Prostay Accounting is a set of books. You raise invoices to companies and agencies, record what you spend with suppliers, keep track of what is owed in each direction, and hold it all against a chart of accounts. It is a bookkeeping system that happens to sit next to a hotel system.
What the module is for
Four jobs, and everything on the menu belongs to one of them.
- Billing. Invoices, estimates, sales receipts, credit notes and statements, addressed to customers you keep here.
- Spending. Expenses, bills, cheques, purchase orders and supplier credits, recorded against suppliers you keep here.
- Holding the balance. The chart of accounts, the bank accounts, fixed assets and the rules that tidy bank transactions.
- Knowing where you stand. The dashboard, the receivable and payable ageing, and what each customer owes.
Accounting and the PMS are separate systems
This is the thing to understand before anything else, because almost everyone arrives expecting the opposite.
Nothing flows from the Property Management System into Prostay Accounting. A room sold, a folio charge, a minibar item, a payment taken at the desk, a booking that came through a channel: none of it arrives here on its own. The accounting module only knows about documents you create inside it.
That is a statement about plumbing rather than about what you can keep here. Plenty of properties do want the month's trading in their ledger, and the way to get it there is to post it: read the totals off the revenue reports and enter them as a sales receipt, one a month, with a line for each income account. The demo property in the screenshots below does exactly that, which is why its Room Revenue account has a figure in it. Nothing did that automatically, and nothing will.
| These look the same and are not | What is actually going on |
|---|---|
| Guests and customers | A guest sleeps in a room and has a folio. A customer receives an invoice from this module. The two lists are separate and nothing copies between them. |
| Items and products | The PMS item catalogue is what you sell to a guest on their folio, such as a spa treatment or a bottle of wine. Accounting products are what you put on an invoice line. Two catalogues, no connection. |
| Folio invoices and accounting invoices | A folio invoice settles a stay at checkout. An accounting invoice bills a company and waits to be paid. Neither creates the other. |
| Taxes | The PMS has its own taxes and fees, applied to stays. Accounting has its own tax rates, applied to invoice lines. Setting one does not set the other. |
There is exactly one link between the two, and it is Tasks. See below.
Three lists, and everything else
The module has a lot of screens, and most of them are documents. Underneath them sit three lists that the documents all draw on, and getting those three right is most of the setup work.
- The chart of accounts. The buckets every figure lands in. Nothing can be recorded until this reflects how you think about your money.
- Customers. Who you invoice.
- Products and services. What goes on an invoice line, each pointing at an income account from the first list.
Suppliers is the fourth, and it is the same idea on the buying side.
Finding your way around
Switch to Prostay Accounting from the module switcher and the sidebar changes to the accounting one. It holds five groups that expand and four entries that go straight to a screen.
| Menu | What is inside |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Home, the overview screen, and Cash Flow. |
| Tasks | A task list for the accounting team. The one screen that can point at something in the PMS. |
| Transactions | Chart of Accounts, Reconcile and Rules. Despite the group name, this is where the account setup lives rather than a list of your transactions. |
| Fixed Assets | The asset register and its depreciation. |
| Sales | Overview, Estimates, Customers, Products & Services, Sales Orders and All Sales. Most billing work starts here. |
| Expenses | Expenses, Purchase orders and Suppliers. |
| Employees | Employee records and the time activities billed against them. |
| Taxes | The tax rates that invoice lines can use. |
| Account & Settings | Five settings screens. See the next section, because these leave the module. |
Two things about that menu are worth knowing before you go hunting for something.
The first is that Chart of Accounts is under Transactions, which is not where most people look for it. The second is that Purchase orders is not always there: it disappears from the menu when purchase orders are switched off in the Expense settings, and nothing on screen explains the absence. If a colleague can see it and you cannot, that setting is why.
The settings that live outside the module
The five entries under Account & Settings behave differently from everything else on the menu: they open screens that sit outside the accounting area entirely, so the address in your browser stops saying accounting and the page around them changes.
| Screen | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Company | The details that print on your documents. |
| Sale | Defaults for every sales document, including the invoice terms that decide due dates. |
| Expense | Defaults for the buying side, including whether purchase orders exist at all. |
| Time | How time activities are recorded and billed. |
| Advance | Date and number formats, and the accounting year. |
Use the sidebar to get to them rather than bookmarking them, because from those screens the way back into accounting is the module switcher.
Why every figure appears twice
Prostay Accounting is double-entry, which is worth thirty seconds of explanation because it makes the rest of the module obvious.
Every document you save moves money between two places rather than putting it in one. Raising an invoice for 500 does not simply record 500 of income: it records that a customer owes you 500 and that you earned 500, at the same moment. When they pay, it records that your bank went up by 500 and that they now owe you 500 less. The money is never created or destroyed, only moved.
Two consequences follow, and both save you time later.
The first is that any balance can be explained. Click a balance on the chart of accounts and you get every posting that made it, each one traceable to a document. Nothing arrives from nowhere.
The second is that the account you choose on a line matters more than it looks like it does at the time. There is no separate step later where the coding gets reviewed. What you pick on the line is where the money goes.
The favourites strip
The accounting home screen opens with a row of shortcuts to the things you do most: create an invoice, receive a payment, record an expense, and so on. Twenty actions are available and you can pin up to ten.
Until you choose, Prostay shows a default handful. It is worth setting these deliberately early on, because they are the fastest route into the eight or nine forms you will otherwise reach through two levels of menu. Everything on the strip is reachable another way; nothing is only there.
Tasks, the one place the two systems meet
Tasks is a to-do list for the accounting team: chase this invoice, check that supplier statement, file the quarterly return. Tasks carry an assignee, a due date and attachments.
It is also the module's only genuine connection to the rest of Prostay. A task can Link Reservation, tying it to a booking in the PMS. That is useful for exactly the case where the two systems otherwise cannot help each other: a corporate booking that will be invoiced later, where someone needs to remember to raise the invoice once the group has left.
The link is a reference, not a mechanism. It does not pull the booking's charges into an invoice, and it does not tell the PMS anything.
What is not in this module
Worth knowing up front, so you are not looking for it.
- Manual journal entries. No screen lets you post one directly. Every entry in the books is a side effect of a document, so the way to correct something is to correct or reverse the document that created it.
- A bank feed. Nothing connects to your bank. Bank transactions are entered or imported by you, and reconciliation is a manual comparison.
- Multi-currency. The PMS supports several currencies. Accounting uses one, the property's own, on every document. A supplier who invoices you in another currency has to be converted before it is entered.
- Payroll. Employees here are records with notes and billable time. There is no pay run, no payslip and no tax withholding.
- A period close. Nothing locks a month or a year, so a document in a period you have already reported on can still be edited. Agree a cut-off with whoever does your accounts, because the system will not enforce one.
Who can open it
Anyone who can sign in and reach the module. The roles and permissions grid covers reservations, housekeeping, the Channel Manager, the Booking Engine, system settings and more, but it has no accounting section, so there is no permission to grant or withhold and no read-only accounting role.
What to set up, in order
The dependencies are real: each of these needs the one before it.
- Work through the chart of accounts and make it match how you want to read your income and costs. Everything else points at it.
- Add your customers, meaning the companies and agencies you invoice, not your guests.
- Build the products and services catalogue, pointing each item at one of your income accounts.
- Set your defaults under Account & Settings, particularly the invoice terms on the Sale screen, since those decide every due date.
- Only then start raising documents.
Doing it in another order works, but you will spend the time later instead: invoices raised before the chart is right are coded to accounts you will want to change, and changing an account's type after it has been used moves history you have already reported on.