The folio is the single running bill for an in-house guest — every room they hold, every charge they incur, every payment they make. One folio per stay, even when the guest occupies multiple rooms.
Before you start
- You need Room Management access.
- The guest must already be checked in. If they aren't, run the Check-In wizard from the Room Status board first.
The Rooms section
The folio's Rooms card lists every room currently held against the stay. Rows for rooms the guest has already checked out of are kept for history but greyed.
- A multi-room stay is one folio, but each check-in produces its own Invoice under the hood — that's what keeps each check-in's posting and audit trail self-contained. The folio rolls them up by guest, so you see them as one bill regardless of which room's invoice you drilled in from.
- When the guest changes rooms (Room Status board → Change Room), the new room is appended and the old one is marked checked-out — both remain visible on the folio.
- When the guest adds another room to their stay (Room Status board → Add Room on an in-house guest), the new room joins the same folio. Drilling into either room's tile lands you on the same unified folio.
- The system never splits an in-house guest across two folios. If you ever see a guest's room missing from the rooms list, it's a data issue, not a UI filter — log it.
What counts as a charge on the folio
Charges, Grand Total and Balance Due cover everything the guest has run up on this stay:
- The room charges for every room on the folio, night by night as they are billed.
- Everything posted to the room — charges you add with Post Sales to Room, room service, QR orders the guest places from the room, and bar or restaurant bills the waiter bills to their room number.
Sales the guest paid for in cash at the till are not included. Those are already settled, so adding them would make the guest look like they owe money twice. They still appear on the guest's statement, which is a full history of everything that happened rather than a list of what is still owed.
Balance Due is what the guest must settle before they can be checked out. Checkout stops on any non-zero balance and asks you to confirm — that is the safety net against releasing a room with a restaurant bill still open on it.
Balance Due, and the credit already on file
Balance Due is what the guest still owes after counting money they have already given you. The totals panel shows the arithmetic in order: Grand Total, then Payments applied, then Unused guest payment, then the figure itself.
Payments applied is the part of the payments (the guest's own, and any sponsor credit applied here) that bills on this folio have used.
Unused guest payment is money received from the guest that no bill has used yet: a deposit, or an over-payment. It pays each new bill on the folio automatically, so it is normally small or absent. When every bill is paid and money is left over, the box reads Guest in credit with that amount, and a line under it says the guest's unused money can be refunded or transferred to the sponsor.
If a bill is unpaid while the guest still has unused money (rare, between two billing steps), a line under the box says so; the money is applied the next time the folio is billed or settled.
Refunding a guest in credit
When a folio ends up Guest in credit, the Refund button becomes available. It opens a Client Journal entry (Debit Customer) pre-filled with the amount owed; pick the cash or bank account the money is paid out from and save.
Refund stays greyed out when:
- The guest still owes money — take the payment instead; the tooltip shows the amount.
- The account is exactly balanced — there is nothing to refund.
- The folio has no sponsor customer — there is no account to refund to.
- The folio is already closed.
Receive Payment from the folio
The Receive Payment button on the folio opens the standard receipt modal, pre-scoped to this guest's folio — so you can see and allocate the payment across everything the guest owes on the stay without chasing through the full receipt page.
- The Outstanding Invoices grid shows every unpaid invoice posted to this guest: the room invoices (including pre-billed nights still to be paid) and charges posted to the room — room service, QR orders from the room, bar or restaurant bills billed to the room.
- It does not show sales that were already paid in cash at the till. Those were settled at the point of sale, so there is nothing left to collect and they never reach the folio's payment grid.
- It also doesn't show invoices belonging to a different customer, even where the same person is involved. To pay those, use the Receipts page directly.
- Existing-Credit selection works as normal — any unallocated credit on this guest is offered as a payment source.
Tips
- The folio totals (Charges / Paid / Balance) refresh after every save.
- The deposit from an advance booking shows as "Deposit for advance booking #N" with a lock badge — it stays attached to the booking until the guest checks out. The auto-bill job grows the allocation across the folio invoices.
- For partial check-outs (one room out, others staying), use the Check-Out modal on the specific room row, not the folio header.
Common problems
- "Only one room shows after Change Room" → check the room status board Change Room completed. If the new room tile is occupied but the folio rooms list is missing it, look in the API log for a reservation-side error during the change-room flow.
- "A room-service or QR order is on the folio but Receive Payment won't let me collect it" → the charge has to be posted to the room to reach the payment grid. If the guest paid cash at the till it is already settled and correctly absent. If it was billed to the room and still doesn't appear, log it — the charge is on the guest's statement but not attached to their registration.
- "Receive Payment shows invoices from another module" → this only happens if the modal was opened outside the folio (e.g. from a customer page). The folio's Receive Payment button always scopes to this guest's own folio.
- "The folio asks for payment but the guest has already paid" → check Unused guest payment in the totals panel. Money received but not yet applied to a bill is counted in Balance Due, so the figure should already be net of it. If the transactions list disagrees with the panel, note both figures and log it.
- Deposit not showing on the folio → if check-in was just done, give the auto-billing job a minute to grow the allocation. The deposit is "earmarked" on the receipt until then; you can also force it from Bill Rooms Now.
Printing the folio
Three prints, three purposes:
- Print Folio — the Guest Bill: one line per invoice with amount, tax, service charge and discount, the amount in words, total paid and balance. Date Out is when the current night ends while the guest is in-house, or the real departure once checked out; NoNights counts the nights billed so far; Room Rates shows each room's current rate.
- Print Statement — the guest's transaction ledger with a running balance.
- Print This View — this page exactly as shown: the current view (Rollup or Detailed), the date range you set, the rooms and the totals panel. Use it when a guest or manager asks for "what is on the screen".