Taxes & Charges
Your charge stack decides what a guest is billed on top of the room price. It is the setup that has to be right before you take a single live booking, because every charge is frozen onto the booking when it is made. Correcting the stack later fixes future bookings; it never rewrites what a guest was already quoted or charged.
You configure it under Property Settings > Taxes.
Get this right before your first live booking
Charges recognize once, at the moment a booking is created. If you launch with a missing tax, the bookings taken in the meantime keep the stack they were created with, and the shortfall has to be corrected on each folio by hand.
Every row in the stack has five properties. Together they express almost any statutory or house charge as data, without code.
| Field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Kind | What sort of charge it is: service charge, tax, green tax, card fee, or a custom fee. This drives how it is labelled and reported. |
| Method | How the amount is worked out: a percent, a flat amount per person per night, or a single flat amount. |
| Rate | The percentage for the percent method, or the per-unit amount for the flat methods. |
| Applies on | Whether a percent is calculated on the base room price, or on the running total so far. This is what creates a hierarchy. |
| Applies to | Whether it hits room charges, F&B charges, or all charges. |
Two further controls narrow who and what a charge reaches:
- Guest market:
all,international, orlocal. A charge set tointernationalis skipped for guests booking on a locals-only rate plan. This is how a resident exemption is expressed, and because the market is derived from the rate plan's visibility rules rather than from a list of plan IDs, a rate plan you create next month is covered automatically. - Room types and booking sources: a charge can be limited to specific room types, or to specific booking sources, so an OTA-only fee never lands on a direct booking.
The order of the rows, combined with each row's applies on, decides how charges compound. This matters: a tax charged on the base price and the same tax charged on the running total produce different totals.
The Maldives stack is the clearest example, and it is expressed entirely as data:
- Service charge, 10%, applies on base.
- TGST, 16%, applies on running total, so it is levied on the room price plus the service charge.
- Green tax, a flat amount per person per night, applied last and never itself taxed.
Reorder those rows and the guest pays a different total. If you are unsure, use the live preview described below rather than reasoning it out.
A charge is either added on top of the price or already embedded in it.
- Exclusive charges are added to the folio as their own line and increase what the guest owes.
- Inclusive charges are already inside the rate. They appear on the folio and the invoice for transparency, and are reported as tax collected, but they never increase the balance.
Inclusive or exclusive is a property of the rate plan, not of the charge. When a plan is inclusive, Veridien works backwards out of the gross price to derive the net room revenue and the embedded tax, so your ADR and RevPAR are reported net of tax rather than flattered by it.
Inclusive pricing is not yet self-service
The rate plan form has no inclusive/exclusive switch today, so a plan is exclusive unless it was created inclusive for you. Ask support before you publish an inclusive rate card. Because revenue recognition is frozen at ingest, changing this later does not restate a single existing booking.
The Taxes screen includes a live preview: enter a sample room price, number of guests and nights, and Veridien shows the exact breakdown a guest would be quoted, line by line, in order. Use it after any change. It is faster and safer than creating a test booking, and it is the only way to be sure a reordering did what you intended.
Rather than building a stack from scratch, you can apply a country template, which creates the usual rows for that jurisdiction with the standard rates and ordering. Apply the template first, then adjust the rates to match your own registration, and preview the result.
A template is a starting point, not advice
Templates reflect common configurations, not your specific tax position. Confirm the rates and which charges apply to your property with your accountant before going live.
If you run a restaurant outlet, it has its own charge stack, configured per outlet under Restaurant Settings. Hotel charges do not apply to restaurant orders and vice versa, which is what lets a restaurant carry a different tax treatment (and a different currency) from rooms.
Card and gateway fees are configured alongside charges, on the payment method itself. These are a merchant cost, not a guest surcharge. The fee is frozen at the moment a payment is recorded and reduces your net revenue in reporting. It never increases the guest's balance.
- Folios: where charges land during a stay.
- Payments & Settlements: recording payments and multi-currency settlement.
- Rate Plans: the rates the charge stack is applied to.
- Property Settings: the rest of the settings area.