Tracking Cancellation Reason Using the Cancellation Report [Mini Video]

For your convenience, we've included a transcript of this video below.

Hi everyone. My name is Ilsa and I am an account manager and a project manager here at ThinkReservations. I've been with ThinkReservations for about two years and I also act as the resident Innkeeper at a bed and breakfast in Portland, Maine. Today, I want to share with you some tips and tricks on tracking cancellations related to COVID-19. However, it can certainly be used for other situations in the future.

Our team did recently make some exciting improvements to our cancellation process and our Cancelled Reservations report and I'm excited to share those with you today. They are mostly in an effort to help your business during this difficult time. So let's jump in and take a look at them.

Alright, so first I'm going to go ahead and open the reservation on the calendar that I want to cancel. As always our first step of canceling will be clicking on Actions and Cancel Bill.

And at this point all of my charges are zeroed out here on the left hand side. You’ll notice a new option that showed up when I canceled this reservation for the Reason. I'm going to add my reason here and then I can go ahead and add any charges, like a $35 cancellation fee for instance.

At this point I would go ahead and refund the card for this amount for 17.25 that I owe the guest. And now my bill is balanced.

So the next thing I'm going to show you is how to track multiple cancellations. We're using our Cancelled Reservations report. So we'll go ahead and we'll click on Reports up at the top here. Next I'll click on Cancelled Reservations on the left hand side and I'm going to search for reservations that were canceled in the month of March.

Here's the list of all of those cancellations and on the far right side, you'll notice a new column which includes that Cancellation Reason we just discussed. Most of these, as you'll notice, are likely COVID-19, but there's a possibility that some of them were canceled way far in advance for a completely different reason. So that'll be useful information for us to understand.

Next, I want to point out the new columns here: the Canceled Subtotal, Canceled Tax, and Cancelled Total. These values will allow you to see how much money was on the reservation before it was cancelled as opposed to the subtotal, tax, and total after the reservation was canceled.

So if you only charge a small cancellation fee, or perhaps you don't charge at all and you refund in full, these numbers will be much lower. But this how these columns here will allow you to see how much it would have made.

So we really hope that these changes will assist you and your business in this difficult time. Really it'll be helpful for having the data that you need to apply for a loan or file a claim with your insurance, or simply track for future reference and for your records. Thanks so much for listening in today. And as always, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions at all. We hope you have a good rest of your day.