel them as, say, “booking” and send them to customers showing the deposit paid and how much is owing on departure while giving yourself visibility of what money you have due to come in across the season.

Can you please explain clearly how to do this. In my business I typically do 20+ jobs per week and have in excess of 30 customers. Amongst those, there are some that prefer to pay via bank transfer, but the majority like to pay me cash on completion. I am currently raising a sales invoice for every job I do. It is important to do that for those who pay directly into my bank as the invoice is sent electronically via email. The cash payers, on the other hand, never see (or need) an invoice as I just flag it as sent.
I would need traceability for the cash payers. I would welcome suggestions on this!

@gardenman_2803 I have answered this on your separate post.

In that case you’re doing it right by creating sales invoices in QuickFile. If you were to tag the cash payments directly to the General Sales nominal account without an invoice then you wouldn’t have any record of which payment came from which person (other than the transaction description you enter when you create the transaction on your petty cash account).

No, I am looking into hiring a book keeper, this stuff is just a completely foreign language to me. I looked at the invoice templates and they may as well have been designed in Russian. I have no idea where to even begin. Thanks for your help, but I don’t think this is for me :slight_smile: