Standard Operating Procedure
Dusit International, February 2016
o Head of accounting’s assistant responsible for daily JV approvals for
all postings;
o Income Auditor
o General Cashier
o Reservations staff
In this context, segregation of function as required by Hotel Accounting
Policy No: 1-55 Sound Practices must be adhered to so that access is not
jointly granted for employees to post and reconcile payments both in Opera
PMS as well as in Global Collect’s account page.
6. Legal implications are set forth in the Project Agreements with Global
Collect and it is therefore mandatory as part of the set-up process for the
relevant VP for Hotel Accounting to review this with each property’s Head
of Accounting.
B. Testing
1. Before implementation, a trial period must be established to verify the
following for each property:
a) interface between SynXis and Global Collect;
b) charge and settlement by Global Collect;
c) cancellations and refunds by Global Collect;
d) finalize data reporting and formats by Global Collect
This should be done by the Corporate Data Management team in
conjunction with the property’s IT Manager and Head of Accounting.
2. The Revenue Manager at each property must ensure that the advance rates
published on the hotel’s website are approved as these rates would be
tagged to the payment gateway. A policy on how to update future rates must
also be issued so that the Reservations and Accounting staff are informed
accordingly of the process and audits required in connection with the
property’s rate management strategy. Please note that once payment has
been processed by Global Collect, there is no mechanism for it to update
SynXis on this which thus requires a manual process by the Reservations
staff to post the advance payment in Opera PMS.
3. Included in the testing element of Point 1(d) above is a review of the user
guide issued by Global Collect so that the staff at each property thoroughly
understand how the payment gateway works. This should be done as a
presentation by Global Collect and should be organized by the Corporate
Hotel Accounting Department. On completion of this session, each staff
should be verified for competency on use of the payment gateway console
of Global Collect.
C. Implementation and responsibilities
Property Accounting
1. As explained earlier, to ensure proper segregation of function, the
accounting and reconciliations involved with the payment gateway
transactions must be allocated to different staff by functionality.
2. The overall responsibility for the work flow lies with the Head of accounting
or designate person who is responsible for the maintenance of the General
Ledger to work with the following staff:
For the Income Auditor:
i) On a daily basis, to check and balance the postings for payments made
by card type and by total amount between the Opera Trial Balance
Report (as explained under the section “Hotel Reservations”, these
postings will be done by the Reservations Supervisor) and Global
Collect Transaction Report. To do this, he or she should note that Global
Collect will batch and process payment transactions for the previous day
by the close of business standard time in the Netherlands. Due to the
time difference between the locations of our existing properties and the
Netherlands, the Income Auditor will only be able to view the previous
day transactions the following day;
ii) The Income Auditor must print out the daily reports (defined and
customized during the set-up phase) from Global Collect and then
perform the necessary verification to ensure that the amount charged as
credit or debit card payments in Global Collect matches the same in
Opera PMS by card type. For payment postings, the currency used will
be the local currency, so there should be no exchange rate variance at
this stage.
- If balanced, it is considered reconciled on the posting side and
should be signed off by the Head of accounting as per Point 2 above
and the forwarded to the AR Supervisor / AR Centralise for further
action in the Opera PMS Receivables Ledger; or
- If not balanced, the Income Auditor must then review with the AR
Supervisor / AR Centralise on a line by line basis the postings made
in Global Collect against the same in Opera PMS. Once the
discrepancy has been identified, it is the responsibility of the AR
Supervisor / AR Centralise to follow-up with the Reservations staff
as this side of the transaction posting originates from the SynXis
interface with the Opera PMS;