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Knowledge Base

K2 Status

May 28, 2019 Release

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Introducing Account Billing

When Charge to Site was released on April 16th, it fulfilled a large portion of the ‘On Account’ gap between KampSight and K2. Account Billing closes the gap completely by giving campgrounds a tool to use to bill guests, group leaders, companies, etc. and collect payment at a later point in time.

In the hotel industry, this functionality is known by other names such as “Direct Bill”, “City Desk”, “City Ledger”, etc. K2’s version might be considered a ‘light-weight’ accounts receivable/billing module. It uses the Master Account structure currently in place in K2 for Groups. Below are some examples of when Account Billing could be used.

Example 1: Great Plans Oil Company has three employees staying on your campground for the next six weeks. The employees are responsible for their own store purchases but the company will pay for their registration fees. They would like to receive a bill so it can be paid by their corporate office.

 

Example 2: The Roadmasters RV Club is holding a group rally at your campground. The group leader has stated that he will collect registration fees from each of his group members and will pay the bill for the entire group himself. He wants a bill of all the registration charges for the group.

 

Example 3: An extended family is vacationing together and grandpa has offered to pay the registration charges for several family members. He doesn’t want them to be bothered so he asks that you put all the charges on one bill and he will settle up with you before he leaves.

 

Example 4: A guest is desperate to stay on your campground over the 4th of July holiday but didn’t make her reservation early enough. You’ve moved other guests but you can’t make enough room on one site for her entire stay. She is willing to move to a different site during her stay but she’d like to pay for it all with one credit card payment.

 

Account Billing Business Rules

  • IMPORTANT NOTE: As was the case with KampSight, royalties are payable when eligible charges are placed on an account, not when the payment for that outstanding balance is received.
  • By definition, Account Billing provides the ability to charge multiple reservations to an account that can be paid for at any time during or after the stay.
  • Account Billing is available in the Short Term Stay and Long Term Stay reservation forms. The reservation status can be ‘On Site’ or ‘Checked Out’. It is not available on Upcoming or Cancelled reservations.
  • Account Billing is not available for a standalone KampStore sale. However, store sales can be done through the reservation form and added to an account bill if desired.

Setup & Security

  1. Go to Operation Setup -> Operation Details
  2. Look for the tab titled “Charges”
  3. Look for the option “Account Billing” and move the slider to the YES position
  4. Employees on your campground have to be given the authority to use Account Billing features. This is done with a user role called the “Account Billing Role”.
    1. Administrators automatically have this authority as do our built-in Security Groups of Administrator, Bookkeeper, and Manager.
    2. Make sure any of your staff members you want working in Account Billing have the Account Billing Role added to their username.
    3. If you want your staff to have access to reporting for the Account Billing feature, make sure to check the box for the report role too.
  5. With these options set, you will see a new menu option for Account Billing and will be able to access a new landing page. Additionally, you will see a new report box called ‘Account Billing’.

Using Account Billing

  1. An account must first be setup in order to use Account Billing to pay for charges in a reservation. This can be done from the Account Billing menu or from the Group Setup menu since they use the same account setup functionality.
  2. From the Account Billing menu, click on the button by the search field “+Account”

