Hotel accounting under Circular 99/2025: stop entering every figure twice

Last time we looked at ancillary revenue and how to close the leaks that come with recording services by hand. That article stopped at the front desk: making sure everything a guest used ends up on the folio. This time we go one stage further — the stage many owners of small properties treat as "the accountant's business" and therefore never look at: from the guest's folio to the company's books. And that stage has just acquired a very concrete reason to be re-examined — Circular 99/2025/TT-BTC replaces Circular 200, effective 1 January 2026.

Two things to be clear about up front. First, this article is written for a small accommodation business operating as an enterprise — with a legal entity, statutory books and financial statements. Household businesses apply a different accounting regime and are outside the scope of Circular 99, so if that is you, the regulatory part of this article does not apply, while the part about operational data still does. Second, this article does not say "use software and you will not need an accountant". Quite the opposite: the accountant still decides how everything is recorded. What we are discussing is how to stop the accountant having to retype figures the front desk has already typed once.

Part 1: Why small hotels always key everything in twice

At almost every small property, the same amount of money is recorded at least twice, in two different places. The first time is at the desk: the guest checks in, uses services, settles the bill — all of it onto the room's folio. The second time is at month end: the accountant receives a stack of summaries, a spreadsheet or a bundle of invoices, and keys the lot into the accounting software from scratch to produce the books.

Three consequences of entering everything twice

• The two sides never match exactly. Not because anyone is careless, but because every re-entry is an act of interpretation: an amount received in advance read as revenue, money collected on behalf of a third party counted as your own, an invoice split in two at the desk and merged again in the books.
• Nobody can trace anything back to source. When two figures disagree, tracing from a line in the ledger back to the exact room night sold and the exact signed service docket is all but impossible if there is a manual keying step in between.
• The numbers arrive too late to be useful. Books closed at the end of the following month are a filing exercise, not management information. The owner learns whether last month made money at the point when nothing can be done about it.

Why hotels are more exposed to this than other industries

• Revenue accrues continuously rather than per order. A shop sells an item and the transaction is finished. In a hotel, every occupied room is revenue accumulating night by night, and until the stay ends nothing is final.
• One guest generates several different kinds of revenue — room, food and beverage, services, retail items, money collected for third parties — and each kind is recognised differently.
• Cash does not move in step with revenue. A guest books and pays this month but stays next month. An intermediary channel holds the money and remits it after a reconciliation cycle. Cash flow and revenue are two separate lines, and confusing one for the other is the single most common error.

Part 2: What Circular 99 changes, and why it reaches into hotels

Circular 99/2025/TT-BTC is the corporate accounting regime replacing Circular 200/2014/TT-BTC, applicable from 1 January 2026. It applies to enterprises; household businesses have their own accounting regime and fall outside its scope. For a small accommodation business that has incorporated, there are three things to know.

Three changes to be aware of

• The chart of accounts changes. Some accounts are renamed, reordered or have the content they capture adjusted — account 112, for example, is now titled Demand deposits. For whoever keeps the books this is not relabelling for its own sake: it carries through into how items are classified and how statements are produced.
• Balances have to be converted to the new chart of accounts. At the point of transition, the enterprise must reconcile old balances and place them correctly within the new structure — a one-off job, but one that drags an entire financial year with it if done wrong.
• The accounting software has to be updated in time. This is where many small properties end up on the back foot: if the chart of accounts changes while the tool in use has not, you either patch by hand or you wait. Both cost you at the busiest possible moment — the start of the financial year.

What Circular 99 does not do for you

• It does not decide what is your revenue and what is somebody else's money. Separating money collected on behalf of others from your own revenue remains the job of whoever records it, and it begins with an action at the desk, not with an entry in the ledger.
• It does not generate operational data. If service revenue still lives in the duty attendant's notebook, then however impeccable the chart of accounts, what reaches the books is an estimate.
• It does not draw your day boundary for you. That is peculiar to the accommodation industry, and it is the subject of the next section but one.

This is also the moment to repeat a principle we set out in the article on vetting a hotel management software vendor: keeping pace with regulatory change is a criterion for choosing a vendor, not a secondary feature. A system that tracks changes to the accounting regime saves you from the most expensive thing of all — patching by hand at the start of a period.

Part 3: Five places where the desk figure and the ledger figure part company

This is the core of the article. The five situations below are the points at which the number at the desk and the number in the books begin to diverge. What they have in common: all five are features of hotel operations, not accounting mistakes — which is why they cannot be fixed by keeping the books more carefully.

