Closing your books at the end of a month means getting four figures out of Understory and into your accounting system, then checking that the result ties. This guide walks through them in order, and tells you exactly which report and which column each one comes from.

We are not your accountant, and the rules differ by country. Use this to get the right numbers out of Understory — then let your accountant decide how to post them.

Why a paid booking is not revenue yet

When a guest books and pays in March for a tour that runs in June, you are holding their money. You have not earned it yet — you still owe them the experience. In accounting terms that payment is a prepayment, or a contract liability: a debt you owe the guest until you deliver.

It becomes revenue when the event has taken place.

This is not a preference — it is what the IFRS 15 accounting standard requires across the EU. IFRS 15 covers revenue from contracts with customers, and a guest paying in advance for an experience is exactly that: a service paid for before it is delivered. Booking the money as revenue on the day it arrives overstates the month you sold in and empties out the month you actually did the work.

The same logic applies to everything else you sell:

Gift cards — a liability when sold. Revenue when redeemed against a booking, or when the card expires unused.
Punch cards — a liability when sold. Each punch used becomes revenue.

So three different dates matter for the same booking, and Understory's reports are built around them:

Date	What happened	Where it belongs
Payment date	Guest paid you	Cash and prepayments
Event date	You delivered	Revenue
Refund date	You paid money back	Cash and prepayments

How to generate and download a report

Click Marketing in the left menu — the Marketing menu expands
Select Insights — the Insights page opens
Click Reports — you see a list of reports you generated before
Click + Report — the report generator opens
Choose a Type — pick the report you need from the list
Set the period — most reports use a start and end date; a few use a single date
Click Generate report — generation starts immediately and usually takes under a minute
Wait until the status shows Ready — the list refreshes on its own
Click the download icon — the report downloads as an Excel file

Some reports contain several sheets in one Excel file. Check the tabs along the bottom before you start adding things up — the sheet you need is often not the first one.

Your month-end close, step by step

Four figures for the month, then a check.

Step 1 — Money you took in

Prepayments received during the month. This is what creates the debt you owe your guests, and it is the figure that grows your prepayments accounts.

Three different things create that debt, and all three need capturing. If you sell gift cards or punch cards and only count bookings here, your books will be short by everything you sold in vouchers — and the check in Step 5 will never tie.

What you sold	Report	Sheet or filter	Column to add up
Bookings	Bookings	`bookings` sheet	`Total (VAT Excl)`
Gift cards	Gift cards	—	`Total (VAT Excl)`
Punch cards	Transactions	filter `type` to `punchcard`	`paymentTotal`

Generate the reports you need — set each to the month you are closing
Remove the rows listed further down this article — several kinds of row should not be counted
Add up the column for each — keep the three totals separate if you post gift cards and punch cards to their own accounts

Keeping them apart is worth the small extra effort: gift cards and punch cards are treated differently from bookings for VAT, and differently again when they expire. See Gift cards and punch cards, end to end below.

Step 2 — Revenue you earned

Use the Revenue summary report. It is the only report built around the rule above: it counts revenue on the date the event finished, not the date the guest paid.

Generate a Revenue summary — set the start and end date to the month you are closing
Leave the experience filter empty — you get one row per date and experience
Tick Include locations if you post revenue per venue — adds a Location column
Add up Total Revenue (VAT Excl) — your revenue for the period, excluding VAT

The report also gives you Total Purchases (money taken in, by payment date) and Total Refunds (money paid back, by refund date). These are cash movements, not revenue.

Do not subtract Total Refunds from Total Revenue. Refunds are already deducted from the revenue figures. The Total Refunds column is for your cash reconciliation.

The maximum period for this report is 12 months.

Save the file when you close the month. If a refund arrives later against an event that has already happened, regenerating the same period will show a slightly lower revenue figure than it did at the time. Keep the report you actually booked from.

Step 3 — VAT

VAT does not wait for the event. As a general rule across the EU, VAT falls due when you receive a payment on account — not when you deliver. So for a June tour paid for in March, the revenue belongs to June but the VAT belongs to your March return.

This is the biggest difference between bookkeeping for an experiences business and for a shop, and it catches people out: revenue waits, VAT does not.

The VAT you collect is not your money. It sits on your balance sheet as a liability until you file and pay it — in the same way the guest's prepayment is money you are holding for the guest. Two different debts, both created by the same booking.

