In Germany and the European Union, there are a number of accounting requirements you should consider when choosing hotel management software.
In particular, deviations in the requirements of the auditors and tax authorities regarding booking, accounting, and bookkeeping (including the cash book) usually lead to legal problems and additional financial burdens.
There are many inexpensive products on the market that promise their customers to simplify hotel and restaurant management. When choosing the right system among all these options, you should make sure that it is the principles for electronic accounting (GoBD) compliant.
HotelFriend explains how to do it below:
Why is the GoBD important?
The reason for these precise and strict accounting principles can be summed up in two words - traceability and auditability. This is easy to implement on paper: If a sum, a receipt, or another variable is changed, it is immediately apparent. But if you work electronically in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, all previous data has disappeared after a change - this means that there is no understanding of why a change was made and the change is also no longer verifiable. In terms of income and expenses, a lack of verifiability is fatal.
The guideline (it is described in detail in the BMF letter dated November 28, 2019) is also applied to the tax audit. If you fail to comply, you run the risk of all your accounting being discarded. This can lead to a tax estimate or the loss of the input tax deduction.
What do the specifications include?
The tax authorities demand literally: the “immutability of bookings and records”. It must be possible to save all your receipts, delivery notes, business correspondence or offers in such a way that they either cannot be changed or the change can be easily traced.
This information relates to both the type of document (e.g. Word, Excel, PDF) and its storage and archiving. Storage locations such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and unprotected cloud systems are not GoBD-compliant.
What else should you pay attention to?
In addition to invoicing and accounting, it should be possible to keep a tax office-compliant cash book that stores your expenses, income, and receipts centrally.
If a transaction is registered via the system, it is automatically added to your cash book. Additional information, such as date, time, invoice reason, and VAT can be also added. Every change is registered and automatically appears.
The advantages of a cash book that communicates with the rest of your software are clear in terms of clarity, efficiency, and security. Instead of unmanageable file systems, there is a central location where all transactions and documents can be viewed and found in seconds.
The automated processes also ensure a low error rate - as errors arise from manual entries. Automatic postings and balance sheet calculations protect against incorrect accounting and thus against tax estimates and loss of input tax deduction due to incorrect documents. Also, this digital technology together with regular cash book balancing allows to reduce internal discrepancies or even fraud.
HotelFriend fulfills the requirements of the principles for electronic accounting (GoBD) and offers a secure option for electronic accounting with our own cash book.
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