The five gaps

• 1. The night audit runs past midnight. A hotel's working day does not end at 24:00 but at the night audit run. A guest checking in at 00:30, a drink sold at 01:00 — which day do they belong to? If the desk closes at one cut-off and the accountant totals to another, every day's revenue is slightly out, and by month end the differences do not cancel themselves at the opening and closing boundaries.
• 2. Revenue through an intermediary channel versus a walk-in guest. A guest booking through an online channel pays a sum; the channel retains its commission and remits the rest after a reconciliation cycle. Record the amount actually received in the bank and revenue is understated while the commission expense disappears from the accounts. Record it at the selling price and you need a corresponding receivable and expense. A walk-in paying at the desk is far simpler — which is precisely why the two have to be distinguishable at the moment they arise, not at the moment the books are written up.
• 3. Money received in advance and deposits are not revenue. A guest transfers a deposit this month for a stay next month. The money is in the account, but the service has not been provided. Booking it straight to revenue in the month of receipt puts it in the wrong period; and if the guest cancels, it has to be unwound. This is the most common error at small properties, because the intuitive reading is "money in means a sale made".
• 4. Services charged back to the room. A guest uses a service today, signs for it, and pays on departure three days later. The revenue belongs to the day of service, the cash to the day of payment — two different days, and if they straddle a month end, two different periods. This follows directly from the previous article on ancillary revenue.
• 5. Cancellations, refunds, discounts and complimentary items. At the desk, waiving a charge is a line deleted or a figure amended. In the books it has to be a deduction with a reason and an approver. If the desk simply edits the number and leaves no trace, the accountant has nothing to record, and the difference gets "rounded" until it agrees — which is the moment the books lose their ability to explain themselves.

Part 4: The night audit — a hotel's day boundary

The end-of-day close in the accommodation industry has its own name: the night audit. It runs at the quietest point of the day, locks down everything that arose during the day just ended and rolls the system into the new day. For anyone keeping the books, this is the only cut-off that means anything for a revenue period — not midnight by the clock.

Three things the night audit does that adding up by hand cannot

• It charges room revenue for every occupied room at the correct rate for each night, including guests who changed rooms mid-stay, guests who extended, and groups on their own negotiated rate.
• It closes and locks the day's figures. After the lock, every change leaves a trace. This is the precondition for books that can explain themselves, and it is the thing a spreadsheet does not have.
• It reconciles cash against revenue for the day — cash in the drawer, amounts transferred, amounts still charged to rooms, amounts pending from intermediary channels. Those four groups together have to agree with the revenue recognised.

Two rules worth writing down internally

• The property's accounting day is the day defined by the night audit. State the cut-off time, apply it consistently to every report, and keep it stable across periods — changing it midway makes every year-on-year comparison meaningless.
• Do not correct a locked day by editing it directly. Every adjustment is a new entry with a date, a reason and a named author. This rule protects the owner and the staff alike.

Part 5: Channel revenue, walk-in guests and other people's money

This is where revenue is most often inflated or understated, and both cause damage. Overstate it and your tax obligation is calculated on a figure that does not exist; understate it and you cannot explain yourself at reconciliation.

Three groups to keep apart from the moment of recording

• The property's own revenue. Room charges, services you provide, goods you sell. This is what goes to revenue.
• Cost of selling through intermediary channels. The commission a channel retains is an expense, not an arbitrary reduction of revenue. Recording it for what it is shows the reality: which channel is expensive to sell through and which is cheap.
• Money collected on behalf of third parties. Transport fares, entrance tickets, tours booked for the guest — your share is the commission, the rest is somebody else's money passing through your hands. Lumping it into revenue is the fastest way to manufacture a fictitious revenue figure and a miscalculated tax position.

Two things you can do this week

• Build a coded list of revenue items and abolish the "miscellaneous" box. One code per revenue type, one code per selling channel. It takes an afternoon and saves you a year.
• Mark the booking source at the moment the booking is taken. A source recorded afterwards is always incomplete; a source recorded at the time gives you a channel-mix report for nothing — exactly as we set out in the article on channel integration and direct booking.

Part 6: Money received in advance is not revenue

This is the shortest section and the one most worth reading closely, because this is the error that skews many small properties' reports systematically — above all in high season, when advance bookings are heaviest.

Three common advance-payment situations

• A deposit to hold a room. Money first, service later — and possibly never, if the guest cancels. Before the stay, this amount is an obligation to the guest, not a result of trading.
• Payment in full before the stay. Common with packages sold through online channels. Revenue is still recognised night by night as the guest actually stays, not in one lump on the day the money arrived.
• Vouchers and prepaid packages. Selling one means taking money for a service to be used in the future. This is the most complex group, because expiry dates and unredeemed balances come into it — so ask your accountant before launching the programme, not after several hundred vouchers have been sold.