    1. You will be required to perform at least one search to make sure the account you’re looking for doesn’t already exists. If it doesn’t, go ahead and create a new account by clicking on the ‘+Account’ button in the search pop-up.
      1. The Account Type can either be ‘Individual’, ‘Group’, or ‘Business’.
      2. Fill in the name of the account, contact person, contact information, etc. For example, the name of my account may be “Great Plains Oil Company” and the contact person “Todd Smith”.
      3. The Terms field is just a flag on the account to tell the account holder when you expect to receive their payment. Options include: “Due Upon Receipt”, “Net 15 Days”, “Net 30 Days”, and “Net 60 Days”.
      4. Click ‘Save’ when you’re done.
    2. You are now ready to use Account Billing in a reservation. Register a guest as you normally would. Charges can include site charges, people charges, other charges, or store charges made through the reservation form. When you get to the Payments section of the form, look for the “Account Billing” payment type. Depending on how you have your payment buttons arranged, it may be under the ‘Other’ button as it is in the screenshot below.
    3. The payment modal will appear.
      1. The total amount due will show in the blue section on the right.
      2. Notice that the payment amount field is not editable. This means that the system is expecting you to put the whole amount of the registration on the account. If you don’t wish to do that, apply your other partial payments first and then add the amount to the account that you want.
      3. In the ‘Account’ field, look up the account that you want to charge. Once you find it, click on it to select.
      4. The account information will show in the payment modal so that you can make sure you’ve selected the right one.
      5. If the account is correct, click ‘Apply Payment’ to complete. There will be one more pop-up to allow you to verify the correct account.
      6. Back in the reservation, the transfer to the account will show in the Payments section. Note that as far as the reservation is concerned, a ‘payment’ has been applied and there is no longer anything outstanding. The balance has been transferred to an account to be collected at a later point in time.
      7. The receipt will show that the charges have been added to an account and will show that account name.

Working With Accounts

  1. Clicking on the Account Billing icon from the left menu bar will take you to the Account Menu page.
    1. The list can be viewed with three different filters: ‘Active’, ‘Inactive’, or ‘All’
    2. The ‘Active’ pill will show all accounts that either have a balance or have a zero balance and haven’t been inactivated because they may be used again.
    3. The columns in the list show the account ID, name, type, contact name, terms, and balance. You can sort the listing by clicking on any of the column names to sort by that field.
  2. Clicking on an account will take you into the Account Activity page. It is divided into three basic parts: the Account Setup summary (top), the Transactions section, and the Payment buttons.
  3. The Transaction section shows the charges that have been added/transferred from a reservation. Each time a set of charges are transferred from a reservation, it is assigned a transaction number. Clicking on the transaction number in the first column will produce a pop-up screen that shows the details of the total charges. Changes cannot be made to these charges, they are view only. Also notice that there is a link to the reservation in the second column. Clicking on this link will take you to the reservation.
  4. Transactions can be paid in any order or in part. Type in the Payment amount for each transaction line and then click on the Payment button for the type of payment you’re receiving.
  5. The Payment modal will appear with the total of the payment calculated as the Amount Due. Complete the payment by clicking ‘Apply Payment’.
  6. The Transactions will stay in the ‘Current’ tab of the Transactions list as long as there is a balance. Since partial payments can be made, there is an ‘Original Balance’ column which will show the original amount that was transferred to the account and an ‘Outstanding Balance’ column which shows how much of the original balance is still outstanding. Payments that apply to any of the transactions on the Current tab will show at the bottom.
  7. The ‘Past’ tab will list all of the transactions that have been completely paid.

Reporting for Account Billing

There are three reports to help with Account Billing.

  1. Account Billing Aging Report
    This report lists all of the accounts that have transactions outstanding. It is a point in time report – similar to the Deposit Liability report. It lists the transactions for each account spread over common aging buckets.
  2. Account Folio Report
    Similar to the Guest Folio, the Account Folio will list all of the transactions and payments for the account. It will help to identify what has been paid and what’s outstanding.
  3. Account Statement
    The Account Statement was designed to show the outstanding balance of the account and all of the transactions and payments that lead up to the balance. It’s formatted to be printed and mailed in a standard window envelope but could also be printed in pdf form and manually emailed to the account holder.

French Text for Guest Receipts

As part of closing the gap between KampSight and K2, we’ve added the ability to support multi-languages for our guest-facing receipts. This initial roll-out will include translations in French for system terms commonly used on receipts. Our future roadmap will include allowing the ability for campgrounds to add translations for areas of setup that are unique to the campground, such as Pricing Group descriptions.

  1. If you want to turn on the French translation for your campground, please contact KOA Tech Support at K2help@koa.net to opt you into the functionality.
  2. A pop-up will appear after you’ve taken a payment which will allow you to tell the system which language you want for the receipt: English, French, or Both. If you choose Both, you will get two separate receipts; one in English and one in French.
  3. A special thanks to Nic Leclair from Quebec City QC KOA Holiday for his awesome help with the French translations! Merci beaucoup mon ami!