Use the VAT reconciliation report. It is built for this one job: everything that carries VAT in the period, one row per rate, with refunds already netted off.

Generate a VAT reconciliation report — set the start and end date to the period you are filing for. A quarter works as well as a month.
Open the vat-summary sheet
Read Net VAT for each rate — sales VAT less refund VAT, which is what you owe on that rate
Add up Net VAT across the rows — the period total for your return

The Source column tells you what each row's VAT arose on:

Source	What it covers
`tickets`	Ticket value paid with money
`tickets-voucher`	Ticket value paid from a gift card or punch card balance
`booking-fee`	The Understory booking fee, where you pass it on to your guest
`gift-card` / `punch-card`	Cards you sold

VAT Treatment separates the things a return keeps apart: standard, zero-rated (taxable at 0%), exempt (outside the scope of VAT), and deferred. A deferred row is a gift card or punch card sale where the rate is not knowable yet — it carries no VAT and belongs on no box of your return. The VAT arrives later, when the card is spent.

You do not need the exclusions listed further down for this step. The VAT report only counts money that actually moved through Understory, so unpaid bookings and reseller bookings never appear in it.

The vat-details sheet holds the same figures line by line — one row per ticket line and per refund, with the booking and receipt ids — so you can trace any figure back to what produced it.

If your accountant uses the delivery basis instead, the VAT report is not the right tool: it is anchored on when the money arrived. Use the Bookings report's orderlines-completed sheet, group by VAT Rate and sum VAT Total. Local rules and special schemes vary, so confirm which basis applies with your accountant.

Step 4 — Cash, fees and refunds

Use the Transactions report. One row per payment and one per refund, dated when the money moved.

Generate a Transactions report for the month
Add up paymentTotal — total charged to your guests, with refunds as negative rows
Add up paymentFee — what your payment provider charged for processing
Add up holdbarFee — the Understory platform fee
Add up netPayout — what is left for you, and what should reach your bank

netPayout is paymentTotal minus the fees. It is zero where a guest paid with a gift card or punch card — no new money came in, they spent a balance you were already holding.

To see only refunds, filter type to refund. Those rows are negative and dated on the refund date, so a refund this month may belong to a booking from months ago. Fees are not returned to you on a refund.

Ignore the paymentVat and paymentTotalExVat columns in this report. They are not filled in. VAT comes from the VAT reconciliation report, as in Step 3.

For matching against the actual transfers into your bank, see Managing payments in Understory Pay — one transfer there equals one line on your bank statement.

Step 5 — Check what you still owe your guests

The first four steps are all period figures — they cover only the month you are closing. This last step is different, and it is the one people most often get wrong.

The Customer debt report is a running total, not a monthly figure. It lists every outstanding prepayment your business has ever taken and not yet delivered — bookings made last year for events still in the future, gift cards bought two summers ago, punch cards with punches left. Adding up the column gives you a closing balance, not the movement for the month. Never post it as this month's figure.

Use it to check your work instead. Once Steps 1 to 4 are posted, the balance on your prepayments accounts should equal what this report shows.

Generate a Customer debt report — set the single date to the last day of the month you are closing
Add up the value column — everything you have been paid for but not yet delivered, as at that date
Compare it with the balance on your prepayments accounts — the two should agree

Filter the type column to split it three ways, matching the three totals from Step 1:

booking — paid bookings whose event has not happened yet
giftcard — gift cards with a remaining balance
punchcard — punch cards with punches left

value is what the guest actually paid, minus refunds completed on or before your chosen date. Fully refunded bookings and cards are left out — you owe nothing on them.

If you post gift cards and punch cards to their own accounts, the Gift card balance report (Balance) and the Punch cards report (monetaryBalance) give you those balances on their own, card by card. They are cumulative in the same way.

If the two figures do not agree, the usual causes are an event that has been delivered but not yet released into revenue, an expired gift card not yet dealt with, a refund not yet posted, or simply that the report is a live snapshot and new bookings have come in since your period end.

Generating the Customer debt report on the morning after the period closes avoids the last one. Unlike revenue, the balance itself is stable: a Customer debt report dated 31 March shows the same figure no matter when you generate it.

Gift cards and punch cards, end to end

A gift card is not a sale — it is a promise. Money arrives, but you have not sold an experience yet, so nothing is revenue until the card is actually used or the promise runs out. Punch cards work the same way.

