Accounting
Your tax reports, in the order your bookkeeper works
One page, laid out the way a month gets closed, with every report you need to file your taxes. Underneath it, a ledger where every correction is its own line.
Tax and ledger
Five parts, top to bottom
- 1. The months already filed
- Every completed month, kept with its four reports, so last quarter is one click away.
- 2. The month in front of you
- Gross charges and net tax for the month you pick, with each tax shown separately.
- 3. Can you trust these numbers?
- Every bill is checked against the ledger before you read anything, and any problem is described in plain language, with a correction ready to approve.
- 4. The four reports
- Transactions, the accountant summary, the GST and QST remittance, and the payment reconciliation, each with a preview beside its export.
- 5. What is still outstanding
- Deposits held for stays still to come, and what companies still owe you.
The ledger
Every entry is permanent
A posted entry is permanent
Postings live in a ledger table with database triggers that physically refuse a modification. A mistake is corrected by posting a reversal, never by editing history.
The server computes the money, not the browser
Cardinal's server recalculates every charge from the stay and your tax settings, then compares it with what was sent. If the numbers do not match, the entry is refused.
Every entry has to balance
Price plus tax equals the total, and the taxes add up to the tax total. If one entry is wrong, the whole group is refused, so nothing is ever half recorded.
Two people, the same payment, one posting
Posting runs inside a single database transaction that locks that one folio while it writes. Six simultaneous submissions of the same $50 payment produce one posting. That is measured in a test, not assumed.
Authorized corrections
A manager-authorized reversal writes the authorization into the ledger itself: who, what role, why, when. The server refuses a reversal that arrives without it.
A refund and a correction are two different instruments
Money genuinely owed back to a guest is an ordinary thing to do at the desk and needs no manager. Undoing an entry that should never have been made is error correction, and that one carries the authorization, the reason and a limit of one reversal per transaction. Treating them as one would either put a manager password in front of a routine refund or let anyone rewrite the books.
Voids and discounts post as credit lines
The original charge is never overwritten. The final amount is the sum of every line, so the history shows what happened and when.
You cannot edit a posted transaction in Cardinal. Neither can we. That is the point.
Tax
Each tax kept apart, rounded per night, in your timezone
Each tax is recorded separately
GST, QST, PST, HST and lodging tax are separate columns on every posting, so the remittance report reads straight from the books.
Rounded per night, then summed
Room tax is rounded per night and summed, so the books match the printed invoice to the cent. A four night stay at $169 comes to $800.92 on the quote, the folio, the ledger and the export.
A void reverses the split, not just the total
Cancelling a charge negates each tax component separately, mirroring the way the charge was posted, and a discounted line credits net of the discount. A void that only reverses the total leaves the GST and QST counted as collected: the bill still balances, but your tax return comes out too high.
Dated in the property's timezone
Not the server's and not the staff member's browser. A payment taken at 9pm on June 30 lands in June's return, not July's.
Deferred revenue is tracked
Cash collected for a stay that has not happened is counted as revenue only as the stay happens, and the report shows it split between stays that have not started and the unearned part of stays in progress.
Closing the month
Closing the month, and a check before every report
A closed period is locked
An entry dated in a closed month is neither refused nor lost. It is recorded in the current month with its original date kept, which is what an accountant expects.
A check for missing lines before every report
Before any accounting report is read or exported, Cardinal goes through the whole property and compares every reservation, activity and sale against what the ledger actually holds. Missing lines are posted.
Every exception surfaces in plain language
Anything the sweep would have to guess at is put in front of you in plain language instead of being fixed silently. A check that quietly fixes itself is one you can only hope is right.
Retention
Daily backups, with each month's first backup retained permanently, toward CRA's six year records requirement.
When something does not agree
A problem comes with its fix ready, and waits for your approval
Any system can tell you a folio does not reconcile. What usually follows is a support ticket and somebody with database access. Here the same screen that raises it works out the entries that would settle it, shows you what they do, and then stops and waits, because posting them is your decision and not the software's.
- It shows the consequence before the button
- Four figures, each with a before and an after: what the guest's folio nets, what sits on the charge side, what is marked as billed to the company, and what the company actually owes. You see where every account ends up before anything is recorded.
- A correction is a pair, not a void
- Money moved off a guest's bill shows up in two places in the books, so fixing only one moves the problem instead of solving it. The real case that taught this: voiding a $46 charge on its own left the folio at $46 in credit, which reads as a refund owed to a guest who was owed nothing.
- It would rather propose nothing than guess
- If it cannot land every book in agreement it says so and offers no button. Most findings resolve to exactly that, which is the reason the ones it does propose are worth reading. Where a company has already paid for a stay that never happened, it says that the money is real, that a credit note is the right tool, and that a manager decides on the refund.
- It names the cause in your own language
- Company over-billed. Billed to nobody. Money left behind. Cannot be decided. Four plain descriptions of what has actually happened, in place of a variance figure you would have to reverse-engineer.
- Nothing posts without a reason on it
- The correcting entries carry who authorized them and why, into the same append-only ledger as everything else, so the fix is as readable a year later as the mistake was.
- One rule, read by both the panel and the nightly check
- The overnight check and this screen use the same test, so a folio can never be flagged by one and cleared by the other.
Exports
What your accountant receives
- Detailed transaction CSV with tax split by component
- An accountant summary
- A GST and QST remittance report: collected minus adjustments equals net owing
- A payment reconciliation
- A monthly archive keeping all four reports for every completed month
- Configurable GL codes, mapped at export rather than frozen into the record
We describe mechanisms, not outcomes. Cardinal is not a certification and does not guarantee a compliance result. Your accountant decides what these records mean for your filing.
Questions
Asked and answered
Can I edit a transaction after it is posted?
No, and that is deliberate. Posted transactions are immutable at the database level. To correct one you post a reversal, which requires a manager authorization and a stated reason, and both are written into the ledger. This is what makes the books auditable.
What if my front desk makes a mistake?
Every mistake is fixable. Voids, discounts, refunds and manager-authorized reversals all exist. The difference is that fixing it leaves a trail instead of erasing the evidence.
Can I close a month so nobody changes filed numbers?
Yes. Close the period and it is locked. A transaction dated into a closed period is not rejected and is not lost. It is redated into the current period, with its original date kept on the record.
What does my accountant get?
A detailed transaction export with tax split by component, an accountant summary, a GST/QST remittance report, a payment reconciliation, and a monthly archive that keeps all four for every completed month. GL codes are configurable and mapped at export.
Do you have a night audit?
No, and there is nothing here for one to do. A night audit exists in legacy systems because the books are only correct after a batch process rolls the day. In Cardinal every transaction posts as it happens and the ledger is always current. Instead of a nightly close there is an automatic sweep that resolves no-shows and overdue check-outs, and a completeness reconciliation that runs before you read any report.
What happens if two people take the same payment at the same time?
One payment is recorded. Posting runs in a single database transaction that locks that one folio while it writes, and every payment carries a one-time key, so the same submission arriving twice is recognised as the same payment rather than counted twice. Six simultaneous submissions of the same $50 produce one posting. This is a test we run, not an assumption.
How do I know the numbers are right?
Roughly forty dedicated automated test suites cover the money paths: tax arithmetic, folio math, ledger reconciliation, refunds, rates, packages, concurrency. Several thousand assertions run in multiple timezones on every change. Beyond that, the system reconciles the entire property against the ledger before any report is exported and flags anything it cannot verify.
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