Report Updates

Daily Transaction Summary

  • The Daily Transaction Summary is a great report to use to track down charge and payment information for a time period. We’ve updated the report options to allow the user to filter the results by “Untaxed Registrations”. This option will help you narrow down which registration transactions were NOT taxed if required for your tax reporting.

Operations Recap Detail Download

  • As a result of requests, we’ve update the report options to allow it to be filtered by the Type of Stay (Long Term, Short Term, All) as well as by Pricing Group. Additionally, we’ve extended restriction on the number of days in the reporting period from 7 to 31.
  • An update was made to correct the totals on the Untaxed Registrations when compared to the Operations Recap report itself.

Occupancy & Revenue by Day

  • We’ve added a new column to the report to show the number of closed sites for each day.

Housekeeping Cleaning List

The Housekeeping Cleaning List report has been updated with a new look and some great new features!

  • For sites that have a check out and check in on the same day, we’ve added an icon to draw attention to it. This will help your staff see those ‘hot sites’ quickly and prioritize their cleaning schedule.
  • We’ve added totals at the bottom for quick reference that will show the total number of Arrivals, Same-Day turnovers, and On Site.

Other Development

Charge to Site

A fix was made to the option “Allow Charge to Site” in the reservation form. The issue was that the Check In screen was defaulting the Y/N setting based on the operation setup and would overwrite whatever the user manually changed. This has been corrected.

Groups

We’ve updated the Group Site Block screen. There was a minor paging issue that was causing some sites to show up twice when the list spanned multiple pages. This has been corrected.

KOA.com

An update was made to the programming that supplies KOA.com with rates for the Availability Calendar. The rates will now include the Value Kard discount if the card is valid at the beginning of the stay time period or the discount of the Hot Deal chosen.

Long Term Stay

An issue was fixed that resets the reservation when a PIN pad payment is taken but cancelled. It was removing the reservation from the “PYMT Due” pill in the list even though the payment was due. This has been corrected.

Operation Setup

An update was made to the Operations Setup, Operations Details screen to make both the “Contact Email Address” and the “Return Email Address” required. This was causing issues with sending out Confirmation emails. This has been corrected.

QuickBooks

An update was made to the QuickBooks mapping screen with regards to Penny Rounding. This functionality uses a global payment code called “Penny Rounding”. The update hides the payment code in the mapping if the campground doesn’t use the Penny Rounding functionality.

HotFixes Since the Last Release

A Hotfix is something that gets pushed into the software immediately after the issue has been identified and corrected. These fixes usually represent something that must be corrected quickly and cannot wait until the next software release date. We had five Hotfixes since our last release on May 7th.

  1. Rate Your Stay Dashboard bugs (released on 5/20/2019)
    There were some bugs in the dashboard causing multiple RYS returns in the table, the Awards section was missing, and the ‘All Surveys’ link was not fetching all of the survey results for the awards period. These have been corrected.
  2. Operations Recap (released on 5/15/2019)
    It was discovered that the Tax Base reported in Section 1 on the Ops Recap was not correct. However, the tax collected was correct. This report has been fixed.
  3. Tax Report (released on 5/15/2019)
    The Tax Base reported for KampStore transactions was not correct when the campground had multiple taxes in their store, like Local Sales and State Sales for example. However, the tax collected was correct. This report has been corrected.
  4. Rate Your Stay (released on 5/9/2019)
    The programming that supplies data for the “Rate Your Stay Analysis” and the “Rate Your Stay Dashboard” was updated. The data queries were taking too long and the reports were timing out.
  5. Operations Recap for Canada (released on 5/7/2019)
    An update was made to the Ops Recap when run on Canadian campgrounds. Individual debit transactions were listing in the Payments section rather than a summary line for Debit. This has been corrected.

 

Future Development

  • Report options for On Site Storage and Overflow
  • Group Enhancements
  • Reassign/Refresh Rates
  • Waitlist

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