Charging restaurant and bar sales to the room: connecting your POS and PMS properly

Why room charges matter

Guests who don’t have to pull out a card for every drink spend more freely. At the end of their stay they pay for everything at once at the front desk: room, breakfast, dinner, bar and massage. For many leisure hotels with half board and a spa this is standard; for city hotels with a bar it is at least a frequent request.

The risk lies in the handover. Without a connection between POS and PMS, the restaurant prints a bill that someone carries to the front desk, where it is entered by hand. Three typical mistakes happen along the way: the bill never arrives, it is posted to the wrong room, or it is entered twice. If the guest leaves early in the morning before last night’s bill has been posted, the revenue may well be lost.

How POS and PMS work together

The POS remains the tool in the restaurant and at the bar. That is where orders are taken, sent to the kitchen and receipted. The PMS knows which guests are in-house, which room they are staying in and whether room charges are allowed for them. The interface connects the two: the POS asks the PMS about the room and sends the finished charge, and the PMS posts it to the guest folio.

A clear check before posting is essential. Is the guest actually checked in? Have they already left? Has the hotel marked this booking as “no room charges”, for example for business guests whose company only pays for the room, or is there a credit limit? A good interface answers these questions before the server closes the bill, not at check-out.

Cash registers, RKSV and TSE: the obligation stays with the POS

In Austria, businesses above certain turnover and cash-sales thresholds are required to use a cash register. The register has to meet the requirements of the Austrian Cash Register Security Regulation (RKSV), secure every cash sale with a signature and issue a receipt. In Germany, the Cash Register Security Regulation (KassenSichV) requires electronic tills to work with a certified technical security device (TSE); on top of that come the obligation to issue receipts and to register tills with the tax office. Confirm the exact thresholds and obligations with your tax advisor and your POS provider.

For room charges this means: the certified POS in the restaurant fulfils these obligations for its own sales. It creates the receipt, signs it and records it in its own journal. The PMS only receives the charge, i.e. the information that room 214 has €18.40 of drinks outstanding. The restaurant receipt is therefore signed by your restaurant POS. If the front desk later takes cash or card, STRYK signs that receipt with the ‘Cash register & fiscalisation’ add-on.

One point is often overlooked: if the guest pays cash at check-out, that is also a cash sale. Clarify with your tax advisor how cash payments at the front desk are recorded and secured in your business, for example through a certified POS at reception. This applies regardless of which PMS you use.

Avoiding duplicate postings and forgotten charges

Most mistakes don’t happen in normal operation but when something goes wrong. The restaurant Wi-Fi drops, the POS cannot send the charge, so the server hands it to the front desk, who posts it by hand. An hour later the connection is back, the POS sends the charge again, and the guest has the same wine on the invoice twice.

Two things help. First, every bill gets a unique reference that stays the same on every retry; that way the PMS recognises that the same bill must not be posted again. Second, when the front desk enters a charge manually, it notes the POS bill number so that later retries can be matched. A fixed routine in the end-of-day close makes sure that suspicious pairs don’t go unnoticed until departure.

Choosing the right POS for a hotel

If you are buying a new POS, check the hotel interface first and only then look at hardware and design. Many restaurant tills are built for stand-alone restaurants and have no concept of rooms. Others can only post room charges to one specific PMS. What matters is whether the POS can talk to an open interface and whether the provider is willing to set up and test the connection.

Don’t just have room charging described to you; have it shown with a real test guest: look up the room, post a bill, void the bill, interrupt the connection and resend, check out with an invoice. Whatever doesn’t work cleanly in this test won’t get better on a busy Saturday night.

How STRYK handles it

STRYK has an open POS interface for restaurant, bar, spa and other outlets. You set up your outlets with their VAT rate in STRYK and create a separate access key for each POS, which you can revoke at any time. Your POS provider connects to the interface; the documentation “Connecting a POS system to STRYK” describes setup, security and process. The POS interface is included in the base price.

Before every posting the POS looks up the guest by room number. STRYK only accepts charges for guests who are checked in and not yet checked out. For each booking you can block room charges or set a credit limit, and once the final invoice has been issued, the guest folio accepts no new charges. Every charge carries a unique reference from the POS: if the POS sends the same bill again after a connection error, STRYK does not post it twice.

If the front desk has entered a bill by hand, STRYK spots possible duplicates: if a POS charge with the same amount arrives on the same booking shortly afterwards, the pair is flagged for review and you void one of the two charges. At check-out STRYK carries the open charges over to the hotel invoice, and the front desk collects everything together. If a charge is already on an invoice, the correction is made in the finance area.

And to be clear: the restaurant receipt is signed by your certified POS, under the RKSV in Austria and with a TSE in Germany. STRYK takes over the room charge and the hotel invoice. For cash and card payments at the front desk there is the ‘Cash register & fiscalisation’ add-on.