The condition for handling all three correctly is simple in principle but hard by hand: the system has to distinguish money received from revenue recognised, at the level of the individual booking. That is something a cloud AI hotel management software does within the operational action itself — taking a deposit is one type of transaction, recognising revenue is another — rather than letting the two blend into a single line of cash received.

Part 7: Letting revenue flow from the management system into the books

By this point the problem is clear: it is not that the accountant is doing a poor job, it is that there is a manual keying step between operations and the books. Remove that step and most of the five gaps in Part 3 disappear, because each item is now recorded exactly once, where it arises, with every attribute needed to account for it.

What a standalone accounting package cannot do

• It does not know what time your night audit ends. It receives a summary by calendar day and has no way of telling whether that summary was cut at the right point.
• It does not know whether the money that just arrived is a deposit or revenue. That information lives in the booking, which is to say in the operational system, not in the bank statement.
• It cannot trace back to the room night and the service docket. When a revenue line has to be explained, the trail has to lead all the way back to the guest's folio — which is only possible when both sides read from one set of data.

How the DiHotel Solutions ecosystem addresses this

• Revenue is created by operational actions, not by a summary sheet. Check-in, service sale, payment, night audit close — each action already carries its revenue item, guest source, date of origin and a reference back to the underlying document.
• The accounting module sits inside the same ecosystem. DiACC hotel accounting software receives data from the management system instead of waiting for someone to retype it, so the "second round of keying in" simply does not exist.
• DiACC has already updated its chart of accounts to Circular 99 and is running in production at 4–5 star hotels and chains — which means converting the chart of accounts is no longer something you have to work out for yourself at the start of a period.
• The accountant retains full authority. The system delivers data to the right revenue item; reviewing, adjusting and closing the books remains the accountant's work. What is removed is the retyping, not the professional role.

If your property uses a separate hotel accounting software and wants to keep it, the minimum condition to insist on is this: the data transferred must be at the level of individual transactions with a reference back, not a daily total. Synchronising totals sounds tidy, but it discards precisely what you need when you have to explain a figure.

Part 8: Summary table — which transaction, which gap, which fix

Part 9: Six things to do before your first accounting period under Circular 99

The list below is written for a small property, needs no consultant, and can be done in a few sittings. The order is deliberate: the first three are internal housekeeping, the last three concern your tools.

Three pieces of internal housekeeping

• Fix the accounting-day cut-off at the night audit and tell both the duty staff and the accountant. Write it as a line in your internal rules.
• Rebuild the list of revenue and expense items, one code per type, abolishing the "miscellaneous" box, with three groups clearly separated: your own revenue, cost of selling through channels, and money collected for third parties.
• Review the amounts received in advance still outstanding — unused deposits, unredeemed vouchers, prepaid packages — and set up a separate tracking sheet. This is usually a sheet nobody has ever made.

Three things about your tools

• Ask your software vendor one question: has the Circular 99 chart of accounts been implemented, and in which release. A vague answer is a signal worth noting.
• Check at what level data travels from operations into the books — individual transactions with a reference back, or a single daily total.
• Run a trial reconciliation for one month between the revenue report at the desk and the accountant's revenue ledger, then break the difference down by the five groups in Part 3. This test tells you exactly where your property stands.

Conclusion

Circular 99 is a compulsory moment to look again at your books, but it is not the biggest problem a small accommodation business has. The bigger one is that there is a manual keying step between the front desk and the accounting ledger, and every systematic discrepancy is born there. Three things decide the outcome: fix one accounting-day cut-off based on the night audit; separate revenue from cash flow without exception, above all for money received in advance and money collected for third parties; and let each item be recorded once, where it arises, with enough attributes to account for it. Changing the chart of accounts comes after those three, because it is a one-off job while the other three repeat every day.

The cheapest starting point is still the one-month reconciliation in Part 9. From that base, DiCloud — an online AI hotel management software and a total hotel management solution — can send revenue straight through to the accounting module inside the same ecosystem, instead of routing it via a summary sheet at month end. If you run several properties, or a resort with several outlets, the companion piece on the DiHotel Blog covers hotel accounting under Circular 99 at chain scale — one chart of accounts, many properties, and how to consolidate while keeping separate reporting for each site. At that tier the work is handled by DiHotel, the AI hotel management software — the original platform for 4–5 star hotels, resorts and chains — while small and mid-sized properties use hotel management software from the same ecosystem with reporting consolidated in one place. And if you want to understand why everything in this article begins with an action at the desk, go back to the article on ancillary revenue — data not recorded at the moment it arises cannot be rescued by any accounting regime.