Adding an expense or discount to a booking
Last updated: August 8, 2022
Expenses and discounts can be used to adjust the booking total on a completed booking. You may sometimes hear these referred to as line items.
Here are some ways you can use expenses and discounts:
- Balance a booking to be “Paid in Full”
- Retroactively apply a discount
- Add a tip or retail item to a booking
Adding an expense or discount does not actually affect the customer’s payment. To charge or refund a customer after adding an expense or discount, use the add payment or refund actions.
Who can add expenses and discounts?
The ability to add expenses and discounts depends on your permission group. By default, anyone with the Director, Manager, or Reservationist permission group can view and edit line items.
You can check these settings by going to the Bookings & Payments section of a user’s permission group and locating the options “View line items” and “Create and edit line items”.
Learn more about permission groups.
Need help updating a permission group? Contact FareHarbor Support and we’ll be happy to help!
Adding an expense or discount
Watch a short demo or follow the steps below.
- Find and open the booking you want to update.
- Scroll down and click Add expense or discount (located above the subtotal and total).
Enter a description and amount. If adding a discount, be sure to include a minus sign in front of the amount (for example: -20.00).
Tip: Keeping descriptions consistent comes in handy when using the Expenses and Discounts report.
Determine whether the line item should be private (not included on customer receipts and emails) and/or taxed (this will tax using the tax types on the price sheet’s item line), then click Add.
- To charge or refund the customer, use the Add payment or Refund actions. If you do not need to charge or refund the customer, complete steps 1-4 only.
You can edit an existing line item by clicking the 
icon and adjusting the amount. (Remember, if you change a line item’s amount, you’ll need to add payment or issue a refund to update the customer’s payment.)
Keeping track of expenses and discounts
Expenses and discounts are displayed on the customer’s booking above the subtotal, tax, and total.
They are also tracked with a date and timestamp in the activity history at the bottom of the booking.
Additionally, you can use the Expenses and Discounts report to view your line items and related bookings for a given date range. Learn more about this report.
Other options
What if I want to add an expense or discount before charging the customer?
The expenses and discounts feature is designed to be used on completed bookings, but there are a couple of ways you can adjust the booking price before charging a customer.
1. Create booking without payment
When making a booking in your Dashboard, select “Don’t add payment now” to create the booking without payment. Then use the expenses and discounts feature to adjust the total as needed. When you’re done, click the Add payment button to collect the customer’s payment.
2. Set up a private custom field
If you want to be able to adjust the price during the initial booking process, this can be accomplished using custom fields. By adding a private custom field to your book form, you and your staff can make fine-tuned pricing adjustments before creating the booking itself. Contact FareHarbor Support for help setting up custom fields.
Note: Pricing adjustments made with custom fields aren’t tracked on the Expenses and Discounts report, but can be viewed using the Custom Field Answers report.
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Expenses & discounts with tax types
An expense/discount’s tax checkbox is used to determine the expense/discount’s taxability. Because an expense/discount is pulling tax types from the item line on its booking’s price sheet(s), an item line that has taxability turned off still inherits tax type values from the next highest level in the inheritance stack, therefore the taxed expense/discount will still use those tax types.
This can be visually confusing since the first place to check for inheritance shows “not taxed”.
Some notes on this:
- This feature allows extra functionality if a company wants taxed expense/discounts on an otherwise untaxed sheet
- If the desire is to leave taxability as “on” for expense/discounts, then the item line’s taxability can be set to “changed” and all the tax types turned “off”
- Untaxing the item line still means that the expense/discount will not be taxed