Each card passes through up to three moments in your books, and each has its own report:

Moment	What happens	Report	Column
Sold	Cash in, and a debt to the holder	Gift cards / Transactions (`type` = `punchcard`)	`Total (VAT Excl)` / `paymentTotal`
Redeemed	The debt moves from the card to a booking	Bookings, `bookings` sheet	`Gift Card Amount Used` / `Punch Card Amount Used`
Expired	Unused value becomes revenue (breakage)	Gift cards by expiry	`giftcardAmountLeft`

When a card is sold, the money is yours to hold but not to earn. Capture it in Step 1 and keep it on its own account.

When a card is redeemed against a booking, no new money arrives — the guest spends a balance you were already holding. The debt moves from your gift card account to your bookings account, and then becomes revenue when the event happens like any other booking. This is why netPayout is zero on those rows in the Transactions report. Punch Card Amount Used only appears in the Bookings report when a booking in that period was actually paid with a punch card.

VAT on gift cards depends on what the card can buy, and the VAT reconciliation report works this out for you.

If every experience in your catalogue carries the same VAT rate, a card can only ever be spent at that rate. The VAT due is therefore known the moment you sell it — it is a single-purpose voucher, and VAT falls due on the sale. If your catalogue has more than one rate, nobody knows yet which rate the card will be spent at, so it is a multi-purpose voucher and VAT waits until it is redeemed against a booking.

You can see which applies from the report: a card sale showing deferred under VAT Treatment is multi-purpose, so no VAT is due yet. One showing a rate is single-purpose, and that VAT belongs on this period's return.

Two things to keep in mind. The report reads your catalogue as it stands when you run it, so adding an experience at a new VAT rate changes the answer for reports you run afterwards. And if you are close to the boundary — nearly all one rate, with one exception — it is worth confirming the treatment with your accountant rather than relying on the report alone.

When a card expires unredeemed, the unused balance eventually becomes revenue. This is called breakage, and the timing is not always the expiry date.

In Denmark, holders can claim the remaining value in cash for 12 months after expiry, so the money is not yours until that window closes. Sweden and Norway apply different validity rules again.

The Revenue summary lists expired gift cards on the expiry date itself, under the experience name Gift Cards. If you are in Denmark, that is 12 months earlier than you can recognise it — so treat that line as a signal, not as a figure to post directly. Your accountant will know the rule where you are.

There is no expiry report for punch cards. Expired punch cards simply drop out of the Customer debt report, so if you sell them, compare the punch card balance between two months to see what has lapsed.

Before you add anything up: rows to exclude

Every report includes bookings that should not be in a revenue total. Filter these out first or your figures will be too high. This applies to Steps 1 and 2 — the VAT reconciliation report in Step 3 handles it for you.

Bookings with no payment — an empty Gateways column and Receipt ID shown as -. Nobody paid, so there is nothing to book. They still carry a full Total (VAT Incl) value.
Bookings paid outside Understory — Gateways shows external or integration. These come from a reseller or an OTA, or you marked them paid by other means. The money never came through Understory, so they are absent from the Transactions and Revenue summary reports. Handle them with whatever paperwork the reseller sends you.
Cancelled bookings — the bookings sheet includes bookings with Booking Status of cancelled. Check whether they were refunded before counting them. The bookings-completed sheet excludes them already.
Rows where Paid Amount and Total (VAT Incl) disagree — usually a gift card or punch card covered part of the price, or the booking was partly refunded. Paid Amount is the card payment; Total (VAT Incl) is the value of the experience sold.

If you have the Accounting module

Some Understory plans include an Accounting section in the left menu. If you see it, use it instead of the reports for month-end — it does all of the above for you:

Reconciliation gives you recognised revenue, VAT split by rate, and prepayment and gift card balances with opening balance, movements and closing balance for each month
Activity shows the individual bookkeeping entries behind every figure
Settings connects Understory to e-conomic, Tripletex or Fortnox, so entries post to your accounting system automatically

Reports stay useful for the detail behind a figure, or for a period you want to slice differently.

If you do not see Accounting in your menu and you would like it, message us in the chat.

Going deeper

If you or your accountant want the full picture — the chart of accounts to set up, the exact journal entries for each step, how VAT works on vouchers, and how to reconcile every account back to Understory — see Accountant's guide to bookkeeping with Understory.

Did this answer your question? If not, please reach out to us in the chat window at the bottom to the right, and we'll be happy to help 🤗

How to close your books each month